From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature 9781501333194, 9781501341090, 9781501333224, 9781501333217

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 Intellectual Networks and Surrealist Objects
Gaming the system
The world comes to Paris
From automatic writing to the surrealist object
2 On the Road to Establishment: Surrealism in the 1930s
The second manifesto
Who is Salvador Dalí?
Surrealism conquers the world (1933–1939)
3 Pierre Menard the Sur-realist
Lautréamont and plagiarism in Littérature, Minotaure, Mesures, and Sur
Littérature is the birthplace of Pierre Menard
From Lautréamont’s plagiarism to Breton’s surrealist object
Lautréamont as a model for Pierre Menard
Les Chants de Maldoror: from anonymity to pen name
Lautréamont’s Poésies, plagiarism, and surrealism
Menard’s surreal bibliography
The common denominator
A retrospective prophecy
4 Surrealism on the New York Market
Introducing surrealism: Levy and Barr
Barr’s fantastic art exhibit and Levy’s Surrealism
Dalí at Levy’s gallery and at the New York World’s Fair
5 The Battle Over the New World
VVV versus Vogue
Where is surrealism?
The surrealist object: try it on with Breton and Dalí
6 From Dulita to Lolita
The spectral beauty of language
Lolita’s surrealist sister: Dalí’s Dulita
Dullita—Galuchka—Lolita
A scent of surrealism: Lolita’s Soleil Vert perfume
Humbert’s Amour fou
7 The Ghosts of Surrealism in the World Novel
Strategies for going global: Orhan Pamuk and Mircea Cărtărescu
Surrealist noir: Aragon’s Cahier noir and Pamuk’s Black Book
Louis Aragon and La Défense de l’infini: a novel for posterity
From transparent objects to innocent objects
Beyond Tlön: Cărtărescu’s Bucharest
Being-objects in “Gemini”: books and playing cards 2
Messages hidden in maps: the cryptogram world of Blinding
The paradise of crimson traps: Solenoid
Bibliography
Index
Plates

Citation preview

Literatures as World Literature Literatures as World Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations—according to language, nation, form, or theme—of literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. World literature has been mapped and theorized in the abstract, but the majority of critical work, the filling in of what has been traced, lies ahead of us. Literatures as World Literature begins the task of filling in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outward from their own area of specialization. The hope is to foster scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of the world literature we wish to explore.

Series Editor: Thomas O. Beebee Editorial Board: Eduardo Coutinho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hsinya Huang, National Sun-yat Sen University, Taiwan Meg Samuelson, University of Cape Town, South Africa Ken Seigneurie, Simon Fraser University, Canada Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark

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Literatures as World Literature German Literature as World Literature Edited by Thomas O. Beebee Roberto Bolaño as World Literature Edited by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro Danish Literature as World Literature Edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Crime Fiction as World Literature Edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature Delia Ungureanu Romanian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian American Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Brazilian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Edited by Eduardo F. Coutinho

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From Paris to Tlön Surrealism as World Literature Delia Ungureanu

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Delia Ungureanu, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Mary Ann Caws, ed. “The Mystery Corset” (pp. 137–9, 13 lines) and “They Tell Me That Over There” (p. 143, 18 lines). From The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-century French Poetry (Yale University Press, 2004) © Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Excerpt(s) from THE ANNOTATED LOLITA : REVISED AND UPDATED by Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Appel, Jr, copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov, annotated edition copyright © 1970, 1981 by Alfred Appel, Jr. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC . All rights reserved. Excerpts from THE ANNOTATED LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC . Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ungureanu, Delia author. Title: From Paris to Tlön : surrealism as world literature / Delia Ungureanu. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Literatures as world literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017018010 | ISBN 9781501333194 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501333217 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Surrealism (Literature) Classification: LCC PN56.S87 U55 2017 | DDC 809/.91163—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018010 ISBN : HB : PB : ePub: ePDF :

978–1–5013–3319–4 978–1–5013–4109–0 978–1–5013–3320–0 978–1–5013–3321–7

Series: Literatures as World Literature Cover design: Simon Levy/Levy Associates Cover image © 2003 Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events, and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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Pour André Breton et l’or du temps

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Contents List of Illustrations Introduction

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

17 49 75 127 159 205 259

Intellectual Networks and Surrealist Objects On the Road to Establishment: Surrealism in the 1930s Pierre Menard the Sur-realist Surrealism on the New York Market The Battle Over the New World From Dulita to Lolita The Ghosts of Surrealism in the World Novel

Bibliography Index

307 321

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List of Illustrations Black and white images 1a 1b 2a 2b 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10a 10b

11 12a

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Wifredo Lam, Alice, sirène de rêve © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Salvador Dalí by Priscilla Peck/Vogue © Condé Nast. “Star Packed Season,” Vogue, December 15, 1944: 30. Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (circa 1659). Salvador Dalí, The Image Disappears (1938) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. Salvador Dalí, Cannibalism of the Objects (1937) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. DADA soulève TOUT , 12 January 1921. André Breton, “Le merveilleux contre le mystère. À propos du symbolisme,” Minotaure 9 (1936): 31. Arthur Cravan by Jean-Paul-Louis Lespoir. New York Dada Cover (April 1921) © Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Salvador Dalí Portrait. Cecil Beaton/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, November 1, 1936: 60–61. Salvador Dalí holding Time © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Minotaure 5 (1934): 22. Surrealist jewels designed by Salvador Dalí. William Grigsby/ Vogue © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. “Fashion: Dali Prophesies ‘Mobile’ Jewels.” Salvador Dalí/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, January 1, 1939: 56–7. Salvador Dalí’s ad for Bryans stockings. Vogue, April 15, 1946: 69 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

18 18 54 54

65 90 113 130 132 147 149 175

175 176

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List of Illustrations

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12b Salvador Dalí’s “Bird-in-Hand” Compact, Vogue, May 1, 1951: 23 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 177 13 “Le Monde au temps des surréalistes” [“The World in the Time of the Surrealists”]. Variétés, June 1929: 26–7. “Le surréalisme en 1929.” Special issue dedicated to French surrealism by the Brussels magazine. 180 14 “Le surréalisme autour du monde” [“Surrealism around the World”]. Minotaure 10 (1937): 62–3. 181 15 Left: “Salvador Dalí, 1968, The magician of surrealism, wearing the cross and sash of the high spanish order, Isabel la Católica.” Vogue, April 15, 1968: 62 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. Right: Salvador Dalí collage, Part of the first group of Surrealists, all painters and poets, about 1931: Tzara, Man Ray, Dalí, Arp, Eluard, Tanguy, Max Ernst, Breton, and Crevel. Vogue, April 15, 1968: 63 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 189 16a Nadja’s drawing “La fleur des amants” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard. 198 16b Nadja’s drawing “La main” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard. 198 17 Man Ray, The shoe-spoon © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2017. 199 18 Nadja’s drawing “Le salut du diable” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard. 199 19 The two cabarets Heaven and Hell, above which Breton lived for 44 years, from 1922 until his death in 1966, at 42 Rue Fontaine. 203 20 André Breton, posing with ironic formality in his bathrobe, in the empire of his surrealist dream objects, circa 1950. André Breton © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet/NU. 204 21 Salvador Dalí by Eric Schaal, Life, April 7, 1941: 100 © Photographer: Eric Schaal/Getty Images. 207 22a Vera Zorina by Herbert Gehr. Life, April 20, 1942: 29 © Photographer: Herbert Gehr/Getty Images. 211 22b Philippe Halsman, “Ballerina Toumanova and Dalí’s rooster,” Rockefeller Center. Life, October 20, 1941: 37 © Philippe Halsman/ Magnum Photos. 211

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List of Illustrations

23 Salvador Dalí, “Dullita.” Drawing. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dial Press, 1942) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 224 24a Arnold Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead,” 1880. 227 24b Photo by Man Ray, Minotaure 5 (1934): 20 © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York /ADAGP, Paris 2017. 227 25a Rigaud perfume ad, “Un Air Embaumé.” Country Life, October 1920: 96. 242 25b Rigaud perfume ad, “Un Air Embaumé.” L’illustration, 25 April 1931. 242 26 Rogi André, L’air de nager. Jacqueline Lamba: la nymphe, 1934. BNF © All rights reserved. 255

Color plates 1

Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, “1939 New York World’s Fair:” Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus Pavilion © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017 and © Photographer: Sherman Oaks Antique Mall/Getty Images. 2a Rigaud, “Un Air Embaumé,” perfume bottle and stopper © The Perfume Bottles Auction. 2b Marcel Duchamp, “Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette,” readymade, 1921 © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017, and Photo © dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy. 3 Roberto Matta, Cover of VVV 4, 1944 © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 4 Salvador Dalí/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, June 1, 1939. Cover. 5 Salvador Dalí, Landscape with a Girl Skipping Rope, 1936 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 6 Salvador Dalí, screenshot from the short film Destino © Disney 7 Salvador Dalí, Paranoia, 1944 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 8 Salvador Dalí, “Desert Flower.” Vogue 109.4 (Feb. 15, 1947): 190–1 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. 9 Box 53 in Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence,” Istanbul.

List of Illustrations

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10 Salvador Dalí, Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically – Gala’s Shoe. Assemblage with shoe, white marble, photographs, a glass containing wax, a gibbit, a matchbox, hair, and a wooden scraper, Reconstructed 1973. © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, (ARS ), 2017 Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL (USA ) 2017 © 2017 Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. 11 Box 23 in Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence,” Istanbul.

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Introduction

Born in interwar Paris, within only a couple of decades surrealism traveled throughout the world, defining its conceptual contours at the intersection between the avant-garde and a wider and more comprehensive modernity. How did surrealism circulate so quickly and so far from its point of origin, figuring prominently in locations as various as the Argentine journal Sur and department store displays in New York? So many of the avant-garde movements of its day, from Dada to Vorticism to futurism, faded before long as influential literary forces, but surrealist ideas continue to inspire writers and artists from Orhan Pamuk to Haruki Murakami to Jeff Koons. In a remarkable process of transfer, exchange, and transformation, surrealism rapidly evolved from a purely poetic movement to encompass visual art, and through the medium of the surrealist object it has proved to have a major influence from contemporary world fiction to the advertising industry and to our daily lives, where it thrives to this day. In the 1920s, Dada was attracting at least as much attention as surrealism in the 1930s, and it wasn’t clear that either movement would have a lasting impact. Dada was explicitly a movement of creative ideological destruction rather than a foundation for future masterpieces of literature or art, but to many observers, surrealism didn’t appear destined to become more than a passing fad, popular in a limited circle of avant-garde poets and their artistic friends. In an early and influential account in 1933, De Baudelaire au surréalisme, the Swiss critic Marcel Raymond presented surrealism as the logical conclusion of modernist poetics, but more as a dead end than a productive movement. Raymond saw surrealism as an oblique form of escapism dwelling in the dungeons of the mind: “We are no longer living in the period when Goethe praised the French romantics to Eckermann for not moving away from nature like the German romantics. The symbolists, and especially the surrealists, broke the balance between the inner and the outer worlds in favor of the inner world, and the danger pointed out by Goethe exists today in France” (322). To Raymond, surrealism was another failed promise to conquer the unknown: “After having threatened to submerge the 1

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

whole of the newer literature, surrealism leaves the impression of a force that did not succeed in finding its path, of a great disappointed hope” (313). Yet even as he describes surrealist poetry as little read and hard to read (“It is true that this poetry has few readers, and that it sometimes discourages readers”), Raymond still holds out the possibility of its future impact: “nevertheless, it registers the slightest changes in the atmosphere, it makes the gesture that others will imitate and develop (in writings that will be read and rewarded), and it is first to utter the long awaited word” (324). Raymond was right. Still not widely read today, surrealist poetry survived as a mode of thinking, as an attitude towards life, and as a way to represent the world in works that belong to writers who became canonical in their turn. Through the mechanisms of consecration, surrealism would be reconfirmed as a legitimate stake of the game, not only thanks to its poetry, as Raymond believed, but also to its literature, painting, and the borderline practice of the surrealist object that linked these different modes of expression. *

*

*

Once surrealism was the master of Paris. On March 17, 1951, Le Figaro littéraire asked André Breton and the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret what statues they would place in the major Parisian squares and crossroads, “si le surréalisme était maître de Paris.” Their list included larger-than-life literary characters such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu; the alchemist and astrologer Paracelsus; Hieronymus Bosch, painter of visionary and fantastic characters; the polymath Leonardo da Vinci; the master of irony and absurd humor Jonathan Swift; the Spanish painter of nightmares, Francisco Goya; the father of modernist poetry, Charles Baudelaire; Gérard de Nerval, the poet who walked a lobster pet at the end of a blue ribbon in the Gardens of the Palais Royal; the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; and one of the early creators of cinema, Georges Méliès, initially an illusionist who thought filmmaking was the art of dreams. (Even today, Méliès still thrives as a proto-surrealist filmmaker in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 tribute film Hugo.) And last but not least: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who first developed the concept of Weltliteratur. Once surrealism became the master of the world. This is an invitation to understand the complex circulation of surrealist ideas between Paris and newly rising cultural centers, from New York to Buenos Aires and points beyond. My story explores André Breton’s and Salvador Dalí’s rival versions of surrealism that are echoed and transformed to different outcomes by writers who are

Introduction

3

surprising figures in a discussion about surrealism—Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, but also contemporary world writers like the Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and the major Romanian novelist and poet Mircea Cărtărescu. In mapping surrealism’s network of circulation from its founding figures to agents not openly associated with the group, I build on the concept of network theory from social anthropology (Elizabeth Bott, Jeremy Boissevain, and J. Clyde Mitchell) to unfold an “histoire croisée” (Werner and Zimmerman) of production, circulation, and reception. By rethinking surrealist ideas within a crisscrossed intellectual history, I hope to go beyond existing studies of the more obvious networks of circulation and cultural institutions that the surrealists used, such as the international exhibitions and the related artistic circles in Paris and New York that have been well explored by art historians like Dickran Tashjian (A Boatload of Madmen, 1995) and Lewis Kachur (Displaying the Marvelous, 2001). Looking at the intersection of disciplines, media, and genres, we can better understand the subtle, oblique, but very fertile impact of surrealist ideas on writers working in the United States, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, well beyond the realms of poetry and of visual arts. My approach has been substantially dictated by the object of study itself: surrealism was a group practice that benefited from a great world network of agents and mediators even beyond what the surrealists themselves imagined. This history challenges traditional notions of direct influence and unidirectional transfer, including the portrayal of surrealism in terms of in-group dynamics found in works such as those of Lewis Kachur or Adam Jolles’s The Curatorial Avant-Garde (2013). Instead, we find networks of mutual exchange and transformation, which far exceed the confines of the organized surrealist groups, with their constant struggles over hierarchies, subordination, and authority. Mapping surrealist ideas in the intellectual field beyond its group confines brings us to writers who weren’t openly associated with the group, but who benefited greatly from this intellectual transfer, exchange, and transformation: Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita, Borges in his most renowned volume of short stories, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Orhan Pamuk in The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence, and Mircea Cărtărescu in Nostalgia, Blinding, and Solenoid. I build as well on the sociology of literature devised by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art, extended to an international field and market in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and in Gisèle Sapiro’s articles on international

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

circulation through translation. The advantage of such an approach is that it allows for a disenchanted perspective on the trajectories of the main characters in this story—less as post-Romantic geniuses than as agents in the field. Rather than a clash of ideologies and personalities, as much of the existing scholarship on surrealism claims, the major break in the surrealist group, that between Breton and Dalí, was a clash of different market strategies that would enable surrealism to move beyond Paris and conquer the world. At the same time, a networked account of these strategies relieves the pressure and politics of understanding this intellectual exchange of surrealist ideas in unidirectional terms of the domination of cultural capitals over passive peripheries. Unlike Casanova’s unidirectional approach to Paris as the only cultural center in the interwar period, the story of the circulation of surrealist ideas shows rapidly expanding and shifting networks around Europe and the Americas, both North and South, and unfolds also the less visible truth of New York as a rising center as early as the 1930s, with the first attempts going back to the first decade of the twentieth century. As for Paris itself, it wasn’t only a center where peripheral writers could make a name for themselves, a welcoming home for those considered marginal or rebels in their home cultures; I show that it was often the French artists and writers themselves who rebelled against the cultural and political establishment in the aftermath of World War I. Their interactions with international networks were essential to their success from the start, and so rather than Casanova’s oppositional discourse between center and periphery, we find in the case of surrealism a mutually productive exchange among different cultural capitals around the world. Breton thought himself a citizen of the world, and the surrealists’ political stance—anticolonial, antinationalist, anti-imperialist, antiracist—was what made them so attractive to writers and artists from Prague to Copenhagen, Buenos Aires to Japan. With the writers, artists, and poets I discuss in this book, the circulation of ideas was not determined by the linguistic, racial, gender, national, or political color of the agent from whom the idea originates or is mediated, but rather by its resonance with the agent who received it. Such is the case of Borges’ preoccupation with the idea of intellectual creation in a postmodern world that no longer believes in Romantic originality and novelty. Through the surrealists, Borges found a similar idea in the poetics of plagiarism advanced by Lautréamont and then developed further in the surrealist aesthetics of automatism championed by Breton. The fact that Borges openly criticized Breton’s political and artistic views didn’t prevent him from making creative use

Introduction

5

of a poet like Lautréamont, whose centrality in avant-garde poetry was entirely thanks to the surrealist group. Like the map of surrealism, its literary history isn’t linear or unidirectional. The third generation of writers I discuss—Pamuk and Cărtărescu—aren’t engaging only directly with agents from the surrealist group per se, but are deeply indebted, as they themselves admit, to figures who preceded the surrealists and were claimed by them as forerunners—like Novalis, Hoffmann, Nerval, and Lautréamont—and also with writers such as Borges and Nabokov who were outside the surrealist group but who had interacted with surrealist ideas within the broader intellectual networks in which they participated. Thus this isn’t a history of surrealism’s influence on the next generation that reproduced their practices, as seen in works such as Tashjian’s A Boatload of Madmen or in the collection La planète affolée: Surréalisme, dispersion et influences 1938–1947 (1986). Instead, this is the story of the part that surrealism played within the world market of intellectual ideas as it intersected with the preoccupations of a very diverse set of writers and artists within the larger framework of modernity. I am not in any way using surrealism as a label or umbrella term to bring together such diverse writers, artists, and poets as those my book deals with. I don’t in the least think that Borges, Nabokov, García Márquez, Pamuk, or Cărtărescu are Surrealists with a capital “S,” and in general I prefer a lower-case surrealism, signifying a broad and varied movement and perspective rather than (pace Breton) a single orthodox school. And in any case, great writers defy any conceptual box, because they are open to very diverse types of influences that they internalize, sometimes beyond recognition even to themselves. However, the surrealist connection is a strong one, as the writers I discuss produced their works in a diverse intellectual and social network in which the surrealist ideas had an important symbolic and even economic value. These intellectual exchanges had an immense impact on the world fiction written by Borges in Buenos Aires, Nabokov in the United States, Pamuk in Istanbul, and Cărtărescu in Bucharest. Whereas studies of surrealism and its global spread almost always look at poetry and the visual arts, my book proposes fiction as another very fertile ground for the global spread and local transformations of surrealist ideas, in genres and forms that the surrealists themselves sometimes wouldn’t have thought of. Breton, for instance, dismissed fiction and especially the novel in the 1920s as a bourgeois, corrupt genre; because of his disapproval, Aragon burnt almost entirely his 1,600-page manuscript La Défense de l’infini, which could have been a most ambitious form

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

for a new type of novel. Others such as Philippe Soupault who refused to stop practicing the forbidden genre were simply excommunicated from the group. Yet by the 1930s, as surrealism was expanding its conceptual and practical umbrella, the surrealist journal Minotaure began to show an interest in detective, noir, and Gothic fiction. Network analysis thus goes beyond looking at the theory of surrealism only as the surrealists themselves conceived it and reveals how, to everyone’s surprise, it was the minor, marginal genres or magazine articles that made surrealist ideas travel all the way into global fiction. A half-page article by the graphologist Pierre Menard, together with a series of scraps and fragments from the Uruguayanborn French poet Lautréamont, would be invested with a wholly different stake in Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote.” A perverse reverie that Salvador Dalí published in 1931 in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, forgotten by almost everyone, is transformed first by Dalí himself in the pages of his fictional autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí before being picked up and refashioned by Nabokov as a prime basis for Lolita. A few dozen pages saved by Aragon’s lover from his pyromanic drive and published in the 1980s as “Le cahier noir” helped shape The Black Book, the novel that first brought Orhan Pamuk world fame. Magazines such as Minotaure, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur were key elements in the spread of surrealism, as were the exhibitions that are at the core of approaches from art history. Literary magazines have the advantage of showing the immediate, subtle changes in the group’s interests and strategies, whereas exhibitions are by nature retrospective, as they synthesize and boil down the dynamism and fluctuations in the group that a magazine renders so well. We will be looking at many images in this book, but the magazines need to be seen not just as sources of striking images and group manifestos but as nascent cultural institutions, sites for group strategy and as a networking space for different intellectual generations. Even a mainstream magazine such as Vogue engages in a more complex relation to surrealism than mere commercialization: Breton’s flamboyantly avant-garde New York magazine VVV is in no small measure a response to Dalí’s presence in Vogue. From Paris to Buenos Aires to New York, literary magazines were key nodal points in the intellectual network, together with cafés and bookstores like those of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach where ideas were circulated, exchanged, and transformed, as explored in important studies such as Norbert Bandier’s Sociologie du surréalisme: 1924–1929 (1999) and Laure Murat’s Passage de

Introduction

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l’Odéon: Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier et la vie littéraire à Paris dans l’entredeux-guerres (2005). A second structuring principle for this book was the international character of surrealism from its very beginnings. Membership of the Parisian group was international, and surrealist groups soon appeared from Belgrade to Tokyo. This aspect distinguishes surrealism from other avant-garde movements, and contributed to its duration and lasting impact. The international character of the group and movement has been little understood by French and American scholars to date. Thus Tashjian claims: “In running its course, then, Surrealism unpredictably careened out of Breton’s control, beyond national boundaries” (xix). Yet, in fact, this transnational movement was precisely the intent of Breton and his international band. As can be seen in a collage published in Minotaure 10 (1937) under the title “Le Surréalisme autour du monde,” from surrealism’s early days Breton was avidly collecting translations of surrealist works around the world. Surrealism’s international character is inborn in the movement. A third structuring principle that I have used is to focus on the theory and practice of the surrealist object as a prime element traded through the intellectual network. As first theorized by Breton and Dalí and then developed in the 1930s, the surrealist object was meant to bridge media and cross the boundaries between poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, and parlor games. The surrealist object is thus far more than a visual manifestation or a theoretical thought experiment, as it has often been discussed (Okun, Finkelstein, Kachur). Understood through network theory, the surrealist object can be extended from the actual object that marks what Adam Jolles calls “The Tactile Turn” in the early 1930s (The Curatorial Avant-Garde 12) to the written version of such an object as it appears in Borges, Nabokov, Pamuk, and Cărtărescu. For instance, Hans Bellmer’s dolls photographed for Minotaure and Dalí’s literary creation Dulita are transformed into a purely written version—a whole new metamorphosis of the surrealist object—in Lolita. Before it became an artistic practice, the surrealist object had a dreamed and written quality; the impossible objects as described by Breton in his early “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” (1924) are brought from the world of dreams into concrete form. The surrealist object is initially dreamed about and then written by a poet in a prose text; it then becomes a multimedia collective practice in the 1930s, entering the real world as objects of furniture, jewelry, or haute couture, only to return to the written world of literature and back to dreams in Borges, Nabokov, and a wide range of later writers. Network

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

theory, as understood through the history of surrealist ideas, gives the surrealist object a whole new meaning, dynamic and in constant change from the point of view of the medium rather than a static understanding within the confines of the purely surrealist practice. The surrealist object has often been understood as enabling a recovery of the lost past, but I argue that it is equally oriented toward the future. Thus Okun’s approach to the surrealist object through the framework of ethnography and the primitive object leads him to emphasize its orientation towards the past: “Their automatons and dummies . . . are all clearly deities of fetishes (in both the primitive and the psychological sense of the word) as they are simultaneously linked to the hauntingly silent and rigidly expressive figures of folk sculpture” (462). The specificity of the surrealist object, I argue, isn’t merely its periodic primitivity or its suspension of past utility or function (Jolles), but its reinscription within the writer’s or artist’s personal network of signs. Its reinterpretation is intended not so much to bring out forgotten past desires, frustrations or anxieties, but rather to enable the artist to prophesy his future. Thus Breton looked at surrealist objects as dreamed objects that translate a past desire but that at the same time announce the dreamer’s future. We can then read our future in the current objectification of past, unconscious desires; Breton did the same when preparing surrealism’s future as he saw it. It should be no surprise that Goethe was a constant point of reference for the surrealists, given his future-oriented definition of Weltliteratur, especially when the surrealists defined the surrealist image/object as an international and world practice. The frontispiece of La conquête du monde par l’image, the magazine of the surrealist group in France under German occupation in 1942, gives a quote from Goethe to legitimize the practice of the surrealist object on its title page: “The creative force of the artist must call forth these images, these idols dwelling within the organism in the memory, in the imagination; that it do this freely and without the intervention of intention or will; they must deploy themselves, intersect, expand and contract, so as to become not merely fugitive conceptions but real, concrete objects.” Goethe had held a future-oriented, even prophetic view of world literature; as he told his disciple Eckermann, “National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Eckermann 166). Here Goethe echoes Peter’s second epistle, which speaks of the Day of Wrath and the Apocalypse as bringing the long-awaited New Kingdom: “Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire

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shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. . . . we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:12–13). Breton could say that the practice of the surrealist object hastens the manifestation of the future marvelous by forcing it into being, as he promoted his own future-oriented understanding of surrealist world poetry, literature, and art. *

*

*

In 2003, Breton’s daughter, Aube Breton Elléouët, decided to sell her father’s art and manuscript collection, which included more than 5,500 items—a collection estimated at about $40 million. Despite written protests from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Susan Sontag, and John Ashbery, the French State refused to purchase the collection, claiming it was too expensive; the material ended up being sold off piece-by-piece and dispersed. Nearly a century after the beginnings of the surrealist revolution, the ethical and political values for which Breton and his group fought were perhaps still a cause of distress for the French cultural establishment that they had criticized so sharply. Recalling Nicolas Sarkozy’s condescending and nationalist response to the 2007 manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français—which had argued, as the surrealists did before them, for a literature without linguistic and cultural borders—we don’t need to look farther for answers as to why the French State didn’t have the funds to purchase the collection. Focused on Breton’s and Dalí’s different versions of surrealism, and particularly on the surrealist object’s production, translation, and circulation, the story of the establishment of surrealism on the world market follows the intellectual networks in which key roles were played not only by the individual agents but by a set of new cultural institutions, including the bookstore as literary circle and center of distribution, the “little magazines,” art galleries, and last but not least, the museum of contemporary art. If surrealism came to have the world impact it had in the 1930s, it was thanks to a collaborative intellectual network brought together at the Paris bookstore owned by Adrienne Monnier; Breton’s several successively published journals and his personal networks that brought together the literary and art markets; Salvador Dalí’s capacity to reinvent himself for different audiences; Marcel Duchamp’s New York and Parisian connections with both Dada and surrealism; Victoria Ocampo’s Argentinian magazine Sur; Julien Levy’s New York avant-garde art gallery; and Alfred H. Barr’s directorship of the Museum of Modern Art.

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

Writing on surrealism as world literature is not an easy task today, when just the bibliography of what was perhaps the strongest group movement of the twentieth century can comprise a rich volume in itself. The divergent ways in which Breton and Dalí theorized, practiced, and then promoted the surrealist object testify to the two major versions of surrealism that traveled internationally: Breton’s orthodox, more purely autonomous surrealism and Dalí’s more hybrid, market-oriented one, opened to the mechanisms of recognition and cultural establishment. Even if surrealism is all about the group strategy, as Norbert Bandier demonstrates, the elaboration of surrealist theory and practice are centered around the group’s leader André Breton, thanks to whom there was a group to begin with. Throughout the history of surrealism, the only challenger to achieve equal stature with Breton was Salvador Dalí, and their two theoretical versions of the surrealist object are those that traveled. Dalí’s was influential mainly in the United States and in visual art all over the world, whereas Breton’s version remained stronger in Europe, in France’s former colonies, and in Latin America. Much more than a movement in modern poetry, surrealism unfolds in this story to encompass the visual arts, fiction, and most importantly, a world vision. More than most other literary and artistic movements of the twentieth century, surrealism engages with a world without geographical, cultural, and political borders. In this light, it is appropriate that one of the statues in the ideal surrealist Paris would be of Goethe. Surrealist ideas circulated in time and space, from the United States to Buenos Aires, to Bucharest and Istanbul, to Tokyo and Beijing, from the late 1930s to the present. Referred to directly or obliquely, scorned or praised, Breton’s surrealism remained a constant point of reference for world writers who explored the same vein of the unconscious and the irrational, and who turned the dream narrative into their strategy to conquer the world. The global spread of surrealism began in the 1930s, when Breton directed all his energies to promote the movement throughout the world. Surrealism rebelled against any form of imposed or repressive authority—the State, the Church, the institution of the family—while advancing a sharp critique of Western morals and society. This helped surrealism to take root, but also to develop in any given political, geographical, or linguistic periphery, and it added to its international profile and diversity. Aesthetically, surrealism opened a path for a richer understanding of reality by making the world of dreams equally important to waking life. Surrealist ideas came to transcend the mere movement or a label: they are a way to represent reality for all those who think reality is

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more than it seems, that the world can be read as a cryptogram, that objects are beings with a life of their own. Surrealism has long ceased to be a Parisian literary and artistic movement, one among other avant-gardes. It is a political and aesthetic attitude that has more than an historical meaning. For this reason this book includes writers who share some of its political or aesthetic beliefs even if they’ve never been part of a group or have even rejected an association with surrealism. As early as the 1930s, surrealist groups existed in Czechoslovakia, Serbia, and Romania, but also in Japan—all countries represented in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Spearheaded by Vítĕzslav Nezval, the very active Prague group included the visual artist Toyen (a pseudonym of Marie Čerminová), one of the most important women surrealists. In 1931, the Belgrade group contributed to the magazine Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and in Belgrade itself, Marko Ristić, Aleksandar Vučo, and Dušan Matić edited the surrealist almanac Nemoguće—L’impossible. The Romanian group included the poets Gellu Naum and Virgil Teodorescu, as well as Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), whose insurgent Dadaist spirit informed the revolutionary position of surrealism after Breton joined forces with him in the early 1920s. In the late 1960s, in Communist Romania, the aesthetic oneirism movement spearheaded by Dumitru Ţepeneag and Leonid Dimov took its cue from surrealism both aesthetically and politically: by taking the dream as a model for writing, they were making an oblique political statement against the regime. Both Romanian groups serve to show that surrealists weren’t necessarily communist sympathizers, as is often supposed; on the contrary, surrealism was banned by the communists in Romania after 1944 as a decadent Western fashion that encouraged subversive thinking. From the very beginning, Breton refused to subordinate the movement to any political institution, and he soon became disenchanted with the French communists. If anything, surrealism opposes authoritarianism of the left as well as the right, in its fight against any kind of moral or political oppression, and it is significant that the May 1968 protests in Paris recirculated surrealist slogans: “It is forbidden to forbid,” “Be realistic, ask the impossible,” “All Power to the Imagination.” Recent anthologies and exhibitions have shown the important role played in surrealism by African and Afro-Caribbean writers and artists. In their collection Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009), Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley offer a comprehensive panorama of

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

the spread of surrealism from Martinique to the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, Cairo, and the United States. Making Rimbaud and Lautréamont their heroes, the Black surrealists embraced their spirit of discovery and adventure, as well as their multilingualism: Rimbaud declared “je suis nègre” as he left Paris to discover Ethiopia, and the bilingual Uruguay-born Lautréamont discovered the world in Paris. From Paris, surrealism responded to the colonial peripheries’ need for freedom, and Martinican and Haitian writers were among the first to adopt it. Aimé Césaire’s periodical Tropiques brought surrealism to the Caribbean, while the Haitian surrealist poets (including Clément MagloireSaint-Aude, René Philoctete, and Francketienne among others) felt encouraged by Breton’s call to freedom when he visited them in 1945. In a similar vein, Melanie Nicholson’s Surrealism in Latin America: Searching for Breton’s Ghost (2013) looks at the circulation and transformation of surrealist ideas in Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico, both in poetry and in fiction, examining the notion of magical realism as a development of the marvelous in the works of Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. The most important nuclei of surrealism in Latin America were Aldo Pellegrini’s group in Buenos Aires, the Chilean group Mandrágora, and the group influenced by the Peruvian philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui’s magazine Amauta. A special case is Mexico, where the poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo, moved at the outbreak of World War II and established a group that benefited from the contributions of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Surrealism also made early inroads in Asia and the Middle East. The Egyptian surrealist group in Cairo was organized by Georges Henein in the late 1930s and was promoted through three periodicals, two of which appeared both in French and Arabic (Art et liberté and Don Quichotte) and one entirely in Arabic (Al-Tattawor). The most important later member of the Cairo group was Joyce Mansour (1928–1986), author of sixteen volumes of surrealist poetry, who joined forces with Robert Benayoun, Octavio Paz, and Nora Mitrani in 1960 to speak “In Defense of Surrealism.” The surrealist group in Cairo paved the way for the Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile, spearheaded in Paris in the 1970s by the Iraqi poet Abdul Kader El Janaby, who militated for “surrealism in art and in life.” Japan was another country where surrealism developed almost simultaneously with the Paris movement, as Majella Munro has shown in her recent book Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan, 1925–1970 (2012).

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The painters Okamoto Tarō and Fukuzawa Ichirō lived in Paris in the 1930s while developing their artistic formulas; the poet Yamanaka Tiroux corresponded regularly with surrealists in Europe. The Japanese were genuine collaborators in international surrealism as early as 1932, the year of the Paris-Tokyo League of Rising Art Exhibition curated by Breton. To the artworks and poetry examined by Munro, we could add the contemporary world fiction of Haruki Murakami, who has identified himself in an interview given to The Paris Review as having a “surrealistic style,” which we see in such works as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Kafka on the Shore. While the surrealists’ major productions were chiefly in the realm of poetry, visual art, essays, and manifestos, Murakami is one of many contemporary novelists whose work shows that the surrealists have had a lasting worldwide effect in a genre they only sporadically practiced themselves: the novel, which over the past several decades has been a prime arena for the construction of dream narratives centered on surreal objects. If world literature is literature that thrives in translation, as David Damrosch defines it in his book What Is World Literature?, we find here an unusual situation of a relative failure of direct translation of the poetry that first made the group famous but is little read today outside surrealist circles. Instead there has been a two-stage translation, first into visual art and then into the novel. As case studies of the circulation of surrealist ideas into world literature, I build on findings I have made in the archives of Harvard’s Houghton and Widener libraries to trace the fortunes of the surrealist object in the pivotal work of two mid-century writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Both were more closely associated with surrealist circles than is commonly recognized. They did much to set the agenda for many writers who have followed in their wake, as we’ll see in the case of two leading contemporary writers, Orhan Pamuk and Mircea Cărtărescu. Surrealism made two major contributions to contemporary world literature. First is the emphasis on the poetic and dream(like) dimension of everyday existence. This poetic dimension can be reached either through prolonging the logic of dreams in waking reality or by detaching objects from their habitual settings in order to de-familiarize them and thus redefine them for the perceiver. The surrealists’ poem-objects subsequently generated Pamuk’s project The Museum of Innocence, both a novel and a physical museum, where each chapter of the novel has a matching display case that functions like a poem-object initially defined by Breton in 1931–1932. These objects can be real (as for Breton

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

and Pamuk) or simply imagined, as with the goldfish created and remade by the poet-Colonel Aureliano Buendía in Cien años de soledad or the paintings turned into jigsaw puzzles in Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Equally important was the surrealists’ obsession with the existence of a hidden meaning beneath the thin skin of everyday life. This they perceived in the form of a pattern, a mysterious drawing, a paranoid conspiracy, or simply a network of meanings available only for the one who can read behind, beneath, or above reality. With surrealism, this took the conceptual form of the “hasard objectif,” “vases communicants” or, in a word, sur-réalité. It could pervade even the conceptual structure of writers such as Nabokov who obstinately dismissed any relation to surrealism at all. This belief, taken to a climax in the theoretical apparatus of surrealism, has a precedent in German romanticism (Novalis and Hoffmann) and its French legacy (Nerval), and later followers in Borges, Pamuk, and Cărtărescu, as we will see in my later chapters, though the list could be extended to writers as various as the Americans Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster (heirs to Dalí’s paranoiac surrealism), Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, and many others. This pattern involves such surreal objects as a magical manuscript that encompasses one’s entire life, including the future (Novalis), a cultural memory going down to esoteric Oriental texts (Nerval), a painting or a manuscript of mémoires turned fiction (E.T.A. Hoffmann), an Escher-like impossible geometric structure based on the Kabala (Borges), the museum of affective memory as encompassed by a book or everyday object (Pamuk), or a great tattoo on a skull or a manuscript dreamed by a huge brain (Cărtărescu). In all these cases, this pattern of meaning in a visual form traced behind the immediate logic of reality has a theoretical grounding in the surrealist repertoire. Like the surrealists, these writers are at once playful and deadly serious, using oneiric and metatextual play to disrupt both the logic and the power relations of everyday life. More than a label for an avant-garde coterie, surrealism is a way of being and of understanding the world that pervaded the intellectual thought of the past century, not always in readily visible ways. This book challenges received ideas about where the legacy of surrealism is to be found today; we will see that among the bastard sons of surrealism have been those who always denied owing anything to it. Major contemporary world writers such as Borges, Nabokov, and Pamuk have the capacity to internalize many different elements coming from divergent networks of ideas, up to the point of obscuring their origins. It is their intellectual mobility and receptiveness to different stimuli that truly make

Introduction

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them world writers. Their highly creative receptivity involves much more than a derivative absorption of influences from the cultural center: even as their world perspective explodes, the boundaries of their local or national tradition remain boundaries that scholars of national literatures all too often try to keep in place. A social network perspective on the intellectual field will show that the writers at the center of my study never existed in isolation but participated in networks that have many points of intersection and that inform each other in the most unexpected ways. Reconstructing networks such as the ones that fostered surrealism’s global spread involves what I have come to think of as “detective criticism.” The clues that first set me on this path were a pair of chance encounters in two surrealist magazines: one with Salvador Dali’s eleven-year-old Dulita in the pages of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and a second with the real Pierre Menard in the pages of Minotaure. This book is an invitation to join me in tracing the surrealist thread through the labyrinthine networks of twentieth-century intellectual and literary thought.

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1

Intellectual Networks and Surrealist Objects Gaming the system The surrealists always played for high stakes even when no money changed hands. In the spring of 1941, André Breton and several of his friends sought to flee Vichy France for the United States. Stuck in Marseille for several weeks while waiting for their visas to come through, they passed the time by inventing a version of the Tarot of Marseille, featuring the figures of the surrealist pantheon instead of the usual characters on the cards. The collective work comprised sixteen tarot cards drawn by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Oscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, and André Masson. They were returning to the surrealist collective practices of the late 1920s, but also taking an ideological stand against racism—Wifredo Lam was of Chinese and Afro-Cuban descent—and for a world literature and art: “In order to keep the collective character of the group as anonymous as possible all these [drawings] have been faithfully redrawn by Delanglade” (Breton, “Le jeu de Marseille” 90). One of these images shows Lewis Carroll’s Alice (see Figure 1a), transformed into one of the playing cards she meets in Wonderland, becoming the Siren of the dream represented by the suit of the black star. We can juxtapose this surreal echo of Wonderland with a very different one from the pages of Vogue magazine a year later (see Figure 1b). There, Salvador Dalí appears in Vogue’s 1944 cartoon “Star-Packed Season” as the White Rabbit, fancily dressed in black tie, holding an umbrella and winding his watch (Peck 30). The playing of games had been an essential surrealist practice. “Exquisite Corpse,” “One Inside the Other,” or reading the Tarot cards were “Delightful games for all ages;/Poetic games,” as Breton called them in his poem “The Mystery Corset.” When the surrealists invented their own Tarot game, they weren’t being particularly original. Lewis Carroll himself had devised “The Game of Alice in Wonderland” which was composed of 52 cards featuring his characters: 17

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

Figure 1a Wifredo Lam, Alice, sirène de rêve © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 1b Salvador Dalí by Priscilla Peck/Vogue © Condé Nast. “Star Packed Season,” Vogue, December 15, 1944: 30.

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Alice is the Queen of Hearts, transposed by the surrealists across the color spectrum from red to blue, with the red heart becoming the oxymoronic, oneiric black star. A central character is the White Rabbit, holding his watch and umbrella, just as Vogue would represent Dalí. The similarities between Carroll and Dalí go even deeper: long before Dalí started commercializing his art, Carroll was involved in promoting his books by licensing the production of biscuit tins and umbrellas bearing his Alice brand. A very surrealist act of history: the White Rabbit started as a fictional character, then became part of a game and came closer to life, only to become real with the apparition of Dalí, only to go back to the playful reality of cartoons in the pages of Vogue. André Breton, surrealism’s would-be king (or errant White Knight), used to retire periodically to his childhood house in Lorient, Bretagne, the place where he grew up fascinated by the forests and by his grandfather Louis’ stories. Lorient was the land of dreams where Breton sought refuge whenever what turned out to be his existential project, the world as surrealism, seemed at a loss: I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond . . . The work of art, considered as being as seriously significant as such and such a fragment of human life, seems to me to be lacking in all value if it does not present the same hardness, rigidity, regularity and luster on all its surfaces, both inside and out, as the crystal . . . The house I live in, my life, my writings; I dream that these things appear from far away just like cubes of rock-salt seen at close range. What is Surrealism? 40–41

Breton’s dreamy glass house—a complement to Carroll’s world imagined through the looking glass—is also a self-portrait, and a perfect example of what the surrealist object is: a transparent, non-utilitarian thing, a response to an inner necessity and desire. Unlike the opaque objects of adulthood, seen through a “river of sand,” the objects of childhood are transparent, and a glass house or a crystal opens a world without borders, in a process that Alice-Breton, following Max Ernst, calls dépaysement (Breton, La clé des champs 25). Throughout the history of the surrealist object, transparency appears in a number of contexts, such as the shop window where it brings a surreal world into our immediate reality like the Dalí-Duchamp window displays in New York, or

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

Breton’s window display for the Gradiva art gallery that he opened in Paris. Even years later, it survives through a project like Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, where his surrealist objects are shown in neatly arranged glass cases. André Breton and Salvador Dalí are responsible for the two versions of surrealism that traveled worldwide; one refused to grow old in the practice of the game, as Pierre Bourdieu would say, and the other wanted to gain immediate consecration and transform the symbolic into social and economic capital, using both short-term and long-term strategies. Breton, the father of surrealism, remained in his surreal glass house described in Nadja and Amour fou, dreaming of a world where dreams can revolutionize poetry and solve the existential problems of mankind, as the first surrealist manifesto promised, refusing any compromise with the political and economic world. Salvador Dalí, the prodigy whom Breton brought from Cadaqués to revitalize the movement in 1929 by incorporating the visual arts, guarded Breton’s dream for a while, until he got bored with surrealism’s running against Time and decided that he should run after it. He set his watch to the Eastern Time Zone and moved his brand of surrealism to New York. Afraid of running late for his meeting with the New York socialites, the master of melted watches molded time into his own name when he published The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí with the anagrammatic Dial Press in 1942. What Breton feared most—growing old in the practice of art—Dalí turned into a strategy for the New York market. As he concludes in the “Epilogue” of this book of memoirs: “I have no desire to fight a duel with anyone or with anything; I want only two things: first, to love Gala, my wife; and second, that other inescapable thing, so difficult and so little desired—to grow old” (399). Even as late as 1952, Breton would still advocate the surrealist position as if he was a newcomer to the game, constantly refusing any means of consecration and sticking to his initial credo throughout a lifetime. Alice-Breton could never accept that surrealism could grow old and become established in the field, commercially or even academically. The fact that surrealism was already being taught in some universities in 1951 made it suspect from Breton’s point of view: In the word “place” there’s always the idea of official consecration involved, which disturbs me. I have already said that by temperament far more than by reason I always positioned myself in the opposition, I was ready to join, come what may, an endlessly renewable minority . . . In my opinion, it’s already too

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much that surrealism is taught in schools. I have no doubt that this will only reduce it. Breton, Entretiens 217

Adrienne Monnier took a skeptical view of the surrealists’ Alice-inspired unconventionality, and in a letter she spoke ironically of “Lewis Carroll, whom the surrealists justly hail as one of their masters (doesn’t surrealism represent a counterpart of English ‘nonsense’?)” (The Very Rich Hours 182). In the same letter she made a perceptive remark about surrealism’s target audience: “This aggressive nonconformism is certainly what most seduces young people, very young people, who are still rallying to surrealism, which for them is mixed up with what has been called ‘the crisis of juvenile originality.’ It is the need to escape from family or school authority, the horror of social cogwheels, the desire to assert one’s personality. It is on a par with speaking Javanese” (181). More positively, Monnier’s friend Valery Larbaud, whose name is inextricably bound to Joyce’s success in Paris, hailed the surrealist poets as Carroll’s rightful heirs. As he wrote to Monnier, Larbaud took pleasure in rubbing Breton’s poetry into the snobbish nose of “Mrs. Arnold Bennett,” as he ironically called the wife of the anti-modernist novelist: “It was the poem ‘Bohemia Crystal Vase’ by A. Breton. I responded to her request, after having briefly compared Dada and Lewis Carroll’s and Edwards Lear’s nonsense poetry. That put them at ease and showed them that France too has good ‘nonsense poets’ (between you and me, better than theirs, since the advent of Dada)” (Lettres 52). Monnier wasn’t impressed. She considered that surrealism was best suited for adolescents, and she strikes a very interesting note on the relation between age, the surrealist object, and cruelty, writing of “the cruelty of children, a cruelty that is generally manifested in actions and not in utterances; it is the physical object—whether animate or inanimate, it is an object because it is perceived as being nonrelated— that first of all provokes curiosity in children and then cruelty as a means of complete investigation” (Monnier 82). Breton never wanted to become a central authority, or so he often claimed. When André Parinaud asked him if the series of their 1951 radio interviews revealed the “real André Breton,” Breton replied that he thought the purpose was to reveal surrealism, not himself: “From the first questions you asked me I was, of course, led to think that the object of these interviews was surrealism and not myself. Since I was invited to tell the chronological story of a spiritual adventure that was and remains collective, I had to somewhat efface myself from it” (Entretiens 213). At the end of his life, Breton looked back on surrealism with the

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

same passion, love, and confidence he’d always had in the movement, which remained his existential project: “Everything considered, I have lived to this very day just as I have dreamed of living” (Entretiens 216). How many writers would say this if, like him, they had always refused prizes and distinctions, and never accumulated much economic capital? He remained stubborn enough to dream of a realm with no frontiers: the world of dreams. Yet he knew well that his dreamworld needed down-to-earth support, and he proved early on to be a master at using the intellectual cultural networks to make his dreams come true. The Parisian networks available to artists and writers in the aftermath of World War I include three institutions capable of generating new forms of social capital: the salons, the bookshops, and the literary magazines—three institutions that compensate for the poor distribution of the avant-garde books and cultural activities (Bandier 40). Paris became the ideal place for multilinguists to publish internationalist and world literature magazines, from Rubén Darío’s Mundial, going through Eugène Jolas’ transition, up to Henry Church’s Mesures. Jolas was an American of Alsatian origin, fluent in French, English, and German. He published the famous magazine transition, where the majority of Joyce’s Work in Progress appeared, but also texts by Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Hart Crane, and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. He also introduced Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Breton’s Amour fou and Nadja to the English-speaking audience (Murat 110). Two key establishments in Paris in the aftermath of the war, where many of the most influential minds of the day met, were two symmetrically located bookstores, almost facing each other on Rue de l’Odéon, a perfect architectural metaphor for the romantic relationship of the two owners: Adrienne Monnier (La Maison des Amis des Livres) and Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare & Co.). These two institutions brought together a cosmopolitan group of Americans, French, English, Germans, Spanish, Latin Americans, and Russians, but also the major intellectual networks, from the established generation of Gide and Valéry to the new avant-garde generation—Breton, Aragon, Soupault. The list of those who frequented, stopped by, or had subscriptions to Monnier’s bookstore reads like an anthology of world literature: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, Valery Larbaud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Monnier’s shop was at once a publishing house, a distribution network for rare and avant-garde

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publications, and the place where avant-garde writers met, read their work, and discussed the latest literary questions. Starting in 1919, Monnier also distributed Littérature, the magazine of the emergent surrealist group represented in the beginning by Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault. Monnier’s and Beach’s bookstores brought together all the circuits of the intellectual market: the editorial circuit, the translation circuit, the marketing circuit, and the distribution circuit, so they represented ideal venues where a newcomer could gain social capital. The future surrealists were no exception. Renowned especially for having taken up the difficult task, together with Beach, of publishing Joyce’s Ulysses, Monnier had been greatly influenced by the views and cultural politics of her close friend Valery Larbaud, who is one of the key names in the development of world literature in interwar Paris; Pascale Casanova relies on Larbaud when she accounts for Paris as world literary capital in her World Republic of Letters. In the first issue of Monnier’s magazine Navire d’argent, Larbaud published his article “Paris de France,” where he defines what it means to be French and Parisian, namely to love culture and freedom—a definition that stands against all parochial definitions of what is the national and the local: “one is Parisian to the degree that one contributes to the material activity and to the spiritual power of Paris . . . fraternally welcoming the Parisians born outside of France, that is to say, the foreigners like Walt Whitman who have been and are still able to contribute to the material activity of Paris and to its spiritual power” (Larbaud, “Paris de France”). Monnier herself had a major world literature project: she worked for many years putting together a bibliography of ancient and foreign authors to introduce to the French public. “I am going to give you my catalog devoted to ancient and foreign writers . . . My ambition is to help you acquire an idea of the world that is as living, as complete as possible” (The Very Rich Hours 151). La Maison des Amis des Livres was a place where young people, young poets of the petite bourgeoisie, with little economic capital, could encounter the latest contemporary literature. By offering subscriptions, Monnier could bring together a lively group of newcomers who wouldn’t be able to afford the books but who could pay for the subscription (Murat 70). Her bookstore also functioned as a library for the avant-garde poets; it was there that Breton and Aragon read extensively before forming the surrealist group. Monnier’s holdings included many rare avant-garde magazines, which she circulated among her readers even if she didn’t always find them to her own taste. It is here that the future surrealists could read the Dada magazines, Pierre Reverdy’s Nord-Sud,

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and Paul Fort’s Vers et prose, in which Valéry had published his Soirée avec Monsieur Teste, one of the landmarks of surrealism. One outcome of these two cultural institutions was the networking of intellectual groups through literary magazines, which Adrienne Monnier was almost always involved in publishing: she began with Le Navire d’argent, then continued with Commerce, both of them “French in language . . . international in spirit” (McDougall, in Monnier 56). She worked as the administrator of Mesures, a magazine published between 1935 and 1940 in which the surrealists were published next to Borges and Nabokov. In 1937, Monnier left Mesures and started her own review, Gazette des Amis des Livres. Similarly, André Breton would construct the surrealist project mainly through literary magazines. In fact, the history of surrealism as Breton understood it can be traced back through the magazines he published: Littérature (March 1919–June 1924), La Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929), Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (July 1930–May 1933), Minotaure (1933–1939), and VVV (1942–1944). The literary magazine became one of the most successful strategies for the self-legitimation of a group or movement in the aftermath of World War I. It had the advantage of circulating through the networks of other peers, and of always being anchored in the present moment, thus having an immediate impact on its audience. Among the many types of intellectuals and generations of writers and artists who frequented Monnier’s institution were the future members of the surrealist group. As early as 1915, Breton appears at Monnier’s in a photograph with Theodore Fraenkel, wearing his army uniform, which makes Laure Murat interpret Monnier’s bookstore as “un foyer d’avantgarde” and, even more interestingly, as the birthplace of surrealism: “The evidence is compelling: surrealism was born in the Odéon neighborhood” (36). It was Breton who brought Valéry and Apollinaire to Monnier’s. Years later, Breton remembered her bookshop as the major literary space for newly percolating ideas, and also, in Valéry’s case, as a space for consecration: “Adrienne Monnier knew how to turn her bookshop into the most attractive foyer of ideas of that period. The fine grain she added to the discussions, the chances she gave to the young and even to the exciting partiality of tastes: she didn’t lack trump cards in her game . . . Valéry . . . all his reputation and unprecedented official successes started there” (Breton, Entretiens 44). From the very beginning, Breton was the absolute leader of the trio he formed with Aragon and Soupault—though both Aragon and Soupault had already had their literary debuts, it was Breton who had the most connections. For all

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his scorn for ordinary economic capital, Breton was very much aware of the necessity of gaining social capital: he had all the right relations in the literary world and knew how to make others talk about him, how to gain publicity (Polizzotti 70–81), as when in 1918 he met and began cultivating Jean Paulhan, one of the leading figures at Gallimard and La Nouvelle Revue Française, famous for his translations from Madagascan poetry. The NRF was one of two magazines that competed to dominate the Parisian literary scene. Whereas the older generation was reproducing in the NRF the symbolist and realist tendencies in poetry and fiction that had also existed before the war, Littérature was the first magazine edited by the young Breton, Soupault, and Aragon in 1919–1924; it began in association with Tristan Tzara and came to be looked on as the French version of Dadaism. The title, suggested by Paul Valéry, back then Breton’s mentor, parodies the last verse of Verlaine’s L’art poétique: “et tous le reste est littérature.” Even Proust, on whose proofs for Gallimard Breton himself worked at the time, wrote a twelve-page letter to Soupault congratulating the editors for their “audacity.” The surrealists frequented Monnier especially prior to their becoming a formalized group in 1924. She distributed their magazine Littérature and also their other magazines, even though she wasn’t a devotee of surrealism and had mixed feelings about Breton. When Breton, Aragon, and Soupault founded Littérature in March 1919, Monnier notes that the rising generation of poets was under Valéry’s leadership—“Valéry was its godfather” (19). From March 1922, when Breton decides to break with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaist experiments, Littérature is directed only by Breton and Soupault and, starting with the fourth issue, only by Breton until 1924. Disappointed by Valéry’s turning to classicism and academicism through his return to alexandrines in La Jeune Parque and through his acceptance of the chair in the Académie Française left empty after Anatole France’s death, Breton breaks from his past and founds surrealism. With his renowned intransigence, Breton distinguished between “ideological friendship” and “affective friendship” and valorized the former, even if it would pain him to excommunicate close friends such as Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos on ethical and ideological grounds. This is the aspect emphasized by most scholars who have dealt with the history of surrealism, including the pathbreaking work of Anna Balakian and Mary Ann Caws, and more recently Mark Polizzotti, Breton’s most thorough biographer. However, looked at through a sociological lens, what was in part an ideological battle unfolds even more as a

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story of divergent market strategies, socially conditioned as well as personally chosen. Breton’s idealism could be defended as long as his finances, though poor, were at least stable, allowing him to criticize friends like Aragon, Desnos, Man Ray, and Péret for turning to money-making ventures in journalism and pornography that ran counter to their anti-bourgeois position. For Breton, the option to pursue a literary career invested in the symbolic quality of the game was conditioned in the early 1920s by his first marriage to Simone Kahn, whose wealthy Jewish parents (involved in the rubber business in Peru) helped the young couple survive, and thus allowed Breton to pursue his literary projects. Having dropped out of medical school, Breton remained without any formal professional qualifications. Partly, his dedication to the surrealist project through a lifetime spent in publishing surrealist magazines, and identifying new writers, poets, and artists who could reproduce the surrealist project was determined by the need to build for himself a professional career to compensate for lacking a university degree. It was at Adrienne Monnier’s that the Valéry–Breton relationship saw its climax and inevitable break, which also led to the break between Breton and Monnier. Whereas Breton complained to Monnier about La Jeune Parque, rejecting it for its classicism, Monnier wrote that she “was struck by its drama” (Monnier 87). Without being openly at odds, their relationship cooled considerably after this point, partly through Breton’s perception of Monnier as a reactionary, but also because of a different cultural orientation: Monnier’s and Beach’s tastes were oriented toward the modern, without necessarily approving of Breton’s avantgardism. Their break was marked by Breton’s publishing La Revue surréaliste and then in 1925 by Monnier’s publishing her Le Navire d’argent, from which she explicitly excluded the surrealists. As she wrote to Valéry: Here are the companions of our first voyages: Claudel, Duhamel, Chennevière, Giraudoux, Larbaud, Morand, Romains. This is all for the time being. And there will never be surrealists. A definite yes to that. Murat 39

Two years later, Monnier expressed her rejection of the surrealists in a letter to Jean Paulhan, who briefly became Breton’s new mentor. Her major problems are the surrealists’ political stance and Breton’s maniacal and despotic leadership: “You are right, one has to separate their works (when they are good, they rarely

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reflect their theory) from their politics . . . nothing will bring them to reason; except for Breton, of course, who doesn’t have any and for this very reason is intransigent, but if he were alone on this position, I dare say he wouldn’t go too far” (Murat 40 n.1). In reply, Paulhan dismisses Breton’s surrealist public “acts,” which only serve to attract publicity, but appreciates his books: Breton is crazy, but he has sensible disciples who obey him . . . if there is an absurd attitude in all this it’s that of Martin du Gard, who treats the surrealists as if they were geniuses . . . it’s that of the journalists who take up Breton’s totally disgusting insults, and don’t mention his books, which are good . . . it’s that of Valéry, who forgives their insulting letters. Murat 40 n.1

Breton kept a distance from Valéry, even if he always kept him close to his heart and to the surrealist project: “Nothing could withstand the disappointment, the disillusionment of seeing him suddenly contradicting his attitude, publishing new verses, modifying (sometimes awkwardly) his previous ones, trying—but vainly—to bring M. Teste back to life . . . I chose the day he entered the French Academy to unburden myself of his letters, which a bookseller longed to have” (Breton, Entretiens 25). After their ideological separation, Breton allowed that “the fact remains that I learned a lot from Valéry . . . I owe him the constant care characteristic of some high disciplines. As long as some certain fundamental requirements were kept, he allowed one full liberty. He used to tell me: ‘I am not at all anxious to disseminate my ideas. Proselytizing is the farthest thing from me’ ” (25). And yet Breton had a great sense of sociability in the cultural field. He maintained a wise balance between the connection with the influential Nouvelle Revue Française where André Gide and the Nobel Laureate Anatole France were publishing, and generally with the agents and cultural institutions that had the power to legitimize him and his new movement. The group became known through the “Littérature Collection” issued by the Surrealists’ publishing house Au Sans Pareil. This collection debuted with Rimbaud’s previously unpublished poem “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie” and continued in the following months to publish the surrealists’ poetry: Aragon, Blaise Cendrars, Philippe Soupault. In the interwar editorial market, a new position was possible for the surrealists through the rise of bibliophile editors and publishing houses, which produced books that also functioned as art products (Bandier 27). Two new publishing

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houses that would invest for the long term without immediate profits were Lucien Kra’s Sagittaire-Kra and René Hilsum’s Au Sans Pareil. This enabled the surrealists to develop a new mechanism of self-legitimation: because the stake of the game was the group strategy, they could be the authors, editors, publishers, and readers of their own books. Initially, Littérature was distributed through Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore, but after quarrelling with Monnier over Valéry and Claudel, Breton moved his Littérature to René Hilsum’s avant-garde publishing house, thus leaving the best circuit of distribution in Paris—Monnier’s bookstore—for an avantgarde circuit with a more restricted and exclusivist audience. In 1920, they started a “Dada Collection,” but the title that made Au Sans Pareil famous was Breton’s and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques (1920), which came to be cited by Breton as the first example of automatic writing. In the series of interviews with Parinaud, Breton expressed regret at having lost some friends on the way; some left him, others he drove away, but it was always in the name of defending the stakes of the game—l’enjeu, a word Breton uses in the same way as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Breton presents his audience with a moving account of losing very close friends like Aragon, Eluard, and Soupault, friends who were and remained very dear to him. Breton represents himself as a true knight for keeping this moral stance throughout a lifetime, always true to himself and never betraying his ideals: “It is true that I had to separate myself from some of them who were dear to me, that others left me, and their memory haunted me for a long time, still haunts me sometimes, and I am not hiding that each time a wound reopens. But I believe it was necessary if we wanted to save the initial stake, and nothing can be gained without this price” (Entretiens 216). Perhaps the most perceptive portrait of Breton in the 1920s, when surrealism was still only a dream, comes in retrospect from Adrienne Monnier’s FranceAmérique (1946). Like all of Breton’s closest friends, Monnier describes him as difficult to deal with: “I really believe that we were never in agreement. Even on the subjects where we should have come to an understanding—Novalis, Rimbaud, occultism—he had exclusive views that bewildered me completely. He was much more ‘advanced’ than I” (86–7). Monnier describes Breton as beautiful as an archangel, but one who is always serious and never smiles. “Archangels have many tasks: people to banish from paradise, dragons to slay” (88). Together once with Apollinaire at Monnier’s, Breton looks haunted and haunting in the presence of his master: “Breton standing, his back against the wall, his look

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fixed and panic, seeing not the man, but the Invisible, the black god whose command he must receive” (89). Written in 1946, Monnier’s text is strikingly prophetic of Breton’s 1947 addition to Arcane 17, where he talks of Osiris, the black god. Monnier sees a very sensual, sexual Breton, inclined to the darkest side of the psyche: Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Breton’s face was the heavy and excessively fleshy mouth. Its lower lip, whose development was almost abnormal, revealed . . . a strong sensuality governed by the sexual element; but the firmness of that mouth and its delineation, which was rigorous even in excess, indicated a very self-possessed person who would combine duty and pleasure in a singular fashion, or rather would make them overlap. . . . And yet what charm and what authority that young man had! His friends later on all submitted to his influence. Jacques Prévert has noted that they loved him like a woman. He really had what Freud would call the libidinous power of the leader. I felt it, I too, but I only took more care to defend myself from it. 89–90

Even so, Monnier maintained a high esteem and affection for him: “Breton can sleep peacefully, there will always be a room for him in the Hotel of the Great Men” (455). After his lonely childhood, Breton grew to love being surrounded by people. Soupault remembers Breton as a solitary man who couldn’t live alone. Despite attempts in 1924 by different groups (Francis Picabia, Yvan Goll) to appropriate the concept of “surrealism,” it was Breton who won the battle; his name is inextricably bound to the story of surrealism. Breton’s inquisitorial and despotic character, remarked on by both his friends and his enemies, his famous excommunications on moral and ideological grounds throughout a lifetime, gave lasting currency to the nickname that his challenger Yvan Goll both bestowed and tried to deny him—The Pope of Surrealism. “Mr. Breton, get used to it. You will never be the Pope of Surrealism . . . Surrealism belongs to everyone and will not be monopolized” (8).

The world comes to Paris It was the growing internationalism of Paris that soon allowed surrealism to extend beyond a small group of French intellectuals and truly bring the world to “tout le monde.” The aftermath of World War I, with the fall of imperialist

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ideologies and of trust in Western philosophical concepts, opened the possibility of an antinationalist, socialist, internationalist, anticolonial position for ethically and socially engaged intellectuals. The social field in France was changing dramatically on three different levels: the university curriculum restructured on modern letters rather than the Classics, the increasing enrollment in the Humanities and social sciences over the more traditional disciplines of law and medicine, and the rising of a new position available for intellectuals, who now have an oppositional social and an ethical commitment (Bandier 67), a position inaugurated by Zola through the part he played in the Dreyfus Affair. Students trained in law and medicine and coming from the upper bourgeoisie were more receptive to traditional literature and less open to the revolutionizing of genres and forms as the surrealists proposed them. This public would impose a dominant form of culture—conservative, nationalist, and Catholic. Against them, the rising public trained in modern letters would propose a modern culture, antinationalist, anti-Catholic, international, and opened out to the world; “the presence of numerous foreign writers or artists, especially in Paris, with whom the new generations of the literary field, trained in foreign modern languages, have close relations, creates the conditions of a sociability that facilitates the openness to other cultures and privileges the translation or distribution of works produced in other cultural contexts” (Bandier 202). Paris in the 1920s allowed for a cultural cosmopolitanism that provided the necessary context for the birth of an anti-Parisian, anti-French, antinationalist movement like surrealism (Trebitsch 356–8). The cosmopolitanism of the Parisian intellectual milieu was harshly criticized by the right-oriented press, which viewed it as antipatriotic and considered it to be a threat to European enlightenment values and the Greco-Roman legacy inbuilt in the French national identity (Bandier 203). This only strengthened surrealism’s leftist revolutionary position, a position that was beginning to have all the more representatives in the intellectual milieu, thanks to the rising of the petite bourgeoisie to occupy positions in politics and in the educational system. The wave of immigrants increased in France between 1924 and 1927. The most numerous are the Belgians, the Italians, and the Russians, followed by the Swiss, the British, and the Spanish. Norbert Bandier represents interwar Paris as the best cultural center for immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia, especially artists and writers. With the civil war in Russia, the rising National Socialist Party in Germany and fascism in Italy, and the ancient capital of the

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Austro-Hungarian Empire torn apart, the ideal place seems to be Paris. Across the Atlantic, the combination of Prohibition and of rising anti-Semitism in the United States pushed many American artists and writers towards the more morally relaxed Paris. During the economic crisis of 1919–1926, the French currency lost ground, making it economically advantageous for foreigners to settle there. When Sylvia Beach met Adrienne Monnier, she expressed the wish to open a similar bookstore in New York, through which she could introduce modern European literature to the American audience, but she ended up opening Shakespeare & Co. in Paris because the rent was more affordable. Altogether, as Bandier says, Paris in the 1920s and 1930s became “a market with no external competition” (204). The most numerous communities of émigré artists and writers in interwar Paris were the Germans, the Russians, and the North Americans, clustering in the symbolic center Montparnasse (Bandier 204–5). They can roughly be split into two communities: the Slavs, grouped around La Rotonde, and the Americans, around the Dome. In his Autoportrait, Man Ray says that “It was at Montparnasse . . . that I truly found myself at the center of a cosmopolitan world” (109–10). Paul Morand in Lettres de Paris writes that “Never has Paris seen such an influx. The number of foreigners has doubled in two years . . . The Russians are everywhere” (52). The surrealist Philippe Soupault, director of the international magazine La revue européene published by Kra, notes the rich milieu of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s: this, he writes, is very favorable for the translation and circulation of authors from all over the world, and enables French writers to collaborate on American periodicals issued in Paris (Mémoires de l’Oubli 138). The world had come to Paris, enabling surrealism to define itself within an international milieu when it was still the plaything of a small circle centered on the Left Bank. But to reach beyond Paris, surrealism would need to reinvent itself—its techniques, its poetics, its membership, and its network. Breton and his allies achieved this through a growing international outreach, grounded in the theory and practice of the eminently translatable surrealist object.

From automatic writing to the surrealist object The concept of automatic writing has remained inextricably associated with surrealism. The concept seemed radically new and certainly shocked the Parisian

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audience when they were first able to read about it. The definition of automatic writing and the story of how it came to be coined as the surrealist practice par excellence are provided in what remains, perhaps, André Breton’s most often-quoted text: the first manifesto of surrealism from 1924. Written by Breton and supported by the group whose names appeared in the manifesto— Aragon, Crevel, Desnos, Eluard, and Soupault, to name just the most important ones—the text inaugurates the radical and pioneering age of surrealism as it developed in the 1920s after a period of three years spent flirting with Dada in the pages of the magazine Littérature. Tired of being in the shadow of his former masters—Valéry, Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara—Breton wanted a more radical and revolutionary form of poetry and a more productive and serious form of creation than the Dada games that ended at best in happenings and circus performances. The major influences that can be identified in Breton’s text are Freud’s psychoanalytical method of dream interpretation, the playful automatism of Dadaist poetics (where to create a poem all it took was a newspaper and a pair of scissors), and Gérard de Nerval’s supernaturalism, which stood for a liminal state of the mind, between reverie and sleep, in which the writer could create something of which he didn’t have full control; he also adapted Apollinaire’s coinage in describing his 1903 The Breasts of Tiresias as “a surrealist play.” In defining surrealism, Breton was only legitimizing a new method of creation that he’d discovered back in 1919 when, together with the poet Philippe Soupault, he produced a text that the manifesto calls automatic writing: Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields). Published in Littérature in 1919 and then in book form in 1920, Les Champs magnétiques was a collaborative poetic prose text that the two friends apparently produced as if in a trance, without the control of reason, each writing a sentence or a paragraph in the continuation of what the other had written, without reading it and trying to put on paper the pure flow of thoughts. Using the concept of the magnetic field from physics, Breton wanted to represent the magnetism of the subconscious of men who are brought together by structural affinities. This text enabled Breton to claim paternity over the newly devised artistic and literary practice—surrealism—that soon became the object of dispute between two avant-garde groups in Paris in 1924, one led by the poet Yvan Goll and the other by the former Dadaist Francis Picabia. With the specific linguistic violence of the avant-garde and with the legitimacy of his practice that had preceded the theory, André Breton links his name to the definition of

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surrealism, over which he asserts an absolute monopoly: “Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all” (Breton, Manifestoes 25–6). Breton defines surrealism in the manifesto with all the scientific rigor of a dictionary entry: SURREALISM , n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. 26

This definition will subsequently not only be quoted by scholarship, but will be reproduced in actual dictionaries of literary terms. As Norbert Bandier has shown, the first manifesto dates from the first age of surrealism, when the movement consisted mainly of Parisian-based poets from the bourgeoisie. Himself a poet, Breton wanted above all to legitimize his own practice and at the same time to oppose the dominant form of practice in the French literary field of the 1920s: the realistic novel. Despite the emphasis on poetry as surrealist practice, Breton left room for other manifestations— “verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner”—that would be more fully explored by surrealism in its second age, which began in 1929 with the second manifesto. By a turn to the irrational and the subconscious through the practice of dreams and dream-like writings, Breton was simultaneously rejecting the realistic novel and redefining poetry away from both formal and moral conventions. Hence the form or anti-form that the manifesto theorized and then many of Breton’s texts put into practice was a hybrid genre, at the crossroads of the logic of poetry and the visionary force of spiritualist mediums, halfway between autobiography and prophetic text, where the prophetic power meant the possibility to see one’s future in the oracular signs of present reality. The first manifesto set out the major structural and theoretical pillars of surrealism: it offered a definition, examples, representatives, and a long list of predecessors that included Dante and “in his finer moments Shakespeare,” then Lautréamont, Swift, Sade, Hugo, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Jarry, and others. But the manifesto also contains something that most scholars have neglected: just before defining surrealism, Breton inserts a highly

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autobiographical passage, which tells the story of how the first “surrealist sentence” came to him: One evening, therefore, before I fell asleep, I perceived, so clearly articulated that it was impossible to change a word, but nonetheless removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window. I took cursory note of it and prepared to move on when its organic character caught my attention. Actually, this phrase astonished me: unfortunately I cannot remember it exactly, but it was something like: ‘There is a man cut in two by the window,’ but there could be no question of ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the faint visual image of a man walking cut halfway up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Manifestoes 21–2, Breton’s emphasis

This story of origin is perhaps better than Breton’s formal definition of automatism/surrealism. It has all the ingredients for us to understand what the surrealist practice is all about. Extemporized in a half-conscious state, just before going to sleep, the surrealist phrase presents itself as given, apparently haphazardly, with no connection to any train of thought. It doesn’t even seem to be a product of the human mind, but rather a preexistent phrase that the self recognizes because it externalizes an inner reality. The phrase materializes as a body that knocks on the door, and thus a whole imagery of doors, locks, and keys that would become hallmarks of surrealism flows in. This phrase is remembered more as an image than a linguistic body, which gives way to a footnote that describes the manner in which Breton took down the phrase, like a painter who draws a pre-established contour: “With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines. Here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing. I could thus depict a tree, a wave, a musical instrument, all manner of things of which I am presently incapable of providing even the roughest sketch” (21n., Breton’s emphasis). The preexisting nature of the surrealist object, the dictation by the subconscious in the absence of the control of reason, the creator as a mere midwife, who had a predecessor in Leonardo da Vinci, who advised his students to paint by observing the figures and images outlined by the cracks in a wall—all these are necessary conditions for the surrealist object to become manifest. What initially seems the result of mere chance turns out to be a predefined trajectory that enables necessity to find its object of desire. This is why many of the surrealist

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writings will be about finding the woman of one’s dreams through a maze of random streets, where the unexpected and the marvelous lurk. All this is epitomized in the imagery Breton uses to describe the adventure through the mind’s maze in search of the surrealist phrase: “I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something ‘never seen’ ” (21n.). All the major concepts associated with surrealism in the next decades are hinted at here: objective chance (“a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere”), the random encounter (“upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression”), convulsive beauty (“something ‘never seen’”). But above all, the sentence itself (“There is a man cut in two by the window”) is such a perfect metaphor—bringing together the two sides of man that have been in strong opposition till then: consciousness and the unconscious, the I and the self—that it is hard to avoid the sense that Breton has rationally devised it for the purpose. Automatic writing is a physical impossibility: if we choose to give free flow to our thoughts in the absence of the control of reason, as Breton advises, we’ve still made a rational choice, which is perhaps the most renowned aporia of surrealism. Breton himself was aware of this, and wrote in 1932 to Roland de Renéville that “We have never claimed that any surrealist text was a perfect example of verbal automatism. It must be admitted that certain frictions can be discerned even in the least ‘directed’ texts . . . A minimum of direction subsists, usually through the ‘arrangement of the text into a poem’” (Raymond 259). Anna Balakian has observed that “the Dadaists had also practiced automatic writing” (André Breton 61), and she contrasts and compares automatic writing to Proust’s involuntary memory (13). But there were English as well as French predecessors, particularly Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. Yet whereas the first manifesto openly lists Swift among the precursors of surrealism (“Swift is surrealist in malice,” Breton, Manifestoes 26), it remains silent on Lewis Carroll. As Adrienne Monnier has already pointed out (The Very Rich Hours 180), automatic writing had an early predecessor in Swift’s ironic “Mechanical Operation,” practiced by those writers who still believed that a god or some transcendent force speaks through the voice of the writer. As Swift described this operation in Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, mechanical writing was meant to liberate the senses from the control of reason and thus give way to imagination. Enlightenment writer that he was, Swift was being doubly ironic: he called the “mechanical operation” the “Trade” “performed by

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our British Workmen” (127) and he included this practice in the category of enthousiasmos, Greek for “inspiration by the gods”: “The Practitioners of this famous Art, proceed in general upon the following Fundamental; That, the Corruption of the Senses is the Generation of the Spirit: Because the Senses in Men are so many Avenues to the Fort of Reason, which in this Operation is wholly block’d up” (Swift 128). Swift is thus strongly present in Breton’s definition of automatism, which is “[d]ictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason” (my emphasis) and can be accessed through Rimbaud’s “derangement of all senses.” Five years after Breton collaborated with Soupault on Les Champs magnétiques, he described the method they’d used and how the sentences came to him by themselves. In 1887, twenty-five years after writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll had similarly described how the story of Alice came to him: Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream—the three little maidens and I—and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit—whether it were at times when the narrator was “i’ the vein” and fancies unsought came crowding back upon him . . . yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died like summer midges each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without having the least idea what was to happen afterwards . . . In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication: but (this may interest some readers of “Alice” to know) every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue, came of itself. “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” author’s emphasis

“Down the rabbit-hole without having the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” Breton, like Alice, plunged into the maze of the lines he drew on paper, “which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere.” Carroll confessed that the initial idea “came of itself ” and then attracted, like a magnetic field, other new ideas and sentences, “which seem to grow of themselves.” Once Breton takes down in words what was initially an image, new sentences come up by themselves, without the control of reason: I realized that I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it this capacity than it was in fact succeeded by a whole

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series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me. Manifestoes 22

In “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Carroll similarly confessed that such an idea comes at night, or “on a lonely winter walk,” “but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself. I cannot set invention going like a clock, by any voluntary winding up; nor do I believe that any original writing . . . was ever so produced” (294, Carroll’s emphasis). Carroll’s use of the word “original” here is all the more striking by comparison with Breton’s automatic writing, which will come to overlap with Lautréamont’s plagiarism and Tzara’s automatic reproduction of a preexisting discourse. A totally new notion of originality was to be devised by the surrealists, one that played against the Romantics agenda of the individual creative genius. Not only the Alice books came out of what retrospectively looks like a protosurrealist poetics, but also The Hunting of the Snark, which caught the attention of Louis Aragon, who translated it into French in 1929 as La chasse au Snark. In the same text on the origin of his best writings, Carroll confesses that the final line of the poem simply came to him, and then, as in Breton’s case, it attracted the rest of the poem, which unfolded backward from the first-discovered last line: I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse—one solitary line—“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, some time afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together. 295

It is more than surreal that this first proto-surrealist sentence is used for the most surrealist of Caroll’s poems, which has Alfred Jarry’s black and absurd humor and the magical force of Breton’s poetic texture. Like the surrealists, Carroll pushed forward the boundaries of language, moving from the arbitrariness lying at the basis of the modern theories of language and going back to the affective nature of the linguistic sign. For Breton, language was motivated by the desire and necessity that would materialize in the surrealist object and in the form of jokes, puns, and

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riddles. Little wonder that Carroll’s Alice was to be a constant turning point, either implied or directly named, for the surrealists through their quest for the marvelous, the logic of childhood, dreams, poetry, or love that turns reality into a maze and a search for identity. But it is symbolically appropriate that Breton’s automatic writing is so intimately related to Carroll’s poetics from the very beginning in surrealism’s foundational text. In practice, automatic writing resembles an extended metaphor, bringing together two illogically related notions, images, or realities to provoke in the reader a shock that would bring about the manifestation of the marvelous. In defining it, Breton refers to two French poets: Lautréamont and Pierre Reverdy, quoting the latter in relation to the surrealist image: “The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality” (Reverdy, quoted in Breton, Manifestoes 20). For Breton, the best illustration of the surrealist image obtained through automatism was to remain Lautréamont’s dictum: “as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Here we have automatism in a nutshell: two disconnected realities—the umbrella and the sewing machine—brought together by chance in a de-familiarizing context (i.e., the dissecting table). As Anna Balakian has remarked of Les Champs magnétiques, despite the expectations created by the “absence of reason,” the book had an intact syntax, like the rest of the surrealist writings. “Breton and Soupault’s syntax is perfect; whatever ambiguity there is in the meaning is caused not by a grammatical lapse but by the dislocation of objects, events, and sensations” (Balakian, André Breton 63). Their half-autobiographical, half-fictional poetic prose text describes a visionary rambling through an oneiric Paris that sets the tone and imagery of almost all subsequent surrealist writings: long walks on unfamiliar streets in invisible cities in search of a phantasmal apparition that is more often than not a woman, a quest for the marvelous exploding at every corner, a reality which waits for the blind eyes of the dreamer to uncover its hidden message. Endless corridors, locked doors, revolving doors, keys, and magic signs occur at every step in this universe made of one’s favorite books. However, they are rendered in a perfectly intelligible language: The marvelous train stations will never again give us shelter . . . With our itineraries interrupted and all our travels ended, can we truly confess them? The lush landscapes have left a bitter taste on our lips. Our prison is built out of

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beloved books, but we can’t escape ourselves, thanks to all these passionate scents that slumber within us. Our habits, delirious mistresses, call out to us; these are spasmodic neighings, even heavier silences. Breton and Soupault, Les Champs 14–17

This passage should clear up all doubt as to whether reason was involved or not in the process. The distance between the theory of automatic writing and its practice is illustrated by the simple fact that Soupault remembered having worked with Breton for two weeks to produce the text, whereas Breton remembered that it took two months (Balakian 63); Mark Polizzotti has observed that the manuscript shows the clear intervention of Breton going back and forth through it. Yet scholars of surrealism have often been tempted to analyze Breton’s writings through this concept. Even though Balakian speaks of “the heavily worked-over poems of Clair de terre of which the many variants and revisions dispel any notion one might have had that they were the product of automatic writing” (Balakian viii), she uses the concept to illustrate Breton’s writings in prose (61). For Nadja, Les Vases communicants and Amour fou, Balakian devises the concept of “analogical prose,” which is a variant of automatic writing that Breton turned to in his more mature writings. Breton himself actually had to drop the original concept of automatic writing once he saw that the collective nature of its practice led nowhere. He then turned to a specific type of metaphor as a poetic device that borrows its force from visionary and esoteric texts, and which he came to theorize in his 1948 essay “Ascendant Sign.” Even if the date is rather late, Breton in fact theorizes a poetic practice that he used throughout his lifetime, either in the manifestoes or in his poetry and poetic prose. Automatic writing was the youth of surrealism, the period opened by the first manifesto and featuring collective surrealist activities: the surrealist games and the Bureau of Surrealist Research. There anyone could come in and share his or her surrealist experiences and dreams and could participate in the group’s séances, where Robert Desnos fell into a trance during which he produced a flow of surrealist lines that were diligently recorded by Simone Kahn, Breton’s first wife. But these collective practices weren’t productive, and for the same reason that he’d abandoned Dada a few years before, Breton turned to his own individual writing. The youth of surrealism, the only period for which the concept of automatic writing would function, lasts only until 1929, when Breton will publish the second manifesto of surrealism.

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“Ascendant Sign” (“Signe ascendant”) published in Néon 1 on January 1, 1948, remains one of Breton’s best theoretical texts on the surrealist practice of the image, in poetry or other media. In astrology, “Ascendant Sign” designates the planet that governs someone’s life after age 30 and becomes more important than the solar sign (the planet that governs the sign). For Breton, the “ascendant sign” is the poetic correspondent to the surrealist game l’un dans l’autre, a game during which someone had to describe the object he had in mind in terms as unrelated as possible to the real object; the group then had to guess what that object was. For instance, someone might describe fire as if it were a woman’s body. Through this game, Breton was giving a more playful use to Reverdy’s image made of distant realities, and was developing a new type of poetic awareness in his group. The ascendant sign is the visual or linguistic sign that points upwards, the sign through which one can ascend to a super-reality. This three-page text carves the surrealist practice of poetry out of worldwide materials, with references that range from the Zohar to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the biblical Song of Songs to the French modernist poets who are landmarks for surrealism (Baudelaire) and to surrealism’s recent discoveries (the utopianist Charles Fourier); the theosophy of Swedenborg, the godfathers of surrealism (Reverdy and Apollinaire), and the surrealists who testify to the worldwide spread of surrealism: Benjamin Péret and Malcom de Chazal, one of the colonial surrealists from Mauritius. What all these texts share is the metaphorical turn of analogy and the major surrealist preoccupations with mad love as a way to ascend to the surreal; sexuality and eroticism; the uniting of contraries (a principle borrowed from the esoteric sciences); the world as a giant book waiting to be deciphered; de-familiarizing the female body; mapping the landscape of the lover’s body and the world of spirits. As Breton would put it in his 1948 poem “Sur la route de San Romano:” La poésie se fait dans un lit comme l’amour Ses draps défaits sont l’aurore des choses La poésie se fait dans les bois [Poetry is made in a bed like love Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things Poetry is made in the woods] trans. by Mary Ann Caws, The Yale Anthology 147

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The epigraph to “Signe ascendant,” taken from the Zohar, invites us to read the surrealist metaphors through the mechanism of analogy: “The desire that the female feels for the male resembles the mists rising from the earth toward the sky. Once they have gathered into clouds, it is the sky that waters the earth” (in Caws, Surrealist Painters 134). The manifesto deploys the mechanism at the heart of the surrealist object: analogy. Far more than a rhetorical device, for Breton analogy is a means to gain intellectual pleasure. “Le désir” is the first word quoted from the Zohar and “le plaisir” opens Breton’s text: “Only on the level of analogy have I ever experienced intellectual pleasure” (Caws 134). If in the early 1920s surrealism’s language was still close to its source in Reverdy, now surrealism is old enough to stand on its own. Thus Breton redefines the surrealist metaphor as a relation between two illogically related objects, where it is the relation that is illogical, not the objects themselves. “For me the only manifest truth in the world is governed by the spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense” (Breton’s emphasis, in Caws 134). Like the ascendant sign, analogy becomes that which goes beyond. Surrealism is now invited to rethink the relation between words and objects through the logic of myth, which would reveal the relation between apparently divergent realities: “an infinitely richer network of relations whose secret, as everything suggests, was known to early mankind” (134). Primitive societies live on the assumption that everything in the world is connected to another reality, which makes it significant, and the mechanism of analogy can somehow help us recuperate that logic: “The primordial links are broken. It is my contention that those links can only be restored, albeit fleetingly, through the force of analogy” (134). The poet whom he uses to illustrate this idea is Malcolm de Chazal: “The white of the eye is a bedframe. The iris is a base for the mattress of the pupil on which a ghost of ourselves rests while we are dreaming” (134). Breton privileged simile over metaphor, because it is in the word “as” (“comme”) that all the imagination of the world resides: “Whether it is stated or implied, as is the most exhilarating word at our command. It gives free rein to human imagination” (135). This mechanism of comparison is based on analogy: “The trigger of analogy is what fascinates us: nothing else will give us access to the motor of the world” (135). To make his claim stronger, Breton concludes by citing a text from the Zen tradition. The great poet Matsuo Basho inverts his disciple’s haiku about a firefly becoming a pepper. Basho simply reverses the direction of the metamorphosis, which plays on the butterfly metamorphosis:

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“A pepper/give it wings/A red firefly” (137). Poetic analogy could successfully replace for Breton the less plausible practice of automatic writing. And it is through the mechanism of poetic analogy that Breton authored some of the most moving love poems in the history of the twentieth century, and created a surreal Paris where every street corner hides an oracular message waiting to be discovered. As Balakian has shown, automatic writing had three different components: “the psychological concept of the liberation of psychic inhibitions, the mathematical one of the coincidences of chance verbal encounters, and the hermetic one of the oracular function of the medium-poet” (André Breton 61). It is this third component that Breton actually practices throughout his writings, which can be grouped largely into three categories: poetry, poetic prose, and critical/theoretical texts. Given the hybrid genre that Breton came to practice, these three categories in fact overlap considerably, though Breton has remained most famous for the visionary and polemical force of his manifestoes and other theoretical and critical writings, including Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme (1934), Position politique du surréalisme (1935), and his Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (1938). His Anthologie de l’humour noir, which features Swift, Carroll, and also Kafka, was printed in 1940, but it was suppressed by the Vichy government and had to wait until 1943 to be bound. Still active after the war in Paris, Breton published a new political essay, La Lampe dans l’horloge (1948), and collected many of his essays and talks in La Clé des champs (1953). The second category of Breton’s texts can be described as poetic prose; it includes a mix of poetry, autobiography, and didactic or polemical discourse, beginning with Les Champs magnétiques (1920) and including the novel that remained his bestseller Nadja (1928). But the epitome of Breton’s surrealist practice in prose remains L’amour fou (1937), the story of meeting his second wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba. During his wartime exile in the United States, Breton turned to the esoteric side of surrealism in Arcane 17 (1944), which included the story of meeting his third wife, Elisa. If Breton’s manifestoes, essays, and narratives are full of poetic devices, his poetry remains the purest genre, not overwhelmed by the theorist or by the leftist intellectual. The irony is that Breton put least trust in his volumes of poetry, yet they give an incredible testimony to what surrealist poetry is all about: a quest for the marvelous through a constantly renewable language, and the search for chance verbal encounters that can bring about the object of desire in the next woman who is going to appear in his life. But above all, the logic of poetry is the

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logic of love and the act of writing poetry is the act of lovemaking. This poetics carries through Breton’s six volumes of poetry, from Mont de piété (1919) to Fata Morgana (1941), to which we should add Breton’s esoteric, utopian Ode à Charles Fourier (1947). Breton’s poems give prime examples of the crystallization of the surreal image through the practice of automatic writing. I will look at two poems from different periods that show Breton’s evolving use of his key devices, automatic writing and poetic analogy: “Le Corset Mystère” (1919) and “On me dit que là-bas . . .” (1934). Published in the magazine Littérature, “Le Corset Mystère” is apparently the result of the practice of automatic writing through the Dada use of collage, but on a closer look, it reveals a carefully developed poetic analogy between a city and a woman’s body:

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Caws, The Yale Anthology 136–9

The poetic analogy appears through a rhyme at a distance (Venise—prise) that circles the poem and connects the two terms of the surrealist image: the woman’s waist and the city of Venice. The poetic analogy plays on the Renaissance trope of identifying Venice with Venus, goddess of love and beauty, born like Venice out of the sea. Thus, the anonymous woman with whom the dreamer discovers Paris as if in a palm reading (“Je tiens Paris comme—pour vous dévoiler l’avenir—votre main ouverte”) is taken to a superior level and identified with the goddess, and the poetic analogy functions like an ascendant sign. “On me dit que là-bas . . .” [They tell me that over there], from the 1934 volume L’air de l’eau, pushes the poetic analogy one step further. It displays a more

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refined technique of staging the apparently random order of lines that change from a black beach to the lover’s eyelashes and from winter to spring, creating an uncanny effect. Whereas in the 1919 poem the poetic analogy was produced through the use of semantic devices (the play upon connotation and homonymy), in “On me dit que là-bas . . .” the poetic analogy is revealed on a structural level in the perfectly constructed arrangement of lines: On me dit que là-bas les plages sont noires De la lave allée à la mer Et se déroulent au pied d’un immense pic fumant de neige Sous un second soleil de serins sauvages Quel est donc ce pays lointain Qui semble tirer toute sa lumière de ta vie Il tremble bien réel à la pointe de tes cils Doux à ta carnation comme un linge immatériel Frais sorti de la malle entr’ouverte des âges Derrière toi Lançant ses derniers feux sombres entre tes jambes Le sol du paradis perdu Glace de ténèbres Miroir d’amour Et plus bas vers tes bras qui s’ouvrent À la preuve par le printemps D’après De l’inexistence du mal Tout le pommier en fleur de la mer [They tell me that over there the beaches are black From the lava running to the sea Stretched out at the foot of a great peak smoking with snow Under a second sun of wild canaries So what is this far-off land Seeming to take its light from your life It trembles very real at the tip of your lashes Sweet to your carnation like an intangible linen Freshly pulled from the half-open trunk of the ages Behind you Casting its last sombre fires between your legs The earth of the lost paradise Glass of shadows mirror of love And lower towards your arms opening On the proof by springtime

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature of AFTERWARDS Of evil’s not existing All the flowering appletree of the sea] Caws 143

The poem is built around an imperfect chiasmus: the foot of the great peak is mirrored by the lover’s legs, the second sun corresponds symmetrically to the sun of the lost paradise, and the peak covered in snow is reversed in the ice of the Tenebrae and the mirror of love. The imperfect chiasmus uses the analogy between the lover’s sex and the sun of the lost paradise, which turns winter into spring and closes the poem by taking this “unknown country” back to the myth of Paradise before the fall: “D’après/De l’inexistence du mal/Tout le pommier en fleur de la mer.” This is just what Breton’s ascendant sign can do. From a rhetorical point of view, this poem is far from purely automatic writing. The use of complicated poetic devices like internal rhyme, rhyme at a distance, and the imperfect structural chiasmus show a structuring poetic intelligence very much aware of itself in the act of writing. Despite surrealism’s failure to actually practice automatic writing, the concept had a strong political and polemical force in the French context in 1924. It worked against the new government’s anti-German and anti-Semitic politics through the emphasis it placed on works like those of Novalis and the German romantics, through the use of Freud’s psychoanalysis, and through the association between 1919 and 1922 with Tristan Tzara’s Dadaism, the movement that had been accused in the right-oriented nationalist press in France of being the creation of political enemies like the Germans (Hans Arp, Max Ernst) and financial enemies like the Jews (Tzara himself). Surrealism’s internationalism was reflected both in the group’s membership and in their genealogy of automatic writing. With ancestors as diverse as Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, the Marquis de Sade, and Lewis Carroll, surrealism was arising as an attack on French cultural nationalism, reinforced all the more with the Cartel des Gauches’ coming to power in 1924. A year later, France confronted an economic crisis, which exacerbated the conflict between the nationalists and internationalists. The surrealists found in this political situation a favorable context for reaffirming their avant-garde position on the side of the internationalists (Bandier 231). In 1925, student protests divided the intellectual field between the royalists/nationalists and the socialists/internationalists. In this context, the Communist Party, which hadn’t joined le Cartel des Gauches, increased its numbers because it responded to the social conflicts and thus

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enjoyed an avant-garde position, comparable to the position of the avant-garde poets, represented mainly by the revolutionary surrealists. In May 1925, the Communist Party protested against the participation of the French Army in suppressing a revolt in Morocco led by the rebel leader Abd el-Krim, a position with which the surrealists would associate themselves through Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Age d’or, because it provided a new opportunity for them to theorize and publicize their anticolonial position. The right-oriented press accused the surrealists of being “international” and hence anti-national. Paul Lévy, director of Le Journal littéraire, pointed out the foreign character of the surrealists: too many Germans (Max Ernst, Mathias Lübeck), a Russian (Georges Malkine), and someone with no identifiable identity (Dédé Sunbeam) (Bandier 242). In parallel to this political position-taking, Breton started to integrate painting in the theory of the surrealist project as early as April 1925. Up to that point, surrealism seemed at odds with painting because it contradicted automatic writing and also because painting was too close to the market and hence to commercialization. Yet there were several reasons for including painting among the surrealist means of expression. The 1924 manifesto already mentioned several painters close to the group (Max Ernst, Man Ray, Masson, de Chirico, Miró would soon follow), and painters could help the rather isolated poetry travel and reach a more global audience. Breton himself had a passion for collecting paintings, and a steady attachment to Picasso, de Chirico, and Miró, and he had good connections in the art market, especially through the fashion designer Jacques Doucet, a great collector of rare manuscripts and modern paintings. To these factors should be added Breton’s almost infallible sense of what would be the next symbolic good to make its mark in the cultural field. The process of internationalizing surrealism through the inclusion of the visual arts began in 1924, and by 1929 was already essential for the surrealist practice, yet it played both for and against Breton. He had always envisaged an ethically and existentally engaged movement that defied linguistic, cultural, and political barriers. Directed against French supremacy as the epitome of rational Greco-Roman civilization, surrealism was opened to the world. By traveling to other countries and cultures, it came to embody forms that Breton didn’t approve of, either politically or ethically. Breton legitimized painting as an essential surrealist practice because he wanted his surrealism to travel faster and gain new members beyond France. But he wasn’t always happy with the way things turned out, and the case he felt most strongly about was Salvador Dalí’s.

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On the Road to Establishment: Surrealism in the 1930s

The second manifesto If the 1920s meant conquering a position in the French literary field for surrealism, the 1930s saw the internationalization of this position on a world market that extended beyond literature to encompass also the art market. Whereas the first manifesto responded mainly to national circumstances—the rebirth of French nationalism in the aftermath of the war, France’s imperialist position in colonial politics, and the reaffirmation of bourgeois cultural and political values—the second manifesto appeared in the context of the financial crash on Wall Street on October 24, 1929 that affected the entire world. Reinforced by the influx of American and English aristocrats and magnates who were art collectors, but also by art dealers interested in circulating the most recent avant-garde art products, Paris was more attractive then ever both for writers and artists. By the late 1920s Breton knew that the movement needed new blood to survive, and he sought a stronger internationalist stance that wouldn’t put the emphasis on poetry or automatic writing, but would define surrealism as an ethical attitude that could express itself equally through other media. Having lost some of his early adherents, made new discoveries, and having reconnected with friends from the past (Tristan Tzara), Breton decided in 1929 that it was time to write The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, which he published in the newly established second surrealist magazine, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. If in 1924 the surrealist group was composed mainly of Parisian poets, in 1929 the group that gathered under the sign of the second manifesto was composed of poets and artists coming from the French provinces or from abroad. The Spaniard Luis Buñuel and the Catalan Salvador Dalí, the poet René Char from the small town of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in southern France, the Belgian art dealer 49

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Camille Goemans, the Serbian Marco Ristitch, leader of the surrealist group in Belgrade, and last but not least, the Romanian Jew Tristan Tzara all signed their names on the front page of the first issue of the new magazine, under a group declaration in support of Breton’s second manifesto. The second manifesto didn’t dramatically change the substance of the surrealist practices defined by the first manifesto. It was more a political declaration emphasizing the surrealists’ leftist position grounded in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto and a reinforcement of the imperative to rediscover the irrational, the dream, and sexuality as instruments to fight against the comfortable world of the bourgeoisie. It built on the ambitious task set for surrealism in the beginning of the first manifesto: to solve the major problems of life. Symbolically for its world outreach, surrealism had been defined in 1924 as an encyclopedia entry: ENCYCLOPEDIA . Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. Breton, Manifestoes 26

Helped by Hegelian dialectics, Breton argued in the second manifesto that the surrealist aims at moving beyond the antinomies that shape our representations of the world. The point where these are no longer perceived as opposites is where surrealism steps in: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of 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” (123). The second manifesto was also an attack against all the solid institutions of the Western world: “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion” (128). Even as he renounces religion, Breton sounds like a biblical prophet in referring to the dedication and commitment required by surrealism. The discipline he asks of the others is truly ascetic: This is because unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surrealism presupposes a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be capable. Were there to remain not a single one, from among all those who were the first to measure by its standards

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their chance for significance and their desire for truth, yet would Surrealism continue to live. 129

Lacking the visionary force of the first manifesto, the second manifesto surpasses it in the polemical violence that comes partly from the embitterment of having lost—or discarded—some friends on the way, but also from the utopian desire to bind together the new, more international group through a quasi-religious allegiance. Breton argues that ideology is above individuals, who only serve functions in philosophical or revolutionary movements, which exist independently of them: I do not believe there is any serious problem as far as Surrealism is concerned because it has suffered the loss of this individual or that, however brilliant, and especially in the case of the one who, after he has left the fold, is no longer whole and indicates by his every action that he is desirous of returning to normality. Thus it is that, after having allowed him an incredible amount of time to recover from what we hoped was only a temporary abuse of his critical faculties, I believe that we are now forced to say to Robert Desnos that, as we no longer expect anything whatsoever from him, we have no choice but to free him from any commitments he may have made in the past with us. I must confess that it saddens me to some degree to do this. In contrast to the early traveling companions, whom we have never thought of trying to retain, Desnos played an essential, an unforgettable, role in the evolution of Surrealism. 164–5

If we were to replace “Robert Desnos” with “Salvador Dalí,” we would have a prophecy about the year 1937 for the history of surrealism. The 1930s, which began with a new manifesto, a new magazine, and a restructured group certainly fulfilled that wish. Yet like any fulfilled dream, it was to have its bitter side.

Who is Salvador Dalí? Two major additions to the group in 1929 were the Belgian artist René Magritte, whose paintings had already a high value on the Parisian market, and Breton’s recent discovery, the Catalan Salvador Dalí. Dalí’s addition to the group came at the right time: the 1930s would be the decade when Breton promoted surrealism abroad through talks and translations; it was also a time for theoretical revision. The chance encounter, objective hazard, and the dream as automatic

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practice—concepts devised by Breton in 1924—were reinvented through Dalí’s paranoiac critical method. This fed into the coinage of the theory of the surrealist object, which promoted surrealism on the international market through a practice that blurs the borders between poetry, reality, and the visual arts. As automatic writing had failed to be a valid practice, Dalí’s newly devised paranoiac critical method seemed a desirable alternative. Unlike automatic writing, it could be applied successfully to painting and the visual arts, though it was less easy to apply to poetry or literature. Though Breton was a poet, Dalí was primarily a painter (even if he also wrote poems, essays, plays, and memoirs) who elaborated the method of critical paranoia in 1930 through the articles he published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. If between 1924 and 1929, the surrealists had been involved in collective practices, including games and experimental dream narratives told orally, from 1929 onwards they began producing surrealist objects, which could range from poem-objects like Breton’s to found objects, artistically altered objects, or full-scale installations. The first edition of the second manifesto in book form appeared in 1930, together with the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution that July. For this first issue Dalí wrote an article called “The Rotting Donkey,” where for the first time he defines the paranoiac critical method: “It is through a decidedly paranoid process that it has been possible to obtain a double image: that is to say, the representation of an object which, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely different object, itself also devoid of any kind of deformation or abnormally betraying some arrangement” (Dalí, Oui 116). The double image described by Dalí is the modern heir of the Baroque anamorphosis, in the manner of Giuseppe Archimboldo, painter of the portrait of a librarian made of books and of portraits representing the seasons, made of seasonally symbolic fruits or objects. Like the anamorphosis in painting, Dalí’s double image is obtained through the interpretation of everything that seems fortuitous in the first image as leading to the apparition of the second image, which is a representation of the paranoid’s obsession: “It had been possible to obtain such a double image by virtue of the violence of paranoid thought which has made use, through skill and cunning, of the requisite quantity of pretexts, coincidences, etc., and has so taken advantage of them as to make the second image appear, which then replaces the obsessive idea” (116). Following Archimboldo’s technique of anamorphotic portraits, Dalí reinterpreted one of Vermeer’s most famous paintings, “Girl Reading a Letter at

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an Open Window” as a self-portrait (Figures 2a and 2b). The contour of the girl’s silhouette in the 1938 “The Image Disappears” is reinterpreted as Vermeer’s profile: the curtain becomes his hair, her head becomes his eye, her arm and elbow his nose, and the letter she is holding his moustache. However, Dalí pushed the Baroque anamorphosis far beyond two images, by coining the paranoid critical method as the infinite metamorphosis of images: “The double image (an example of which is the image of a horse which is at the same time an image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoid process, and the existence of another obsessive idea is then enough to make a third image appear (the image of a lion, for example), and so on up to a number of images limited only by the level of the mind’s paranoid capacity” (Oui 16). Looking closer at Vermeer’s moustache pointing upward, we find a third image hidden behind the second: Dalí’s own profile. Throughout the years, Dalí came to paint more such elaborate infinite anamorphoses, the best example being his “Hallucinogenic Toreador” from 1968–1970. The painting mixes the technique of anamorphosis with superimposed images: in a bullfighting arena, the statue of the Venus de Milo appears twenty-eight times in different shapes and angles, but when looked at closely, the ensemble turns into a portrait of the toreador. In 1930, when Dalí was defining his method, he wasn’t trying to compete with the other surrealist activities. Eager to please Breton, he ended “The Rotting Donkey” with a sentence that directly echoed Breton’s second manifesto, where Breton had defined surrealism as aiming at provoking a crisis of consciousness through gratuitous acts that are moral acts: the new Surrealist images will, more and more, take on the forms and colors of demoralization and confusion. The day is not far when a painting will have the value, and the only value, of a simple moral act, and what is more, of a simple gratuitous act . . . The mortal activity of these new images can still, in the same way as other Surrealist activities, contribute to the downfall of reality . . . Idealists without participating in any ideal. The ideal images of Surrealism in the service of the imminent crisis of consciousness, in the service of the Revolution. Oui 118–19

Dalí’s method was more deeply rooted in psychoanalysis than Breton’s automatic writing. Breton had been unsuccessful in interesting Freud in the surrealist activities that claimed his paternity. As Freud wrote to him in December 1932, “Despite the fact that I receive so many testimonies of your and your friends’

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Figure 2a Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (circa 1659).

Figure 2b Salvador Dalí, The Image Disappears (1938) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

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interest in my research, I myself am not in the position to say that I know what is surrealism and what it proposes. Maybe I am not built to understand it, I, who am so far away from art” (“Letter to André Breton” 11). Breton published Freud’s letter with a lot of self-irony in the fifth issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (May 1933). Dalí, however, had the support of the young psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who was part of the surrealist group in the pages of Minotaure, the third surrealist magazine that began its activity in 1933, just when Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution stopped appearing. Almost simultaneously with Breton’s publication of Freud’s rejection, the first issue of Minotaure from June 1, 1933 published Lacan’s article “Le Problème du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoïaques de l’expérience,” which legitimized Dalí’s new method as employed successfully both by the mentally ill and by artistic geniuses. Lacan saw paranoids and poets alike as seeing the same object under different metamorphoses, and in his article he supported the surrealist ideas of transforming the world through the mind’s creative modification of objects, and renewing the arts and literature through the logic of poetry: Speaking about the symbols, we have characterized a fundamental tendency that we defined as “the iterative identification of the object”: the delirium reveals itself as very fertile in phantasms of cyclical repetition, of ubiquitous multiplication, of endless periodical returns of the same events, the same characters doubled or tripled, sometimes the hallucination of the doubling of the subject’s person. These intuitions are manifestly related to the very constant process of poetic creation and seem one of the conditions of the creative typification of style. Lacan 69

He writes that the problem of style in art or literature is in fact a manifestation of paranoia: an artist or poet’s recurrent obsessions appear under several guises, which criticism unites under the notion of style. Hence: “Understanding this syntax [of the paranoid lived experience] seems an indispensable introduction to understanding the symbolic values of art, and in particular the problems of styles . . . problems impossible to solve to any anthropology which will not liberate itself from the naïve realism of the object” (69). The Catalan painter Dalí had been a rebel since his days attending the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid, from which he was expelled as the leader of a student protest when the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz was not elected to the Chair of Painting. He joined the surrealist movement in 1929, having

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both a financial and personal interest: though he seemed closer to futurism and cubism, he turned to surrealism because the Belgian art dealer Camille Goemans offered to sell his paintings in Paris. Goemans also introduced him to Paul Eluard, who was collecting paintings and had the money to invest, being the only surrealist with substantial economic capital (inherited from his father’s real estate business) with which he financed many of the surrealist projects. This connection soon led to a more personal one: in 1929 Dalí fell in love with Gala, Eluard’s wife, whom he transformed into his own personal myth. On November 20, 1929, Dalí had his first exhibition in Paris at Goemans’ gallery. The introduction to the exhibition was written by Breton, who twice used the adjective “surrealist,” seeking to appropriate the potential symbolic capital of the young painter and thus revive a movement that was in danger of losing its impact due to the emphasis on non-commercial, revolutionary poetry as a solution to the major problems of life. The second manifesto finds the social as well as national composition of the group changed: the majority of newcomers are members of haut bourgeois families with high cultural capital, indicating that surrealism is in the process of establishment and becomes the stake of the game occupying now a dominant position (Bandier 382–3). René Char, for example, comes from a very wealthy provincial family; Dalí’s father is a wealthy notary in Figueras, and his uncle has a bookstore in Barcelona. Dalí joined the group in 1929 having started as a disciple of surrealism, writing articles that reverently quoted Breton in magazines like L’Amic de les Arts and La Gaceta literaria. Looking retrospectively at his trajectory in Paris, Dalí remembered that he had begun by approaching Picasso as mentor and finding dealers interested in introducing his paintings. To get the audience’s attention, publicity was a must; to Dalí there was no better way to attract publicity than creating a scandal and fueling gossip to circulate his name. And as there was no faster way to reach a large audience than the recently born film industry, Dalí and his friend Luis Buñuel created the first surrealist movie in 1928: “Un chien andalou, that succès de scandal, marked my first Parisian recognition” (Dalí, The Unspeakable 77); this was followed by L’Age d’or in 1930. Dalí later claimed that “the fluid Surrealist group is making use of my personality to revive the movement” (The Unspeakable 78). This was partly true, but as Dalí presents it decades later, it is as if surrealism wouldn’t have existed without him, whereas he sought out the surrealist networks in Paris for his own needs. In 1927, he began to frequent the bar La Coupole, a meeting place

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for artists, where he not only met the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, but also Brâncuşi, Derain, Kisling, and Zadkine, before Camille Goemans introduced him to Paul Eluard. Describing his entry into the surrealist group, Dalí portrays himself as intending all along to play a secondary role, while leaving the leadership of the group to Breton: “The others were also André Breton who already seemed a pontiff, even when his conclave met in a café on the Place Blanche, with the apéritif as Eucharist. A newcomer was required to show assiduity, this serving as his initiation” (84). Dalí mockingly mixes religious and military terms to describe Breton’s leadership over his group, but in this retrospective account he maintains a condescending tone towards Paris as a provincial space that seemed confining to his broad world interests, even if in 1927 Paris was the center even for Dalí: No way of getting away from listening to Breton orating to his court of followers like a big turkeycock. The main reason for these gatherings was to let him keep control over his troops; to maintain his authority by nipping in the bud the slightest tendency to dissent . . . All extracurricular liaisons were sharply condemned; it was sort of like a Tribunal of the Inquisition set up in the village’s main café. 84

Totally rejecting any formal political stance, Dalí never sympathized with the surrealist goal of being revolutionary in all ways. As he later remarked in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí,“Marxism was to me no more important than a fart” (117). He was unimpressed by Breton’s authoritarian streak: “Discipline! That was now his favorite word! To an artist, it was leprosy” (118). The ideological feud between Breton and Aragon over the movement’s subordination to the interests of the Communist Party never involved him, as he had his own politics to carve out and defend. He claims that he could have gotten control over the group had he wanted, but that he thought the best strategy was to play an apparently secondary role while at the same time being the savior of the movement. Translating this account into sociological terms, Dalí used the cultural capital the surrealists had in Paris until he got his own capital; he could then simply dismiss the group, having taken everything he wanted from it: for a time I wondered whether I ought not to take the leadership of them, for on the rare occasions when I spoke up my ascendancy was accepted without question. I could see Breton’s blue eye looking fixedly at me and forming a

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature question mark above my head. He mistrusted me. He need not have! I had found the stakes to be second-rate and left him the presidency of the stockless company. I was Surrealism. 84, Dalí’s emphasis

Despite surrealism’s antibourgeois stance, Dalí asserts, “Breton was basically rational and bourgeois” (113), and he claimed that the entire surrealist group was horrified by his use of coprophilic images. “Shit scared them. Shit and arseholes” (113). Not quite so: as Anna Balakian has remarked, “scatological vocabulary abounds in many surrealist works,” and it was chiefly Breton who avoided it (André Breton 10). But as Dalí’s winning card was to be outrageous at any cost, he went so far as to say that the surrealist objects he invented were coming exactly from that part of his body, and the surrealists who relished them were unaware of their origin: “And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contractions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear” (113). Not content with subtle obscenity, Dalí scandalized Breton by claiming to have an obsession with Hitler’s buttocks: Lenin and Hitler turned me on in the highest. In fact, Hitler even more than Lenin. His fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill originating in the mouth and affording me a Wagnerian ecstasy. I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me . . . Breton was outraged. He was unwilling to admit that the master of Nazism was nothing more to me than an object of unconscious delirium. 125

In his Unspeakable Confessions, Dalí quickly did away with the years when he was Breton’s disciple, in the chapter “How to Become a Surrealist.” There he recounts his break from the movement, itself a surrealist act, which was, in fact, Breton’s most famous excommunication on moral and political grounds. Yet Dalí’s behavior at the time makes excommunication seem necessary and a restorative act for the sake of sanity, even if Dalí posed as the saint excommunicated by the high priest for heresy. On February 5, 1934 Breton summoned the miscreant to his studio at 42 rue Fontaine, to analyze Dalí’s behavior and condemn him. The evening turned into a Dalínian spectacle, with

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Dalí coming in with a thermometer in his mouth, shoes unlaced, to defend himself before the inquisition: “Breton, dressed in bottle green from head to foot, looked like the Grand Inquisitor and lost no time in beginning to intone the litany of my deviations and errors” (111). Crevel, Tzara, and Eluard had sent Breton a letter asking him not to eliminate Dalí from the group. Years later, Dalí presented the trial as Breton’s losing the game, but in fact the short dialogue as narrated by Dalí only shows the radical differences that brought them apart: Dalí wanted to shock and pursue his paranoia and delirious dreams at any cost, no matter whom they involved. He chose Hitler and Lenin only to spite Breton. In his turn, Breton couldn’t accept anyone who would mock the surrealists’ political stance: “ ‘So, André Breton,’ I concluded, ‘if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.’ Breton tensed, his pipe tightly held between his teeth, and grumbling furiously, ‘I would not advise you to, my friend.’ He was checkmated” (126). Dalí does admit that Breton was like “a second father” to him and surrealism was a rebirth, but he doesn’t waste the opportunity to emphasize that the only true surrealist was himself: “The Surrealists to me were a kind of nourishing placenta and I believed in Surrealism as in the Tablets of the Law. With unbelievable and insatiable appetite, I assimilated the letter and spirit of the movement which indeed corresponded so exactly to my deeper nature that I embodied most naturally” (112). But as Dalí’s recipe for success included the chapter “How to Get Rid of One’s Father,” the break from the father of surrealism was necessary. Despite all this, Dalí still acknowledged Breton as someone who had a deep influence over him: Breton was the first important person who made me think and whose contact greatly interested me . . . But Breton was very quickly shocked by the presence of scatological elements. He wanted no turds and no Madonna . . . Biologically, there was a censorship determined by reason, aesthetics, morality, to Breton’s taste, or by whim. They had created in fact a sort of highly literary neo-romanticism. 127

Dalí could turn any defeat into a victory. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, he makes his excommunication into an intentional act on his side rather than Breton’s. “The remaining surrealists were in the process of committing suicide gradually, sinking into the growing obscurity of the lethargic and political tittletattle of the collective café terraces . . . Personally, politics have never interested

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me, and at that moment less than ever, for they were becoming day by day more wretchedly anecdotic” (339). In retrospect, from the position of a consecrated artist, it was easy for Dalí to claim that the surrealist group didn’t give him legitimacy in the field, and that they didn’t represent the center of Parisian life as they imagined: “I had hoped, at the beginning of my relationship with the group, to use it as a springboard, but I quickly sensed its dogmatic limitations. I had at one time thought of acceding to power in it, but the idea of fighting to be second in a small village when I could be the first in Rome turned my stomach” (113). Dalí now attacked all the major position-takings that had helped surrealism make a mark in the field, especially their relation to love as a liberation from petty-bourgeois mentality. Dalí accused them of submitting precisely to the “petit-bourgeois taboos” which ran counter to their declarations: “within the group, buggery or anal fantasies were not recognized as being part of the arsenal of love, any more than pederasty or mysticism . . . And woe betide any who did not respect the code of sexual fidelity . . . Desire and lust were no laughing matters here. There was freedom only to have great theoretical, Platonic love affairs” (114). Whereas Dalí had once seemed the perfect disciple of Breton, by the time he wrote for Minotaure in 1933–1939, he had already begun to amass his own symbolic and social capital, and he no longer cites Breton but himself, often in the third person. Dalí was thus moving from an object-centered surrealism, which was Breton’s landmark, to a subject-centered surrealist object, his own self. No longer willing to reproduce Breton’s position, Dalí had grown enough in the practice of the field to fight for his own dominant position. A second strategy that helps to account for the competing versions of the surrealist object has to do with the type of profit that Breton and Dalí had in mind. Because Breton chose long-term symbolic profit and rejected more immediate means of consecration, he preferred to publish extended articles, which would later be included as chapters in his autobiographical books (Amour fou, Arcane 17 ). This meant that he published relatively infrequently, and when he did, these long articles weren’t always suitable for the format of literary magazines. Dalí instead chose short-term symbolic and especially economic profit, so he attempted to accelerate the mechanisms of consecration through frequent short articles, targeting readers who wanted to be updated on the latest developments in art and literature, seasoned with elements of the sensational or of scandal that would always keep him in the news. Whereas Breton’s surrealist object was a bold, even idealistic, attempt at solving the major problems of

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mankind and restoring humanity in the aftermath of the War, Dalí’s paranoid self was meant to exhibit his artistic personality, to mesmerize an audience and persuade them of things that are true only to the self. Dalí wasted no time staking out his position. As early as his first article in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, “L’Âne pourri” (“The Rotting Donkey,” 1929), Dalí theorized critical paranoia as an attempt to systematize confusion (Oui 115) and to supplement Breton’s automatic writing. Paranoia was meant to act as a new mechanism of thought, whose aim was to discredit the world of reality (115). What Dalí called the “delirium of interpretation” was the externalization of an obsessive idea by connecting things that aren’t logically related in reality, with such a strong power of conviction that it will never fail to impose itself on the audience. This final turn was already moving away from Breton’s definition of the surrealist object: “Paranoia uses the external world as a means to assert the obsessive idea, with its disturbing characteristic of making this idea’s reality valid to others” (117). The idea of convincing already had in it the germ that was to separate the two forever. For Dalí, the ultimate expression of his method is the anamorphosis or the optical illusion: “the representation of an object which, without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another absolutely different object” (Oui 116). Dalí then pushes things to the extreme, and in this he departs radically from the soberly moral Breton: “And we don’t know if behind the three great simulacra—shit, blood, and putrefaction—there does not lie the very hiding place of the sought-after ‘treasure land’ ” (118). More systematic than Breton, Dalí devised the taxonomy of the surrealist object as early as the third issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1931). In the article “Objets surréalistes: Catalogue général” Dalí identifies six categories: 1. Objects with symbolical function (automatic origin: “Scatological Object Functioning symbolically”); 2. Transubstantiated objects (affective origin: the soft watches); 3. Objects to project (oneiric origin); 4. Enveloped objects (diurnal phantasies); 5. Machine-objects (experimental fantasies) and 6. Molding objects (hypnagogic origin) (Dalí, “Objets” 16). Echoing Breton’s statement from “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” that oneiric objects function like dreams, Dalí writes that “These objects which use a minimum mechanical functioning are based on the phantasms and representations susceptible of being brought about by the realization of an unconscious act” (16). Not wanting to contradict too openly the surrealist leader, Dalí conceded that erotic desires,

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materialized in these objects through metaphor or substitution, involve a process of symbolization typical of sexual perversion, which is perfectly identical with the poetic act. Listing several examples of objects by Giacometti, Breton, and Gala Eluard, Dalí flatters Breton that his was “the most complex and difficult to analyze” (16) and concludes that “The culture of the spirit will identify with the culture of desire” (17). Dalí’s understanding of objects and surrealism went through several metamorphoses, all of which were important stages in the development of the surrealist object, as Haim Finkelstein has noted: This development, in its broad outline, comprises a movement from the Objets à fonctionnement symbolique [such as the shoe] through the “cannibalisme des objets,” to the perception of the failure of the Surrealist Object implied by the notions underlying the “objets psycho-atmosphériques-anamorphiques,” and on to the development of the alternate concept of the “êtres-objets.” Salvador Dali’s Art and Writing 162

Breton’s own version of the surrealist object, “L’objet-fantôme,” was published in the same issue as Dalí’s taxonomy, and would be reworked in the essay Communicating Vessels. Whereas Dalí was categorizing the many types of objects that the group was involved in producing in the early 1930s, Breton followed more ambitiously the surrealist object’s career beyond surrealism and with a precedent in the objects of primitive or mystical art, in an attempt to prove that this new practice could conquer the entire world, his two examples being Dalí’s “Grand Masturbateur” and Max Ernst’s La Femme 100 têtes. The phantom-object sketched and described by Breton is the back of an envelope with an ear-shaped handle, the opposite edge bordered with eyelashes, and an eye-shaped wax seal in the middle. The word associated with it is silence, playing on cil, eyelash (Breton, “L’objet-fantôme” 20–21). But Breton was aware that this was still a poetic object, which would need translation for the French pun to travel; he advised his group to follow Dalí’s proposal and produce physical objects, meant to trigger an erotic effect (22). As Finkelstein says, “With Breton’s ‘objet-fantôme,’ an important stage in the elaboration of the theory of the Surrealist Object has been reached” (Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object 48). Dalí’s article “Objets psycho-atmosphériques-anamorphiques,” published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 5 (May 15, 1933), defines the surrealist object as “atmospheric” in that it is a psychic object (45). He goes on to illustrate the concept using another optical illusion: a man contemplates a star that falls to

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earth and realizes that, in fact, it was a reverie caused by his smoking a cigarette: the burning tip is the star, and the burnt body of the star that reaches the earth turns out to be the cigarette butt (47). The surrealist’s task is to tell the story of the object as inscribed under its surface: “And we will tell him the story of this object, a very complicated story, and we will convince him completely that there are in the object, next to other essential primary elements, two authentic skulls of Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria . . . This cigarette butt will glitter in the human eyes more lyrically than the atmospheric glitter of the clearest and farthest star” (“Objets psycho” 48). The final issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution published a questionnaire, “Recherches expérimentales: Sur la connaissance irrationnelle de l’objet Boule de cristal des voyantes (5 février 1933).” This was a crystal ball that Breton would reproduce that December in Minotaure (3–4: 55) and the respondents were invited to share their personal free associations. Behind Breton’s and Dalí’s responses we can trace the difference between the ways they conceived of the object. For both, the object is feminine and sexual; but while for Breton she’s the ideal space for all metamorphoses, for Dalí she is merely the passive reflection of metamorphoses. These responses illustrate their opposite conceptions of love: focused on the object versus the perceiving subject, the ‘I.’ For Breton, she is Circe; for Dalí, she can be associated with Narcissus (“Recherches expérimentales” 10). If in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution Dalí seemed keen on pleasing his master, with Minotaure a new phase in Dalí’s career begins. One can sense a change in the tone of his articles, and also an increasing interest in the world of fashion, understood as the ultimate materialization of his dreamed objects, gratifying both his ego and his wallet. Dalí began his activity in Minotaure by basing his own theory of the critical paranoiac interpretation on Breton’s notion of the surrealist object (“Interprétation paranoïaque-critique de l’Image Obsedante ‘L’Angelus’ de Millet: Prologue: Nouvelles considérations générales sur le mécanisme du phénomène paranoïaque du point de vue surréaliste,” 1/1933). Though in 1942, when he published his first book of memoirs in New York, he claimed that the surrealist object was his own invention that saved a dying movement, in Minotaure he acknowledges that the invention of the oneiric object belonged to Breton. In 1933 Dalí was so close to Breton that he adopted his rhetorical style. An example is the article “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible, de l’architecture Modern’ Style” (Minotaure 3–4/1933). Dalí redefines beauty against aesthetics,

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following Breton’s concept of beauté convulsive: “Beauty is only the sum of our conscious perversions.” Analyzing the iron sculptures of the Modern Style as the returned repressed reflexes of eating and drinking, Dalí models his terrifying comestible beauty on Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Under a photo of one of the phallic architectural details from the entrances to the Parisian metro designed by Hector Guimard, the caption reads “Eat Me!” In so doing, he was only reconfirming Lewis Carroll as a predecessor of surrealism, and Breton’s declaration: “The new surrealist age of the ‘cannibalization of objects’ legitimizes this conclusion. Beauty will be comestible or will not be at all” (Dalí, “De la beauté” 72). Returning to the cannibalization imagery that had been at the center of the avantgarde movements from Europe (Francis Picabia’s magazine Cannibale) to Latin America (Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagist Manifesto), Dalí also gave the surrealist object a new turn toward consumerism, as in his 1937 painting “Cannibalism of Objects,” showing a woman tearing with her teeth the inner lining of a high-heeled shoe (Figure 3). Dalí understands the surrealist object as a phantom of things past, those things that resonate with it and converge to its realization (“Les couleurs du sex appeal spectral,” Minotaure 5/1934: 20–22). Among the examples of phantomrepresentations that Dalí cites, we find a woman dressed in a curtain and wearing a shoe on her head. Closely following Breton’s line that “La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas,” but already giving beauty a commercial Anglophone twist, Dalí writes that “Le sex appeal sera spectral.” Dalí’s preoccupation with fashion can already be traced in this article, where tearing apart a woman’s body shows an attention to how the body becomes accessorized with its own parts turned into objects. An example is a pair of breasts used as an accessory for the buttocks. In the article “Apparitions Aérodynamiques des ‘Êtres-Objets’ ” (Minotaure 6/ Winter 1935: 33–4), Dalí continues to develop the theory of carnal objects; it is here that the “being-objects” are molded into the famous soft watches and soft cars. This softness, Dalí explains, comes from carving out the dreamed object from the grease of the universe’s body, which Dalí claims is ideally represented by Hitler’s buttocks. Already in 1936, after the enormous success of his 1933 first exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York, Dalí no longer needed the surrealists; instead of leaving the movement silently, he preferred to get as much publicity as he could, so he included in his Minotaure articles everything that he knew would enrage Breton: coprophilia, scatology, masturbation, pederasty, anal and sexual obsessions. In one of the last articles he published in Minotaure, “Première loi

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Figure 3 Salvador Dalí, Cannibalism of the Objects (1937) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

morphologique sur les poils dans les structures molles” (October 15, 1936), Dalí theorized the use of pubic hair on the surrealist object (as he had done with his Scatological Object with Symbolic Function) as a means of obtaining the effect of dépaysement through the use of “anti-geodesic” curly hair (61). As Dalí puts it,

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adding hair to an oneiric object is the surrealist gesture par excellence, because it both shocks and outrages the audience. He muses on the effect of a beard appearing on a golden plate (61), much like Alice who is pleasantly surprised when she finds herself in the train dream episode in Through the Looking Glass pulling a goat’s beard. In what would become one of the seminal texts in the theory of the surrealist object, “Le message automatique” (Minotaure 3–4/December 12, 1933), Breton points to the found, rather than created object, which certainly was substantially different from Dalí’s self-centered surrealist object. Following Valéry’s reading of da Vinci’s creative method, Breton defines the surrealist as a midwife, who only copies what reality reveals to him: “I think that the expression ‘everything is written’ should be understood literally. Everything is written on the blank page” (56). Da Vinci used to encourage his students to simply transcribe what the cracks in the wall in front of them revealed: “From that moment on, all you have to do is to transcribe what you see and to fill in the gaps according to your needs” (56). But Breton remained a poet all his life, and he emphasized language rather than the image: “It’s just that I always believed, and this is the essential, that the verbal inspirations are infinitely richer visually, infinitely more resistant to the eye than the proper visual images. I continue to believe blindly . . . in the triumph of the unverifiable visual through the auditive” (63). The most important text published by Breton in Minotaure remained “La beauté sera convulsive” (1934), which became the first chapter of Amour fou, published three years later. Here, Breton provides us with the most poetic representation of the surrealist object of desire: a woman who simultaneously embodies everything we’ve loved in previous persons successively. Like dream narratives, the surreal object of desire functions as a way to fight back the irreversibility and uniqueness of an onward flowing time that forces us to make choices and leave out possibilities. The dream comprises what was lived over time in a spatial object: the body of the present-loved woman. The expected new love promises to bring back to life everything that seemed past: “It’s there, at the bottom of the human crucible, in this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who’ve truly chosen each other gives back to everything the lost colors of the times of ancient suns” (10). For Breton, convulsive beauty arises from the object of desire considered in its development, and not just at the end of the process when the object appears in a passive form. Comparing the manifestation of the object of desire to a sexual act, Breton reflects on orgasm as not merely a result, but also a process of reaching

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ecstasy: “For me, there can be no beauty—convulsive beauty—without the price of the affirmation of the mutual rapport that connects the static object with the same object in its becoming” (12). The object of desire is called into being by our reading of the surrounding reality, searching for its oracular message, which is the common language of lovers: “this or that line from the left or right page had to teach me in a more or less oblique manner concerning these dispositions, had to assure me of her imminent arrival or non-arrival—then going back to moving the objects around, trying to combine them in an unusual manner” (14). The final paragraph of Breton’s article closes with a dream-like vision of the night of April 10, 1933 when he met his future wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, at a restaurant. Her coming into his life, a real example of convulsive beauty, was “prophesied” by certain signs, which turn reality into a Wonderland seen through the looking-glass, a dreamland where puns and slips of the tongue bring our oneiric projections to life. For Breton, the surrealist object remained inextricably bound to an erotic encounter with the woman of his dreams in a surreal Paris, explored by a ghost who opens Nadja and seeks to become flesh every time love seems to smile on him: “Convulsive beauty will be erotically veiled, explodingly-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be at all” (16). In 1937, Dalí stopped collaborating with Minotaure and moved across the Atlantic, where he began to appear in the glossy pages of Vogue. Breton thereby lost the strongest supporter and practitioner of the surrealist object, and needed to find other writers and artists who could make up for this loss. Earlier in the 1920s, he had given a central place to Picasso in his seminal essay “Surrealism and Painting,” even though Picasso was never a member of the group. Breton now turned to Kafka, in whom he found a surrealist in action and thought, a writer who inhabits a dream world where inanimate objects are brought to surreal life and who could provide ideal examples of surrealist objects and black humor (“Têtes d’orage: Lichtenberg, Grabbe, Brisset, Roussel, Kafka, Forneret,” Minotaure 10/Winter 1937). A prime example is Kafka’s fragment “Odradek,” published in translation in the same issue of Minotaure. Odradek is a surrealist absurd object, a sort of a bobbin with thread made of bits and scraps of other worn-out strands of thread. The bobbin is star-shaped, can walk, and is homeless. When asked where it lives, Odradek answers: “Uncertain domicile.” For Breton, this was a very good example of defamiliarization/dépaysement—being everywhere and nowhere—in relation to the surrealist object: “but this idea that it could outlive me, this idea is almost painful to me” (17).

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In 1939, when Breton published “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste” in Minotaure, Dalí was no longer part of the surrealist group, and Breton took the opportunity to lament his need to please the public. Breton dismisses this compromise with the market as the typical attitude of the petty bourgeoisie; this commercialism has direct artistic consequences: “Dalí’s painting shows a very fast decline . . . true monotony haunts Dalí’s painting” (17). The artistic decline is both moral and political: “Dalí declares in February 1939 . . . that all the world’s present malaise is racial and that the best solution, to be organized by all the white peoples, is to enslave all the non-white peoples. I don’t know what doors this declaration can open for him in Italy or the US , between which he oscillates, but I know what doors it closes” (17). Despite sounding like the master abandoned by his favorite disciple, Breton does have a point. Art historians have noticed that after 1936, Dalí’s art falls into a sort of mannerism, plagiarizing itself and living on the symbolic capital accumulated when he’d still been a member of the surrealist group. Breton was the first to accuse Dalí of selling out: “While attempting to refine his paranoiac critical method, one can notice that he slips into a type of entertainment similar to crossword puzzles” (17, Breton’s emphasis). War had been declared between Breton and Dalí. They would meet again from very different outposts; never again on the same front.

Surrealism conquers the world (1933–1939) Dalí’s success across the ocean in the late 1930s was the result of a more extended program developed by Breton and the surrealists from 1933 through to the outbreak of war in 1939 to promote surrealism abroad. It included publishing the magazine Minotaure (1933–1939), organizing international exhibitions in a range of art domains (from poetry and fiction to painting, photography, and sculpture), publishing international surrealist bulletins in several languages, and touring the peripheries of Europe to promote surrealism, from Prague to the Canary Islands. The common denominator of these strategies was the surrealist object, whose definition was extended throughout the 1930s from the more restrictive sense of an object produced at the crossroads of poetry, painting, sculpture, and collage to encompass any surrealist product. The history of the surrealist object, as Breton tells it in a series of interviews with André Parinaud in the early 1950s, unfolds as a question of the group rather than

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the individual, which is another oblique way to address Dalí’s claim across the ocean that he is surrealism. Chronologically, Breton identifies five stages of the surrealist object’s history: 1. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. 2. Breton’s call for putting oneiric objects in circulation in the surrounding reality, like the gnomebook with a beard, described in the 1924 “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité”—specifying the year so as to show his priority over Dalí in coining the theory of the surrealist object. 3. Giacometti’s surrealist objects starting in 1930. 4. Dalí’s objects with symbolic function. 5. Breton’s poem-objects. In this surrealist scavenger hunt, Duchamp is the leading name that Breton follows when he theorizes la trouvaille or the found object in L’amour fou. Such an object is first seen in dreams, as Breton describes it when he is exporting surrealism in 1935 to Prague, which became perhaps the strongest center of surrealism in Europe in the late 1930s. In his Prague lecture, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” he takes an example from “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité,” and he recounts the origin of the book-gnome or gnome-book with pages made of black wool, whose cover is a bearded gnome: Thus one night not long ago [I wrote], “I got my hands on a rather curious book in my sleep, in an open air market out toward Saint-Malo. The spine of this book was formed by a wooden gnome with an Assyrian-style white beard which came down to its feet. The statuette was of normal thickness and yet it in no way interfered with turning the pages of the book, which were made of thick black wool. I hastened to acquire it, and when I woke up I regretted not finding it near me. It would be relatively easy to re-create it. I should like to put a few objects of this sort in circulation, for their fate seems to me to be eminently problematical and disturbing.” Manifestoes 277

The surrealist object opens a new way to see reality, which will be developed beyond the surrealists’ own limits: Who knows—perhaps I would thereby help to ruin those concrete trophies that are so detestable, and throw greater discredit on “reasonable” beings and objects. There would be cleverly constructed machines that would have no use; minutely detailed maps of immense cities would be drawn up, cities which, however many we are, we would feel forever incapable of founding, but which would at least classify present and future capitals. 277

Breton developed two parallel concepts in intimate connection to the theory of the surrealist object: the objective hazard and the chance encounter. According

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to Breton, the objective hazard and the (s)elective affinity are more than mere concepts but are embodied within the history of the group’s own formation and activity. The emphasis on surrealism as a group activity, on what and how and where is surrealism, rather than Dalí’s narcissistic who is surrealism, is presented by Breton as some sort of “destiny” of the movement, which was composed of clusters of important poets and artists brought together by these invisible relations of (s)elective affinities, just as the object of desire is materialized from a whole network of interrelated objects that reshape reality through the logic of love, poetry, and madness: It is striking that these commitments to surrealism were seldom isolated cases. Almost always we have seen coming to us several personalities that discovered they shared preexistent affinities. It was the case with Baron, Crevel, Desnos, Morise and Vitrac. A little later, it was the case with Artaud, Leiris and Masson, then Gérard and Naville, then Sadoul and Thirion, later, Duhamel, Prévert and Tanguy . . . What constituted what I call their preexistent affinities marked the general activity, but the legitimacy of the surrealist project was questioned by none of them. Breton, Entretiens 99–100

The surrealists’ next literary magazine, Minotaure, contributed significantly to the internationalization of surrealism. This elegant multidisciplinary magazine proved to be the most important of all the surrealist magazines, and came at the perfect time: 1933–1939. Published by the famous Swiss editor Albert Skira and organized by Breton, Minotaure brings together the two divergent surrealist groups—Breton’s orthodox group and Georges Bataille’s ethnology focused group from the magazine Documents—in an ambitious project of mapping surrealism beyond the world of poetry to include ethnology and folklore, painting, sculpture, psychoanalysis, and architecture. As Lewis Kachur writes, the glossy Minotaure was the equivalent of surrealist exhibitions: he speaks of “the Minotaure phase, in which a lavishly illustrated and designed magazine created a different kind of publication space, allowing for much more play on the image than in the early Surrealist publications. Engaged exhibition space also relates to both the internationalization and the simultaneous commercialization of Surrealism in the mid-1930s” (7). Here we find the young Roger Caillois and Jacques Lacan contributing from their own fields to the internationalization of surrealism, legitimizing the surrealist narrative through the return to myth as the product of the irrational forces of the unconscious or through coining paranoia as a creative artistic force.

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Though Breton felt some embarrassment that the antibourgeois surrealists published in a deluxe magazine, Minotaure’s complexity surpassed all the other surrealist undertakings and came to be their virtual headquarters, mainly through the additions of (in order): Dalí, Paul Eluard, Maurice Heine, Pierre Mabille, Péret and the painters Brauner, Arp, Domínguez, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Masson, Matta, Miró, Paalen, Man Ray. “In the beginning, the magazine seems eclectic, but surrealism gains ground with each issue until it conquers it completely. From this point of view and thanks to its exquisite exterior it made surrealism into something that it hadn’t been before” (Breton, Entretiens 181). Breton was a very good team manager and art dealer, and “taking over” a magazine like Minotaure was part of the strategy of the 1930s. Among its other purposes, it provided a forum to showcase Breton’s international travels and talks, as in the double issue 12–13 of 1939, which published Breton’s account of his trip to Mexico, where he met Trotsky and Diego Rivera. The magazine’s budget allowed for high-quality reproductions, which were essential to a movement whose emphasis was on the oneiric and the visual. Despite Breton’s later rejection of Dalí’s commercialism, Minotaure had, for him, something of the same attraction that Vogue would have for Dalí: in the age of mechanical reproduction, glossy photographs proved as valuable to the leftist revolutionary as to the aristocratic royalist. Minotaure had roots in the first stirrings of surrealism beyond Paris. In 1929, Breton had decided to go with Eluard and Aragon to visit the Brussels group, which was the most active of the surrealist groups outside Paris. Among this group were René Magritte, the poets E.L. Mesens and Marcel Lecomte, the biochemist and essayist Paul Nougé, and the art dealer Camille Goemans. Breton agreed to publish an issue on surrealism in the Belgian magazine Variétés, edited by him and Aragon, and the surrealist magazine Documents 34, edited by Nouagé and Mesens, prepared a special surrealist issue. In 1934, the Belgian group organized the first exhibition of surrealist works coming from all parts of Europe. Held at the Musée Royal de Bruxelles, the exhibition was called Minotaure as a tribute to the Parisian magazine and Breton’s group. Here, Breton gave one of his most salient and influential lectures, “What Is Surrealism?”, later published by the Belgian René Henriquez. Already here Breton was writing the narrative of surrealism by distinguishing between a heroic period (1919–1924), now considered by him totally mistaken, and a period of reassessment that started with surrealism’s turn to revolutionary politics.

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Surrealism rapidly made inroads not only in Belgium but also in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia. When translated to the periphery of the field, surrealism became an umbrella for many local modernist tendencies. In 1935, Breton strengthened contacts with the Czech surrealists, especially with the poet Vítězslav Nezval, who translated Breton into Czech and invited him to give a lecture in the new capital of surrealism, Prague. The fervent Czech group included Nezval, the painters Jindřich Styrský and Toyen (Marie Cerminova), and the theoretician Karel Teige. The group had mounted an ambitious surrealist art exhibit and also translated Nadja and The Communicating Vessels. Unlike the Paris group, the Prague group had very good relations with the Czech Communist Party. Breton and Eluard visited Prague in March 1935 and Breton gave several lectures, including the crucial “Surrealist Situation of the Object” in front of a massive audience of 700 (Polizzotti 413). Breton enjoyed great success in Czechoslovakia, toured the country giving speeches, signed his books in translation, and together with the Czech group, founded the bilingual International Bulletin of Surrealism (four issues) in which his and Eluard’s speeches were published. Breton’s talk in Prague reinforced the revolutionary character of the surrealist object as discussed in his Brussels talk the previous year: “It is essentially on the object that the more and more clear-sighted eyes of Surrealism have remained open in recent years,” I wrote. “It is the very attentive examination of the numerous recent speculations that this object has publicly given rise to (the oneiric object, the symbolic object, the real and virtual object, the found object, etc.), and this examination alone, that will allow one to understand all the implications of the present temptation of Surrealism. It is essential that interest be focused on this point.” Manifestoes 257

Unlike Dalí, who would refuse to recognize Breton’s essential role in the history of surrealism, Breton gives full credit to Dalí’s new method: This experimenting has regained momentum under the master-impulse given to it by Salvador Dalí, whose exceptional interior “boiling” has been for surrealism, during the whole of this period, an invaluable ferment . . . Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemed only to involve poetic language, has spread like wildfire, on pursuing its course, not only in art, but in life . . . I should like to draw your attention to the fact that its most recent advance is producing a fundamental crisis of the “object.” “What Is Surrealism” 82, 86

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The next stop after Prague was the Canary Islands, with support from the Gaceta de arte that gave surrealism Oscar Domínguez, one of the recent additions to the group. Breton was just as well received there as in Prague, and he combined his Prague and Canary Island impressions in a travelogue essay, Le château étoilé, published in 1936 in the special issue dedicated to surrealism by the Argentinian magazine Sur. His stay in the Canary Islands resulted in a second bilingual International Bulletin of Surrealism, this time in French and Spanish, later incorporated into Breton’s autobiographical Amour fou. To an interviewer for the newspaper La Tarde, Breton asserted that coming to the Canary Islands gave him a way to leave Europe behind and to conquer the world: “Arriving in Tenerife, I washed my hands with an ordinary soap that looked like lapis lazuli. I washed my hands of all of Europe” (quoted in Polizzotti 414). By now, surrealism had a very good non-Francophone presence, with active groups in Denmark, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Romania, Greece, Peru, Japan, the Canary Islands, and Egypt. Over the course of a dozen years, surrealism traveled widely through a series of eight international exhibitions: Copenhagen (1935), London (1936), New York MoMA (1936), Paris (1938), Mexico (1940), New York (1942), Paris (1947), and Prague (1947). The four International Bulletins published in 1935–1936 worked as a travelogue to promote surrealism. The first issue appeared in French and Czech on April 9, 1935 marking Breton’s visit to Prague. The second issue, published in October 1935, resulted from his visit to Tenerife, and had texts in French and Spanish, while the third issue, published on August 20, 1935, was only in French, which reflected Breton’s collaboration with the Brussels group. But the most interesting one was the fourth, published in September 1936, dedicated to the International Surrealist exhibition in London that took place from June 11 through July 4, 1936. With sixty-eight exhibitors of fourteen nationalities, the exhibition was the most important one yet for surrealism. The issue included some echoes from the press (17), ironically celebrating negative reviews— “Relics of outworn romanticism” (Daily Telegraph)—along with positive ones: “Surrealism has reached London—a little late, it is true, a little dowdy and seedy and down at heel and generally enfeebled . . . in Paris [it] is decrepit, it may yet become fashionable in London” (The Listener); “The surrealist exhibition is tremendously impressive. There are things in it that will haunt you till you die” (Edinburgh Evening News). Accused of being passé in Paris and seeking new markets to survive, surrealism certainly attracted the press’s attention. Some English reviewers

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had suggested that the movement’s international character was a threat to Englishness, and the London surrealist group replied to this accusation: “There has been a suggestion that the exhibition was governed by snob-preference for foreigners . . . We have considered only the worth and surreal effect of every exhibit and are, in fact, as well as in name, completely international. Surrealism belongs not to any nation, but to humanity itself” (18). By 1936, Breton and his followers had succeeded in denationalizing their Parisian movement; surrealism was poised to enter world literature.

3

Pierre Menard the Sur-realist

The major revolution provoked by surrealism, at least as André Breton understood it, was a renewed belief in man’s visionary and prophetic power, a power that the surrealists believed both they and their creations possessed. In a talk he gave at Yale in 1942 on “La situation du surréalisme entre les deux guerres,” Breton prided himself on having a prophetic power that enabled him in 1925 to foresee the future outbreak of World War II . He noted that back then in Lettre aux voyants, he’d written that “There are people who pretend that they learned something from the war; however, they are not as advanced as I am, who know what the year 1939 has in store for me” (La clé 69). Breton was more prophetic than he realized, for 1939 played a key role not only in the history of humanity, but also in the history of surrealism and its legacy. Through one of those coincidences that surrealism theorized as chance encounters, in May of 1939 two texts appeared in major literary magazines: Jorge Luis Borges published his pivotal story “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” in Sur in Buenos Aires (Issue 56/May 1939); on another continent, Dr. Pierre Menard, a psychoanalyst and graphologist, published a short analysis of Lautréamont’s handwriting under the title “Analyse de l’Écriture de Lautréamont” in Minotaure (Issue 12–13/May 1939). Dr. Menard’s text was part of a dossier on Lautréamont published by Breton and the surrealist group. Curt Müller, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, was writing his dissertation on Lautréamont, and had brought to the surrealists’ attention a series of documents that shed new light on the writings of the controversial Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846, Isidore Lucien Ducasse was educated in Paris and became a rather obscure and marginal poet in the French field of letters before his death at the early age of twenty-four. He was remarkable for two things: the strange circumstances under which he published, first anonymously, then under a pen name; and for having theorized plagiarism as the basis for a new poetics. Ducasse published three works under the pen name Comte de Lautréamont: Chants de Maldoror and Poésies I et II , which remained largely 75

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unknown and had little impact on his contemporaries. He was found dead on November 24, 1870 in his Paris apartment, in circumstances that remained veiled in mystery. Almost half a century later, the literary critic Valery Larbaud rediscovered him as a visionary proto-modernist poet. But it was André Breton and his surrealist group that turned Lautréamont into a precursor of surrealist poetry by republishing his work and making him part of the core cultural capital of surrealism, an aspect never discussed by the Borges criticism, which seems in general to forget the way Lautréamont was recirculated in the twentieth century.1 A recent article by Myriam Mallart Brussosa, “Las voces de Lautréamont” (2009), sheds light on this matter. The two Spanish translations that have been made of Les chants de Maldoror were both done by intellectuals close to Breton and the surrealists. The first, dating from 1925, is an incomplete translation of Les chants by Julio Gómez de la Serna, brother of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who wrote the prologue to Julio’s translation and who promoted surrealism in the pages of Sur after he had published in Littérature and also in the special issue of Le Disque vert dedicated to Le cas Lautréamont in 1925. The second complete translation of Lautréamont’s works dates from 1964, the work of the promoter of Breton’s version of surrealism, Aldo Pellegrini. As for Poésies II , where Lautréamont theorizes plagiarism as a new poetics, it didn’t exist in Spanish translation until 1964; the only available network through which Borges would have read him is that of the French surrealists. But was it only a coincidence that in the same month of the same year Borges was publishing one of the most influential texts of (post)modernist literature while the real Pierre Menard was publishing a text on the writer who became famous for his defense of plagiarism in a surrealist magazine? The simultaneous publication of these two articles makes this unlikely, even if it seems like one of the fictional coincidences that Borges liked to play with. The major question that arises at this point is: could Borges have read Dr. Menard’s article before writing his short story? And if so, what is the network of circulation that made it possible? And most importantly: why would Borges, who constantly rejected surrealism

1

Borges scholars sometimes cite Rubén Darío’s Los raros from 1896, a series of portraits of writers that had impressed him, including Lautréamont, to account for Lautréamont’s name being familiar in Latin America even before the surrealists. But Darío’s few pages on Lautréamont discuss only Maldoror and never mention the Poésies, and his short presentation of a marginal poet, in the absence of that writer’s published works, can have had little impact on the contemporary literary field.

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for its dependence on Freud and its blind trust in the power of the subconscious, be building perhaps his most famous character on someone who was associated with the surrealist group? If this were true, then the existing scholarship on Borges’ short story, taking Borges’ word that his character is modeled only on Mallarmé, Valéry, and Edmond Teste, may have missed the point about Pierre Menard.2 In his influential article “A Modern Master” from 1964, which would set the general pace of the Borges scholarship on the subject, Paul de Man identifies Borges’ narrative model in the eighteenth-century conte philosophique, strengthening his claim that “the subject of the stories is the creation of style” (de Man 57). In his essay, de Man does address the notion of plagiarism, but only through intratextual references to other Borges stories rather than contextualizing it historically. He limits his contextualization of plagiarism to the notion of infamy that he finds at the heart of Borges’ stories: “At their center . . . always stands an act of infamy . . . All these crimes are misdeeds like plagiarism, impersonation, espionage, in which someone pretends to be what he is not” (57). In this context, de Man cites Valéry’s Monsieur Teste and Cervantes’ Don Quixote as examples of characters behind whom their creator hides: “This act, by which a man loses himself in the image he has created, is to Borges inseparable from poetic greatness. Cervantes achieved it when he invented and became Don Quixote; Valéry achieved it when he conceived and became Monsieur Teste” (58). De Man’s position on the question of the historical character behind Pierre Menard develops from his article’s central theme, the infamous act of projecting one’s self into its very opposite—a theme that takes on new resonance in light of Evelyn Barish’s recent biography The Double Life of Paul de Man. Though he undertakes to identify the historical reference behind this highly aesthetic reality

2

The simultaneous publication of “Pierre Menard” and of Dr. Menard’s 1939 essay was noted in passing by Raúl Antelo in “Poesía hermética y surrealismo” (Jitrik, Historia critica), and has been reiterated by Daniel Balderston in “Los manuscritos de Borges” (2009). However, neither critic sees more than a minor coincidence, and Balderston actually missed the whole connection with Breton’s surrealism not once but twice, in 2009 and again in a subsequent essay,“His Insect-like Handwriting” (2011). Neither critic discusses Dr. Pierre Menard as a gateway to Borges’ engagement with the surrealist legacy. Antelo actually opposes Breton’s practice of the poetic image to Borges’, and as Latin Americanists typically do, both he and Balderston privilege Borges’ polemical comments on surrealism and look no further. Their neglect of this relation follows a tradition of seeing Breton as a marginal or even negative influence on Argentine letters, as when Arturo Lagorio wrote dismissively in 1962 of Borges, César Tiempo, and Gonzalez Tuñón as having been directly influenced by Breton’s writings (Cronicón de un almacén literaria, 36–7).

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built by Borges, de Man comes up with an answer that only further obscures the historical context, ending up in another highly textual world: that of Edmond Teste. “When, a little later, we find out that Ménard is the author of an invective against Paul Valéry, as well as the perpetrator of the shocking stylistic crime of transposing ‘Le cimetière marin’ into alexandrines (Valéry has always insisted that the very essence of this famous poem resides in the decasyllabic meter) we can no longer doubt that we are dealing with Valéry’s anti-self, in other words, Monsieur Teste” (58). De Man always preferred decontextualized and deconstructive readings that would privilege the text rather than the context, and in this he found kindred spirits in both Borges and Valéry. However, the instances referenced by de Man in the above quote—an invective against Valéry authored by Menard, a poem transposed in alexandrines to spite him—can actually be contextualized themselves. The only person close to Valéry who was outraged when he turned to the alexandrine in his 1917 poem La Jeune Parque was his then-disciple, André Breton. That moment marked the break between the two; thereafter, Breton outraged the intellectual circles that met at Monnier’s with his disrespectful position-takings against his former master (see the correspondence between Jean Paulhan and Adrienne Monnier on the subject in Chapter 1). Paul de Man’s decontextualizing reading is limited to the explicit references in Borges’ text, to Mallarmé, Valéry, Edmond Teste, mirroring Borges’ own politics of obscuring at least partly his sources—here, the surrealist context which makes Menard possible and Lautréamont’s conceptualization of plagiarism. Subsequent Borges scholarship has continued to minimize Borges’ connection with surrealism, when not dismissing it altogether, taking at face value Borges’ constant rejection of surrealism and Dada, which he found “too frivolous” for his more serious taste: I became acquainted with German Expressionism, which for me already contains all the essentials of what came afterwards. I like it so much more than Surrealism or Dada, which seem more frivolous to me. Expressionism is more serious and it shows concern for a whole series of profound questions: magic, dreams, religion, and Oriental philosophies, the hope for a universal brotherhood. “Encuentro con Borges” 6

Scholarship addressing “Pierre Menard”’s intertextual relations and connections to historical movements has rarely looked beyond such statements. Critics who were contemporaries of Borges or intimately connected with him have typically

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reiterated his open rejection of avant-garde movements in general. Thus Estela Canto: “Guillermo [de Torre] was very interested in all the Ultraisms and Cubisms, in Dalí and Stravinsky and his distortions, in Dada and surrealism. His brotherin-law [Borges] thought that all this was just a rather stupid and snobbish chitchat” (Borges a contraluz 87). A second category of scholarship engages with surrealism as a general background, but emphasizes Borges’ developing in a different direction. Gregory L. Ulmer sees him anticipating structuralism: “Although Borges’ work is associated historically with surrealism, it has also become the emblem of the structuralist ‘nightmare utopia’ of a world completely confined to discourse. Roland Barthes himself notes that ‘surrealism may well have produced the first experience of structuralist literature’” (Ulmer 850). Seymour Menton notes that “Whereas Surrealism is strongly based on each individual’s Freudian subconscious dreamworld, Magic Realism adheres to the Jungian collective unconscious, to the idea that all mankind is compressed into one, that all time periods are compressed into the one moment of the present, and that reality itself is dream-like. From his own texts, it is obvious that Borges shares Jung’s view of the world and rejects Freud’s” (Menton 413). A third category of Borges scholarship is grounded in de Man’s suggestion that Valéry’s ahistorical understanding of the literary text set the pace in “Pierre Menard,” and includes studies that try to identify an appropriate philosophical frame for “Pierre Menard.” Such interpretations look at Valéry’s ideas on language and literary history, or at earlier philosophies of language (Jorge Luis Castillo, “Pierre Menard and the School of the Skeptics”), phenomenology (de Grandis), or Valéry’s and Fritz Mauthner’s ideas about the collective nature of language and decontextualized intertextuality (Arrojo, Rabell). These approaches are based on the assumption that Borges’ short story is primarily a metatextual fiction, whose intertextual references follow this premise. However, “Pierre Menard” is also a story in itself; treating it as a text that also reflects on a historical reality can give us new insights as to how Borges related to the Parisian avantgardes in general and to surrealism in particular. In terms of historical studies, there have been attempts to find a different historical reference beyond the obvious one to Valéry. My major claims are that the graphologist Dr. Pierre Menard is a gateway to the surrealist legacy that Borges is covertly engaging with and that through Menard we reach the surrealists’ plagiaristic predecessor Lautréamont. The latter possibility has been hinted at only partially by Maurice Saillet in a crucial article in 1953, “Défense du plagiat.” To my knowledge, Saillet is the only critic who discusses Lautréamont

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as a possible direct influence on Borges, but without bringing any material historical evidence. Saillet looks at the legitimacy of the history of plagiarism through Borges’ Menard and Lautréamont’s writings. Even if it has a comparative approach, Saillet’s article is still largely addressing the area of French studies. Since then, there have been a number of substantive approaches to the thorny question of creative plagiarism in relation to citation, intertextuality, and the palimpsest, or to a postmodernist poetics. Naturally, the majority of these studies discuss Lautréamont and Borges’ Pierre Menard among others, but never as a direct connection, and none sees Borges’ deep engagement with the surrealist legacy. For instance, Antoine Compagnon’s substantive study La seconde main ou le travail de la citation discusses “Pierre Menard” at length, but never in relation to Lautréamont. The only time Compagnon cites his name is through a quotation from Maurice Blanchot’s Le Livre à venir, where Blanchot mentions Lautréamont in passing among various writers in whom Borges could recognize himself (95). Three years later, in Palimpsestes (1982), Gérard Genette discusses both Lautréamont, then a few pages later Pierre Menard as creative plagiarizers, but without drawing any connection between them. Even a recent Sorbonne dissertation on the history of plagiarism, Kevin Perromat Augustín’s Le Plagiat dans les littératures hispaniques: histoire, théorie et pratique (2010), doesn’t point out any historical connection between Lautréamont and Borges, and still frames the former within the larger discourse of the avant-garde and modernity rather than surrealism. The filiation Mallarmé—Valéry—Edmond Teste that Borges cites in his short story, which has directed much of the scholarship on the subject, remains only on the surface of the text—and is what Borges wanted his readers to see. Underneath this surface reality, there lies the dense fabric of sur-reality, crystalized in two unnamed characters behind Borges’ text who come to haunt him: Lautréamont and Breton. *

*

*

The key characters in the international network that made it possible for Borges in Buenos Aires to read the Parisian magazine Minotaure were Adrienne Monnier and Victoria Ocampo. Thanks to Monnier’s entrepreneurial skills, the most important international circles of intellectuals in Paris met through La Maison des Amis des Livres. An intellectual like Victoria Ocampo, who treasured European literature and lived between two continents, couldn’t have found a better place for making connections with the most important contemporary

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writers than at Monnier’s store-salon. In Buenos Aires in 1931, Ocampo founded the magazine Sur in which she promoted contemporary literature, particularly French. Through her, Monnier had the opportunity to add the Spanish-speaking community in Paris to her network, including the philosopher Ortega y Gasset and the writer Ricardo Güiraldes. Through the same network, the French writers were translated in Ocampo’s magazine. The deep friendship between Monnier and Ocampo lasted a lifetime, and worked both ways across the Atlantic. In 1946, Monnier organized a soirée at La Maison des Amis des Livres in honor of Ocampo, to thank her for directing the Argentinian committee that had supported French writers during the war. That night, Monnier praised Ocampo’s commitment to French letters: “I am sure that there is not, in all of Argentina, a woman or a man who is more Argentine than you . . . And you pay us the honor of preferring our language to your own, of writing your books in French” (Monnier, The Very Rich Hours 167). In an essay on Colonel Lawrence, Ocampo had confessed that “I have never stopped writing in French. I have never published anything but more or less faithful translations of what I had written in that language” (quoted in Monnier 167–8). For Monnier, Ocampo had proved to be the best ambassador of French literature across the Ocean: “In fact, you are a French writer, you, Argentina personified!” She went on to praise “Sur, in which for twenty years you have made known in Latin America what is best in contemporary French literature” (168): Antonin Artaud, Julien Benda, André Breton, Roger Caillois, Albert Camus, Paul Claudel, Paul Eluard, René Etiemble, André Gide, Valery Larbaud, Henri Michaux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valéry. Yet Sur was not only oriented toward France; thanks to Victoria Ocampo’s long-lasting friendship with Virginia Woolf, many of her texts were translated in Sur. She had a great admirer in Borges, who translated Orlando, which he judged to be “one of the most singular and maddening [works] of our age.” Along with Woolf, Sur published James Joyce, Nikolai Berdyaev, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Theocritus, Thucydides, Miguel de Unamuno, and Stefan Zweig, to name just a few. Through the committee Solidaridad con los Escritores franceses presided over by Ocampo, the Argentine writers sold manuscripts and autographs to purchase food and clothing for their French counterparts. Thanks to Ocampo, Monnier’s bookshop became “a true alimentation store” (Murat 20), and the library cards for borrowed books were replaced with cards registering the food and clothing that the French writers received. As Laure Murat writes in her seminal book

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Passage de l’Odéon: Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier et la vie littéraire à Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres, this intellectual and emotional friendship between Monnier and Ocampo epitomizes the Spanish-French cultural relations during the interwar period in Paris (97–8). Before publishing his “Pierre Menard,” Borges had the opportunity to become familiar with the latest writings of the surrealists in Paris in the pages of Sur, where he was one of the most important contributors. On April 1936, Sur dedicated a special issue to surrealism (19 April 1936) which included Breton’s fragment “El castillo estrellado” from Amour fou, poems by Paul Eluard in Spanish and French, and a striking group portrait by Valentine Hugo, a friend of Victoria Ocampo and former lover of Breton. In May 1937, Sur 32 published an excerpt from Breton’s upcoming Anthology of Black Humor, under the title “Cabezas de tormenta,” with notes on Swift, Xavier Forneret, Lautréamont, Jarry, Kafka, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Duchamp. The note on Lautréamont includes several clues that Borges may have used for his Menard. Breton cites the “demonstration through the absurd [demonstración por el absurdo]” (17) as one of the landmarks of Lautréamont, and this is precisely what Borges’ anonymous narrator says about Pierre Menard’s rewritten Quijote: “I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd [un dislate]; justifying that ‘absurdity’ shall be the primary object of this note” (Borges, Collected Fictions 90). Lautréamont’s poetics of playing with philosophical maxims through an absurd black humor is Borges’ Menard’s own poetics. The issue of Sur preceding the issue of May 1939 in which Borges publishes his story includes a review of Breton’s Dictionnaire abregé du surréalisme (1938) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a friend of Ocampo’s who frequented La Maison des Amis des Livres and was introduced by Valery Larbaud in Littérature, where his text “Criailleries” appeared in September 1919. In his review, Gómez de la Serna cites Lautréamont’s poetics as the core of the surrealist project through the use of black humor, absurdity, and play (“Diccionario abreviado” 77–80). An extensive exchange of letters gives us further insight into the personal network underlying such publications. In the early 1930s, through Monnier’s circles, Ocampo had been introduced to Valentine Hugo, an important surrealist painter, and to the surrealist group. The acquaintance came at the right time, as Breton was busy promoting surrealism abroad. He was very interested in collaborating with Ocampo, who expressed an interest in introducing surrealism in the pages of Sur. The correspondence between Ocampo and Breton (1934–1936)

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and Ocampo and Valentine Hugo (1935–1946), held in Harvard’s Houghton Library, testifies to an intellectual exchange that worked both ways between Paris and Buenos Aires, and which materialized in Minotaure being sent to Buenos Aires and Sur to Paris. A letter from Breton to Ocampo on September 29, 1935 discusses texts that Ocampo had requested for her special issue on surrealism in Sur, which was to appear in 1936. In the same letter, Breton mentions having received the issues of Sur that she’d sent, and we can assume that Ocampo in turn received the Minotaure, which Breton mentions in the same letter as well. Half a year later, a second letter from Breton, dated February 25, 1936, begins by thanking Ocampo for the recently received new issues of Sur and discusses the translation of his fragment “Le château étoilé.” Breton writes that he had contacted Borges’ brother-in-law, Guillermo de Torre for the translation but never heard from him. He entrusts to Ocampo the supervision of the Spanish translation, for which a good possibility, he writes, would be Gervasio Guillot Muñoz (Breton, Letters to Victoria Ocampo). The letters received by Ocampo from Valentine Hugo give further insight about how Minotaure was being sent to Buenos Aires and about Ocampo’s connection to the surrealist group. Whereas the letters she received from Breton remain rather formal and official, the letters received from Valentine Hugo testify to a close friendship, of a similar nature to Ocampo’s friendship with Monnier. A letter sent from Paris on August 7, 1935 follows Ocampo’s return to Buenos Aires. In this letter, Valentine informs her of Breton’s second break with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in the winter of 1934, following their initial break in 1924, when Breton decided to leave Dada, which was not his creation, to pursue his own project of surrealism. Later, in 1929, when Breton had published the second manifesto of surrealism and was trying to get more support to make up for the losses in the group—Artaud, Desnos, Soupault—he’d approached Tristan Tzara again. Valentine Hugo’s letter speaks of the surrealist issue of Sur that Ocampo was planning. As she writes, Ocampo is especially keen on having Breton and Eluard for the issue, and they had expressed their intention to collaborate with Sur: “anyway, you’ll finally have only these two [Breton and Eluard] as you wanted, and I totally understand.” Eluard could send an extended poem and Breton an even more extended poetic article, “like the articles he publishes in Minotaure, speaking of everything and especially of himself.” Ocampo must have been receiving the issues of Minotaure at this time, since Valentine Hugo implies that she was familiar with their style.

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A month later, on September 7, 1935, Valentine Hugo sends a letter which indicates that it was she who had originally put Ocampo and Breton in contact for the surrealist special issue of Sur. Both Breton and Eluard received a thousand francs from Ocampo for their contribution, and Hugo writes about the group’s deterioration as she tries to put together a solid issue for Sur but ends up only with Breton’s and Eluard’s contributions and her own paintings. A letter sent on February 23, 1939 finds Ocampo in Paris meeting with Eluard (and possibly Breton), as Hugo mentions. Considering that Ocampo was visiting the surrealist group three months before the publication in May of the Minotaure double issue that published the Lautréamont dossier, she may have been familiar with this dossier and its contents (Hugo, Letters to Victoria Ocampo). *

*

*

The double issue 12–13 of Minotaure turned out to be the magazine’s last issue. It was projected to appear on October 15, 1938, but ended up appearing seven months later, on May 12, 1939. The eleventh issue that appeared in Spring 1938 had announced that “The next issue of Minotaure will appear on October 15. It will be a very important special double issue illustrated with many color plates.” Such an announcement was unusual for Minotaure, and it is likely that Breton was already in the possession of the documents discovered by Curt Müller, and presumably also of Dr. Menard’s article on Lautréamont. Since the issue was delayed seven months, one reason could have been that it ended up including also Breton’s extended account of his trip to Mexico, and by the time issue 11 came out, Breton had already left. The issue includes a letter by Breton facing the table of contents, giving the information about the upcoming “very important double issue.” Breton writes this just before embarking for Mexico, encouraging his readers to “Suivez MINOTAURE” (Breton, Letter). Once it finally appeared, the double issue 12–13 was accompanied by an anonymous text “Éternité de Minotaure”—very likely written by Breton, as we recognize his ideas and style—that justifies the delay by stating that this is an unconventional magazine that prefers to digest the articles rather than have a regular periodicity. The only very special things about this double issue were the Lautréamont dossier and Breton’s supplement “Souvenir de Mexique.” Yet in spring 1938 the editors couldn’t have been referring to the latter, as Breton was just leaving for Mexico, so they couldn’t have had the material. The issue of Sur that included Borges’ short story was printed on May 30, 1939, which would have given Borges more than enough time to become familiar with the Lautréamont dossier, which existed as early as Spring 1938.

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Lautréamont and plagiarism in Littérature, Minotaure, Mesures, and Sur The story of Borges’ engagement with surrealism, and particularly with Lautréamont and plagiarism, is the story of the international networks configured by four magazines throughout the two decades of the interwar period: Littérature, Minotaure, Mesures, and Sur. These magazines published intellectuals who migrated from one magazine to another, and provided a key means by which surrealism became an international movement with a global spread. In their pages, we witness surrealism’s metamorphoses as it travels beyond its country of origin and begins to encompass other types of cultural capital that serve different political and literary purposes abroad. The story begins in Adrienne Monnier’s circle at La Maison des Amis des Livres. There the established avant-garde generation begotten by Mallarmé, represented by Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Guillaume Apollinaire, meets with the arising avant-garde generation of writers in their early twenties, grouped around André Breton, and including Theodore Fraenkel, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault. The result of these interactions was the literary magazine Littérature (1919–1924), directed by the future core of the surrealist group: Breton, Aragon, and Soupault and initially distributed by Monnier. The Littérature group started under the mentorship of Valéry, who gave the magazine its name, but they soon abandoned him for new mentors like Apollinaire or Jean Paulhan, the influential editor of the dominant magazine Nouvelle Revue Française that brought the surrealists to the attention of the legitimating agents and institutions. Littérature is the place where the established generation of symbolist poets meets with the new avant-garde, and the gate through which the international avantgarde movements like Dada find a voice on the Parisian scene. As Littérature becomes more radical in approach, Breton abandons the project for the first surrealist magazine that accompanies the 1924 manifesto, La révolution surréaliste (1924–1929). The intellectual group will now migrate in different directions: contributors to Littérature like Valéry, Jean Paulhan, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Max Jacob will contribute one decade later to Mesures (1935–1940), also distributed by Monnier, but with a broader scope and a true understanding of world literature; the former directors of Littérature will become part of two very orthodox surrealist magazines—La révolution surréaliste (1924–1929) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–1933)—before joining the more international and interdisciplinary

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Minotaure (1933–1939), the magazine that would make surrealism renowned throughout the world. The fourth piece of the puzzle is Victoria Ocampo’s Argentinian magazine Sur (1931–1992), in which many modern, modernist, and contemporary writers found a place, including Breton, Eluard, and some of the former contributors to Littérature like Giuseppe Ungaretti and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Through her close friend Monnier, Ocampo thus had access to all the intellectual networks brought together by La Maison des Amis des Livres, and she became a great friend of Valéry, himself an intimate friend of Monnier’s. During World War II, Valéry corresponded intensively with Ocampo, in whom he confided all his anxieties related to his age, illness, and situation as a refugee, and Ocampo assisted him in finding a place to live and constantly helped him financially. Valéry too published in Sur, and had a great admirer in one of the Argentinian magazine’s major contributors: Jorge Luis Borges. In “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote,” Borges engages obliquely but deeply with the cultural capital of surrealism as it was presented in the Parisian magazines Littérature, Mesures, and Minotaure. I would point to four aspects of this relation as particularly resonant for Borges’ story: 1:

2:

3: 4:

The presence of Mallarmé and Valéry in the first issues of Littérature as symbols of a self-referential poetic language, a view with which the surrealists will soon break; The presence of Tristan Tzara and the publication of the Dada manifestoes in the pages of Littérature advocating a playful means of creation like cannibalism and kleptomania that overlaps with plagiarism; The publication by Littérature of Lautréamont’s rediscovered Poésies I et II ; Three pieces published in Minotaure in the years when Victoria Ocampo approached Breton via Valentine Hugo: Breton’s article “Le merveilleux contre le mystère: À propos du symbolisme” in Minotaure 9 (1936); Paul Eluard’s “Premières vues anciennes,” giving selections from an anthology of poetry Avenir de la poésie published by the NRF (Minotaure 10/1937); and the special Lautréamont dossier, “Documents inédits sur le comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) et son oeuvre” (Minotaure 12–13/ May 1939).

Borges must have been very familiar with both Littérature and Minotaure, and the references in his story indicate that he must have read all these articles. To this, we should add Borges’ own presence in these networks of circulation with a text that confesses obliquely, in Borges’ typical way, what he owes to contemporaries

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whose names he prefers not to mention. Along with Breton, Eluard, Paulhan, and Vladimir Nabokov, Borges himself is present in the pages of Mesures, to which he contributed “L’Approche du caché” [The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim], a text that he later included in the volume El Jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) next to “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote.” Borges’ complex engagement with surrealism goes beyond his dialogue with the article published by Dr. Pierre Menard on Lautréamont’s handwriting. Dr. Menard’s analysis is only the tip of an iceberg that goes down to the beginnings of surrealism, to the magazine Littérature, to Monnier’s intellectual circles, to Valéry’s preeminence as mentor of the rising group of surrealists, and to Breton’s canonization of Lautréamont and Edmond Teste as a proto-surrealist writer and character respectively. Revisiting the intellectual climate of Littérature may prove a good starting point for tracing the historical context that made a character like Borges’ Pierre Menard possible. The similarities between the historical climate around Littérature and Borges’ plot are striking. In the aftermath of World War I, when the French poetical climate is still under the influence of the second generation of symbolists, Paris sees the rise of a group of avant-garde writers gathered around a dead writer whose work they cherish. The group tries to protect their idol’s memory from being stained by the State’s mechanisms of consecration and opposes the literary establishment’s attempt to incorporate their mentor’s work. Last but not least, the group fights repeated attempts to posthumously attribute to their mentor works that are not his. And what matters most: the dead mentor’s major work canonizes plagiarism as a method of creation. If we try to disambiguate our story by adding in the real names, it reads as follows: Paris in the early 1920s, still under the influence of the second generation of symbolists led by Valéry, sees the rise of the future surrealist group, gathered around the marginal and obscure nineteenth-century poet and writer Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, whose work they canonize next to Rimbaud’s poems and Valéry’s Edmond Teste. The surrealists then protest in 1922 against the official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Lautréamont’s death, viewing it as turning the radical, revolutionary writer into an established one. In 1939, Curt Müller publishes in Minotaure a series of documents through which he tries to attribute a minor poem to Lautréamont, through a very complex process involving questions of authorship, editorship, paternity, and anonymity; the surrealist group dismisses the possibility that this poem actually belongs to him. As we’re told in the editor’s note that accompanied these documents, “as

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‘Combat’ in its poetic character doesn’t show any spiritual echo of Lautréamont’s typical manner, there is no substantial argument to justify attributing it to the authentic poet of Chants de Maldoror” (“Note de la rédaction” 82). And what matters most: Lautréamont’s major work, as Breton canonized it, was his Poésies I et II , where the poet advocated plagiarism as method of creation, which he used in the only texts that he authored during his very short life of twenty-four years: Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies I et II .

Littérature is the birthplace of Pierre Menard Littérature began as another magazine that seemed to represent the second generation of French symbolism, and at least for the first seven issues, from March to September 1919, Breton’s group was under Valéry’s guidance and Monnier’s administration. Breton began his career as an admirer of Mallarmé and Valéry, and published symbolist poetry in the magazine La Phalange. Starting with the eighth issue in 1919, Littérature is under the administration of René Hilsum’s Au Sans Pareil, following Breton’s quarrel with Monnier over Claudel’s pro-Catholic and nationalistic stances and Valéry’s compromise with academism. Looking at the directorship of Littérature, we can see Breton becoming the absolute leader of the group-to-be in 1924, when Littérature stopped appearing. From the first issue in 1919 until the twentieth in 1921, Littérature was directed by Breton, Aragon, and Soupault. The first three issues of the new series (March 1922–May 1922) find only Breton and Soupault directing the magazine. Starting with the fourth issue of September 1922 and until the thirteenth and final issue in 1924, Breton takes over as the sole director. Following Mallarmé’s model of weekly mardi meetings, the Littérature group met on les vendredis, just like Pierre Menard’s group in Borges. The first and second issues of Littérature published two symbolist poems by Valéry, whereas the third issue of May 1919 opens with Mallarmé’s poem “Le château de l’espérance” and closes with Lautréamont’s Poésies II , thus symbolically marking a transition from the advocate of a pure, universal language and a book that would comprise the whole universe to the writer who coined plagiarism as the modern method of creation. Interestingly, both references seem to be at play in Borges’ Menard. Discovered initially by Valery Larbaud and introduced through an article in the symbolist

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magazine La Phalange (February 20, 1914), Lautréamont’s Poésies were brought to Breton’s attention by Louis Aragon, who was perhaps the most well-read of the surrealists. It was thanks to Breton and the surrealists that Lautréamont began to be looked at as one of the most visionary and revolutionary of writers. As early as 1925, in the preface to an issue of the surrealist Belgian magazine Le disque vert devoted to “Le cas Lautréamont,” André Gide acknowledges that the surrealist group has the merit of having recognized the importance of Lautréamont for modern poetry: “I believe that the greatest glory of the group formed by Breton, Aragon, and Soupault is having proclaimed the literary and more than literary importance of the admirable Lautréamont” (Gide 3). Symbolically, Lautréamont got his place in the surrealists’ Tarot of Marseille, sharing the sign of the star with Alice the Siren and Freud the Magus, all three shown on the cover of this book next to le marquis de Sade. Breton didn’t include Valéry in Littérature so much for his symbolist poetry as for having authored the Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci and for having created Edmond Teste. In da Vinci’s method, Breton found a case of proto-automatic writing/creation, which he quoted in all his theoretical position-takings ever afterward, while in Edmond Teste Breton found the creation of a perfect surrealist object, made of absurdity and black humor like Kafka’s Odradek. Next to Valéry’s poem “Ode secrète,” the twelfth issue of Littérature from 1920 includes also Louis Aragon’s review of Valéry’s book on da Vinci and the thirteenth announces that Littérature will publish more new texts by Valéry. In the fourteenth issue from June 1920, Littérature announces a series of recent publications by Au Sans Pareil, including Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques and Lautréamont’s Poésies with a preface by Soupault. When the narrator of Borges’ “Pierre Menard” speaks of “la obra impar” as the precious work of Menard’s transcribing from Cervantes’ novel, he is using a synonym for the name of René Hilsum’s avant-garde publishing house, and he is referencing obliquely the two major works that made Au Sans Pareil famous, and which shared a common interest. Les Champs magnétiques came to be known in the history of surrealism as the first example of automatic writing, and Lautréamont’s Poésies included his seminal aphorisms on the necessity of plagiarism and multiple authorship. In the same issue, Jean Paulhan starts to publish fragments from Jacob Cow that will come out in book form in 1921 from the same Au Sans Pareil. Paulhan dedicates this text to Valéry, and in its final form, he writes about Lautréamont’s

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Figure 4 DADA soulève TOUT , 12 January 1921.

notion of plagiarism as aphoristic condensation of language. The dedication to Valéry is meant to be ironic. Valéry advocated the self-referentiality of poetic language and its detachment from practice, whereas the surrealist poetry will look at Lautréamont as a means to return poetic language to the practice of life. It is from this book by Jean Paulhan that Paul Eluard quotes at length in his Minotaure article “Premières vues anciennes” when he discusses plagiarism in relation to Lautréamont’s Poésies. After Valéry disappeared from Littérature, there began an extended collaboration with Tristan Tzara and Dada. Most of the Dada manifestoes champion negation, reversed order of meaning, and plagiarism as creative means. In the manifesto “DADA soulève TOUT ” from 12 January 1921 (see Figure 4), we read that “oui = non” and that “Le Ministère est renversé . . . PAR DADA .” Both ideas are ones that characterize Lautréamont’s notion of plagiarism: borrowing the order of words from an author, but reversing the affirmative

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with a negative sentence and the other way around. In an article dedicated to Lautréamont in Littérature, Tzara touches on the old conception of creation as originality: “Le comte de Lautréamont has gone beyond the fine line that separates creation from madness. For him, creation is already mediocrity.” (Tzara, “Note,” 20.) A notable further similarity between the historical context of Lautréamont in the Littérature group in the 1920s and the situation in “Pierre Menard” is how the group of followers united to protest against their mentor’s work becoming the pretext for a commemorative committee that sought to use his name to build a national identity, consecrating and canonizing his work while suppressing its revolutionary potential. In the first issue of the new series of Littérature on March 1, 1922, the future surrealist group published a “Lettre ouverte au Comité Lautréamont” protesting against the committee’s plans: We hear that a group of devotees, into which some avant-garde critics have adroitly inserted themselves, has taken the initiative to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont. The anniversary ceremony is supposed to take place on March 22, Place Vendôme . . . even the pretext for this small celebration is ill-founded, as the centenary [sic] ended last year. 3

Borges’ Menard shared this view: “The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions” (94). The group at Littérature legitimizes itself as the preserver of Lautréamont’s memory against the State’s mechanisms of appropriation: Monuments . . . don’t call for our attention otherwise. But our readers, who haven’t forgotten Isidore Ducasse’s Poésies published in this very magazine, understand why we find the joke dubious this time. No, we won’t allow Lautréamont to serve to exalt those who Died For The Fatherland (M.P.L.P). We are ready to do anything to put a stop to this masquerade. “Lettre ouverte au Comité Lautréamont” 3

Menard would agree: “Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension” (94). After the orthodox age of surrealism passed and Breton became aware of the necessity of taking surrealism to the next level, he moved the surrealist group to Minotaure, where under the directorship of Albert Skira and E. Tériade, Breton was constrained to join forces with the former group of surrealist dissidents who

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were active in Georges Bataille’s arts and ethnography magazine Documents. Some of these dissidents, whose names appeared now in Minotaure, like Michel Leiris, plus others excommunicated from the core surrealism by Breton, like Henri Michaux, migrated to another magazine administrated by the indefatigable Monnier: Mesures. The magazine appeared under Henry Church’s directorship from 1935 through 1940 and had a very strong editorial board that included Bernard Groethuysen, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Paulhan and Ungaretti were intellectuals with a great social and intellectual mobility in the field; they connected the former Littérature group with whom they had published to Monnier’s circuits—Paulhan was a very close friend of Monnier’s—the influential Nouvelle Revue Française where Paulhan was editor, and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur. It is through this set of intellectual networks that Mesures developed as a magazine of world literature; it is not surprising that we find here both Breton’s fragments from Amour fou and Paul Eluard’s surrealist poetry, but also Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Mademoiselle O” and Borges’ “L’Approche du caché” in Nestor Ibarra’s translation. Leafing through the issues of Mesures, we find a good mix of contemporary and classical names, but also names from antiquity, from the Near and Far East, next to religious books: James Joyce, Meister Eckhart, Stefan George, T.S. Eliot, Kleist, Melville, Brunetto Latini, ancient Tibetan texts, W.H. Auden, Denis de Rougemont, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, ancient Greek hymns, Heidegger, Queneau, English medieval poems, Martin Buber, Kierkegaard, Swift, Esenin, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, ancient Chinese poetry, the Upanishads, Pirandello, Balzac, and selections from the Book of Chuang Tzu. One of the most striking short stories by Borges, “L’Approche du caché,” which appeared in issue 2 (April 15, 1939) just a month before “Pierre Menard” appeared in Sur, closes with a paragraph that, given the context addressed by Menard—Lautréamont, Littérature, plagiarism—seems to ring a few bells: “It goes without saying that a contemporary book covers itself in honor by owing something to an ancient book for no one likes, as Johnson had already remarked, to owe anything to one’s contemporaries” (122). In keeping with this sentiment, for Borges’ Menard the reference to Cervantes was the most comfortable one, whereas any references to Lautréamont, Breton, and the actual contemporary Pierre Menard had to be obscured, just as Menard the character obscured his real work, which remained in the latent subconscious of his bibliography as the oeuvre nonpareil.

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From Lautréamont’s plagiarism to Breton’s surrealist object Plagiarism went through several stages before it fed into the theory of the surrealist object. While still searching for his own identity and future intellectual projects, Breton associated himself with Tristan Tzara’s Dada. Tzara’s poetics of playful negation and reversal of already existing works of art and literature was bringing Lautréamont’s plagiarism one step closer to the avant-garde modernity. As Breton developed surrealism and parted from Dada, he redefined Lautréamont and Edmond Teste in relation to the major surrealist revolution: the surrealist object. With a predecessor in Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” that was halfway between Lautréamont’s plagiarism and the future surrealist object, Breton managed to push the concept a step further and coined la trouvaille or the found object. Looking back at these several stages that began with Lautréamont’s plagiarism and ended with Breton’s la trouvaille may shed some light on the complex reality that Borges’ Pierre Menard is engaging with, and may also help explain why Valéry is a reference cited in the text, whereas Lautréamont and the surrealists remain obscured, with a few minor exceptions where the narrator seems to hint at a surrealist context, but then immediately departs from it. Everything began with Lautréamont’s shocking statement in his Poésies II (1870), which was reprinted by Breton in 1919 in the third issue of Littérature: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It hastens after an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it with the correct one” (327). Then it continued with Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, which tells the unusual story of a character who is not the subject of novelistic events, but rather of interior, intellectual events. Teste develops into a character reduced to a consciousness reflecting upon its own nature. He doesn’t use the word “plagiarism” per se, but he is describing it: “At times, it’s someone who is a complete stranger to our body and sensibility, who speaks our words, for purposes of his own” (Monsieur Teste 88–9). The corollary of such a view is plagiarism as the new poetics: “nothing is outside of me. I shall even make some beings that resemble me a bit, and I shall give them eyes and reason. I shall also give them a very vague suspicion of my existence, so they will be led, by the very reason I have endowed them with, to deny my existence; and their eyes shall be so made that they can see an infinite number of things but not me” (90). Tristan Tzara’s new poetics of Dada transformed the legacy of Lautréamont and Teste into a playful form of plagiarism: the Dada manifestoes are pervaded

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by cannibalistic and kleptomaniac imagery that stands for the new poetics. The avant-garde artist lives by cannibalizing others or by stealing things. This technique was legitimized by Dada and spread like wildfire in the peripheral spaces of Central and Eastern Europe, the French colonies, and Latin America. With its anticolonial and anti-hierarchical politics, Dada and then surrealism were found very palatable by the artists and writers coming from the semiperiphery or the periphery of the field, who exported this new type of poetics back to their national and local contexts. To cannibalize Europe and its classical names in art and literature was a good way for Latin American artists and writers to create their own identity and to have a say in the international game. Following Francis Picabia’s 1920 Manifeste Cannibale and literary magazine Cannibale, Oswald de Andrade returned from his Parisian circles to Brazil and published the Manifesto Antropófago (1928), which became a foundational text for Brazilian modernism. Borges himself was present in Paris in the cannibalizing years and learned a thing or two from this recent avant-garde method. This sense of artistic exhaustion already existed in the poetry of Valéry’s master, Mallarmé, whose famous opening line of the poem “Brise marine” could very well stand as a heading for any avant-garde poetics: “La chair est triste, hélas! Et j’ai lu tous les livres” (The flesh is sad, alas! And I’ve read all the books). Continued in Mallarmé’s brilliant idea of a book that would contain the whole universe and the dream of a universal language, the exhaustion of creative possibilities asserted the futility of the obsession for novelty and originality that stood at the heart of the romantic agenda. Since everything had been said and done, the avant-garde artist could only “steal” bits and scraps from others and put them together in a different way, or else live by consuming what others had done before. If the artist who cannibalizes others is very much aware of doing so, the kleptomaniac has a convenient bad memory. The kleptomaniac’s favorite technique is the collage, which became a legitimate form of creation thanks to Cubism, Dada, and surrealism. One of the first masters of the collage was Francis Picabia, the first avant-garde painter who next to Marcel Duchamp became famous first in New York and only after in Europe. Initially associated with Dada, Picabia’s magazine Cannibale was distributed as well by Au Sans Pareil. When translated into a poetics, cannibalization and kleptomania become synonyms for plagiarism. From Lautréamont, through Mallarmé and Valéry’s Teste, plagiarism was transformed by Dada into a playful form of creation:

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Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem . . . And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestoes 39

In their manifestos, the Dada artists reproduced this playful idea of collage/ plagiarism by printing their texts in different fonts and sizes. A cannibal, a kleptomaniac or simply a thief, the Dada artist is a forger of his identity and a parasite whose existence depends on others: “Sham dadas” (19), “Everybody who looks and who understands can easily be classified somewhere between poetry and love, between steak and painting. They’ll be digested, they’ll be digested” (23), “I was recently accused of the theft of some furs. Probably because people thought I should still be classified as a poet” (23), “selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is DADA” (38). Associated with Dada in the late 1910s before switching to surrealism, Marcel Duchamp developed his own concept of plagiarism in the visual arts by legitimizing the readymade as a new form of art. Duchamp’s most renowned work, The Fountain, was presented as belonging to a certain Richard Mutt—the name inscribed on the urinal chosen by Duchamp—who sent it to an exhibition, whose committee rejected it on moral and ethical grounds. As Duchamp wrote: They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain: 1. 2.

Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. Now, Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumber’s show windows. “The Richard Mutt Case” 5

With Duchamp’s readymade, plagiarism begins to overlap with the lucky find that places an ordinary object in a new or defamiliarizing context, which makes the accusation of plagiarism futile. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made this fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared

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under the new title [‘The Richard Mutt Case’] and point of view, created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges” (“The Richard Mutt Case” 5). We are now only a step away from André Breton’s variant of the surrealist object—la trouvaille—and from Pierre Menard’s notion of writing as reproducing word for word a few chapters of Cervantes’ novel, but in a different historical context, which initially would seem absurd: “Composing the Quixote in the early seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even inevitable undertaking; in the early twentieth, it is virtually impossible” (93, my emphasis). With his notion of plagiarism, Borges is not far from the surrealist’s creation as the found object. Simply by finding an object at the flea market in Saint-Ouen or on the streets and giving it new meaning by de-contextualizing it and reinterpreting, the surrealist is a creator. Between an object found at the flea market and finding le mot juste in a previously written text there is no substantial difference. As Breton defined it in Amour fou, la trouvaille is the result of the synonymy between necessity and desire. The found object becomes a creation once it is placed in a new web of signifiers or, as Lautréamont would put it, in a defamiliarizing context like the dissection table, which would turn the “chance encounter” between an umbrella and a sewing machine into an absurd one. For Borges, the defamiliarizing context for Cervantes’ text would be the twentieth century. In Amour fou, Breton theorized the found object: What is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found. This trouvaille, whether it be artistic, scientific, philosophic, or as useless as anything, is enough to undo the beauty of everything beside it. In it alone can we recognise the marvelous precipitate of desire . . . Daily life abounds, moreover, in just this type of small discovery . . . You only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth. Interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols. Mad Love 13–15

A trouvaille could be anything: a primary school teacher’s shoe admired by little Salvador Dalí that the mature Dalí would sell as a fashion accessory; a shoe-spoon announcing Jacqueline Lamba’s entering Breton’s life; a previously written text that one chances upon one day and finds in it le mot juste, the only

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way in which one could express a certain idea. Simply by chancing upon the same idea through the same order of the words, one performs a creative act: Lautréamont chanced upon the aphorisms by Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Vauvenargues, Borges’ Pierre Menard chanced upon Cervantes’ novel. Copying them word for word and modifying them only slightly or “creatively correcting” the original (in Lautréamont’s case) or cutting down the Spanish novel to two and a half chapters (in Menard’s case) is a new way to be original. Lautréamont believed that having identical mental or sensory experiences authorizes the use of the same words in the same order. When a poet chances upon the perfect verbal expression of his own private experiences, he has a revelation: “When a thought offers itself to us like a truth that runs in the street, if we take the trouble to develop it, we find that it’s a discovery” (Les Chants de Maldoror. Poésies I et II 361). But Lautréamont has this revelation that great discoveries happen in the street—a belief he shares later with Tristan Tzara and with Borges’ Herbert Quain—by chancing upon another one of La Rouchefoucault’s Réflexions et Maximes: “When a thought offers itself to us like a discovery, if we take the trouble to develop it, we often find that it’s a truth that runs in the street” (Steinmetz’ notes, Les Chants 446, n94). Borges’ Pierre Menard refers to his transcribing from Cervantes’ novel as “my revealed novel” [mi divulgada novela], while “It is a revelation [revelación] to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes” (Collected Fictions 94). The project of “my revealed novel” appears in a letter written by Menard, dated September 30, 1934: “My purpose is merely astonishing . . . The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel” (91). In 1934, in the fifth issue of Minotaure, Breton published what would become one of the most often cited surrealist theoretical texts, which he would later include in the opening of Amour fou: “La beauté sera convulsive.” It is here that he theorized the found object—la trouvaille—as a revealed thing of beauty among other “fabricated objects” in a way that defies logic: “Such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed [la chose révélée], the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths . . . This object, in its matter, in its form, I more or less predicted. Now I have chanced to discover it [il m’est arrivé de le découvrir], unique, doubtless, among so many other fabricated objects” (Mad Love 13). Such a revelation, Breton continues, is the

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image produced in automatic writing, which creates impossible dream objects in response to some poetic fantasy: “The image, such as it is produced in automatic writing, has always constituted for me a perfect example of this. In such a way, I have wanted to see some very special object constructed in response to some poetic fantasy” (Mad Love 13). By pushing one step further Lautréamont’s identical mental experiences that lead to the use of identical words, Menard produces among his bibliographical items “a monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary from concepts that are . . . ideal objects created by convention for the needs of poetry” (89). These ideal objects will be used to enrich our empoverished notion of reality also in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” an idea Borges may have chanced upon in Breton’s 1934 Minotaure article, where Breton writes—continuing the idea of surrealist dream objects from the 1924 “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité”—that “[la trouvaille] alone can enlarge the universe [agrandir l’univers], causing it to relinquish some of its opacity, letting us discover its extraordinary capacities for reserve, proportionate to the innumerable needs of the spirit” (Mad Love 15). In the same 1934 text, Breton insists that chancing upon such an object in what is already fabricated through automatism doesn’t mean mechanization or a lack of spontaneity: “I have never stopped advocating creation, spontaneous action” (11). Even as he sets out on his impossible task of transcribing Don Quijote, Menard too insists this is not a mechanical gesture: “his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (91). So, too, Lautréamont wasn’t copying La Rouchefoucauld on common truths revealed as discoveries, he was producing this maxim himself by spontaneously living the same mental experience that would result in the use of identical language. Conversely, it was Mallarmé himself who envisioned a poetry that, even when translated, would raise in the reader’s mind the identical image that the poet had when he put it into verse. The two opposite figures of Lautréamont and Mallarmé have more in common than one might have suspected, and young André Breton was the first to notice this. In the same Minotaure text from 1934 where he theorizes la trouvaille as convulsive beauty, Breton remembers how as a young poet he went to visit his mentor Valéry in 1913. When asked why he wanted to become a poet, he replied that he wanted to recreate the mental and sensory experiences that a certain number of poets raised in him:

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The first time I visited Paul Valéry, when I was seventeen, I remember his insistent questions about my reasons for devoting myself to poetry . . . I was only trying, I said to him, to obtain (to procure for myself?) states of mind like those which certain odd poetic movements had aroused in me. It is striking and admirable that such states of perfect receptivity suffer no diminution in time because, among the examples I am now tempted to give of those short formulas having a magic effect on me, several of those I proposed to Valéry more than twenty years ago return. For example, I remember so well “How salubrious a wind!” from Rimbaud’s “The River at Cassis,” or “Then, as the night was aging,” of Mallarmé from Poe, and perhaps most of all the conclusion of this advice from a mother to her daughter in a story by Loüys: to be wary, I think, of the young men going along the road, “with the evening wind and winged dust.” Need I say that such extremely rare cases, with the discovery some time later of Isidore Ducasse and his Chants de Maldoror and his Poésies, then bloomed into an unexpected profusion? . . . I shall nonetheless continue to call upon all those whose wording has utterly transfixed me some time or another, placing me entirely under the sway [sous le pouvoir] of Baudelaire (“And strange flowers. . .”), of Cros, of Nouveau, of Vaché. Mad Love 9–10

Young Breton becomes a perfect model for Borges’ Menard, himself supposedly a poet who was mentored by Valéry in that very decade—the 1910s— and whose models are the same names cited by Breton. Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Poe, and Baudelaire appear in the same paragraph in Borges’ text: Menard, “a Symboliste from Nîmes, a devotee essentially of Poe—who begat Baudelaire, who begat Mallarmé, who begat Valéry” (92). In the same letter from 1934 cited in the text, Menard writes: “I cannot imagine the universe without Poe’s ejaculation ‘Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!’ or the Bateau ivre [of Rimbaud]” (92). Pierre Loüys—though unnamed in Borges’ text—is the editor of La Conque, the symbolist magazine where Menard is said to have published twice the same symbolist sonnet (the first item in the bibliography). The only name that is absent from Borges’ text is that of Lautréamont, who becomes the obscured figure that haunts his pages: the author of la obra invisible y impar.

Lautréamont as a model for Pierre Menard As Adrienne Monnier noted, the French avant-garde activity was of more interest to foreign artists and writers in Paris than to the contemporary French audience.

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The two surrealist magazines that they were most interested in, according to Monnier—Minotaure and Documents—are the ones in which the graphologist Pierre Menard published his two interventions analyzing the handwriting of the Marquis de Sade and of Lautréamont: “Le Marquis de Sade: Étude graphologique” (Documents, April–December, 1929, fascicle 7) and “Analyse de l’Écriture de Lautréamont” (Minotaure 12–13/May 1939). There are four reasons why Lautréamont’s writings were a suitable and fertile model for Borges’ Pierre Menard. They all represent the major directions taken by the Lautréamont scholarship as early as 1925, when the French-Belgian magazine Le disque vert, directed by Franz Hellens and Henry Michaux, dedicated the May issue to Lautréamont: 1. Plagiarism as creation for a peripheral (i.e., subversive) writer; 2. The subconscious as visionary force; 3. The metatextual character of literature; and 4. Use of the peripheral, marginal, and obscure as the strategy to conquer the center. The special issue of Le disque vert included many texts that used the words “subconscious,” “unconscious,” and “madness” in relation to Lautréamont’s poetry. The special issue, its context, and its branding on the interwar market marked a date in the history of the field that legitimized Lautréamont’s writings as proto-surrealist, which also explains the Freudian concepts that framed the approaches. The surrealists Breton, Soupault, Crevel, and Eluard were among the contributors, as well as Léon Pierre-Quint, who had authored the first comprehensive book on Proust (Marcel Proust, sa vie, son oeuvre, 1925) and was director of Editions du Sagittaire, the second publishing house which associated itself with surrealism after Au Sans Pareil, publishing Breton’s first manifesto of surrealism in 1924. Léon Pierre-Quint was one of the first to read Lautréamont in the context of surrealist and modern poetry—“It’s with them [Rimbaud and Lautréamont] that the pure subconscious appears” (Pierre-Quint 22)—and he went as far as to find in him the first instance of automatic writing: “Lautréamont discovers the device of automatic writing” (22); “And it is again the subconscious that we find in [Breton’s and Soupault’s] Les Champs magnétiques and in [Robert Desnos’] Deuil pour Deuil]” (23). “This poetry exists. And it’s around it that almost all modern poetry revolves” (24). The famous concept of automatic writing, coined by Breton in the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924, was halfway between Lautréamont’s creative plagiarism and Tzara’s self-kleptomania and cannibalization. Breton used automatic writing to describe Les Champs magnétiques, a text he wrote in collaboration with Philippe Soupault, apparently without the control of reason.

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The flow of words on the paper was supposed to be faster than reason and the co-authors wrote alternate sentences without looking at what the other had written before him. As a result, it is difficult to say which sentence belongs to which writer, as in the following example: “Famous men lose their lives in the carelessness of those beautiful houses that make the heart flutter.//How small they seem, these rescued waves! Earthly happiness runs in waves. Each object is Paradise” (Breton, Les Champs 90). Whereas Gide was underscoring the “more than literary importance” of Lautréamont’s writings, Jean Cassou remarked on their metatextual character: “His writing also raises the problem of literature because they are at once the invention, expansion, and destruction of literature, but set in relation with a thousand even vaster anxieties. More than literature, it belongs to metaliterature” (Cassou 30, author’s emphasis ). The fourth reason why Borges found in Lautréamont a model for his Menard is that he was very much like Borges himself, a peripheral writer who used his marginality as sign of distinction and a strategy to conquer the center. It is appropriate that this fourth characteristic of Lautréamont’s writings appears in the text signed by the peripheral Belgian poet J. Slauerhoff, which also gives the title of the special issue “Le cas Lautréamont.” One of Slauerhoff ’s most perceptive remarks has to do with the relation between a marginal writer, world literature, and the problem of influence and the context of consecration. This is why Lautréamont represents a case: it is the peripheral, the marginal, and the outcast or the mad that gets to take the lead in the aftermath of World War I, which witnessed a change from the dominance of rational classical spirits like Voltaire and Goethe, to that of Poe’s uncanniness, Hölderlin’s madness, Wilde’s and Dostoyevsky’s singularity and strangeness (Slauerhoff 81–2). Like Jean Cassou and the surrealists, Slauerhoff compares Lautréamont to Rimbaud and brings the subconscious into question but he stresses that, unlike Rimbaud, Lautréamont managed to master these irrational energies with the force of reason and to systematize them. Because of this, Lautréamont isn’t that far from the highly rational Valéry’s Edmond Teste—who is a master at reflecting upon his reflecting on reflection with sheer lucidity—and could influence a highly rational geometrical thinker such as Borges. *

*

*

Lautréamont’s influence on Borges goes deeper than the mere advocating for plagiarism, a method Borges entrusts to his dead poet Pierre Menard not without

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irony. Borges found in the marginal poet born in Montevideo many similarities with his own biography. Born in 1846 in Montevideo, Uruguay, back then a French colony, Isidore Ducasse was trilingual from an early age in French, Spanish, and English, just as Borges was. His father, François Ducasse, chancellor in Montevideo, sent him to Paris for his education, where Isidore Ducasse took the penname of “Lautréamont” when he signed his poetic works after initially publishing them anonymously. Lautréamont remained a poet and a writer formed between two continents, between Montevideo and Paris. His literary interests were diverse, ranging from the English high Romanticism of Byron to the marginal Equatorial poet Dolores de Veintemilla, from rationalist philosophers and logicians to the moralists and rhetoricians of the Enlightenment. Lautréamont followed the typical trajectory of a post-romantic and future avant-garde poet at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris, coming from a high bourgeois family, rich enough to afford publishing his works—Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies I et II—at his own expense. His cosmopolitan tastes, mixing the canonical with the obscure and marginal, enabled him to show a distant irony to the high Romantic poetry he had loved and studied in his adolescence, and also to move to a different type of poetry that defied the traditional conception of the genre—rhyme, rhythm, stanzas—and legitimized poetic prose and the aphorism as new forms for the practice of poetry. Despite the titles of his works— chants and poésies—they don’t resemble any kind of poetry written before then, apart from Rimbaud’s revolutionary poems and prose poems. Lautréamont’s Maldoror is at once a Byronic and an anti-Byronic character, one who embarks on a journey more of the mind than of the body, a rebel who defies morality, God, and humanity, who turns out to be a seducer and a murderer. But all this isn’t delivered through a traditional plot; the structure that Lautréamont maintains for his six cantos often points toward the metatextual character of the writing and at the dialogue in which Lautréamont was engaging with Goethe, Byron, Mickiewicz, the roman noir, and the Gothic novel. Highly autobiographical, Les Chants de Maldoror initially included the name of Lautréamont’s male lover, Jean Dazet. But the text went through several rewritings as Lautréamont wanted to first diminish, then totally obscure the autobiographical references: the 1868 edition published in Paris names Dazet, the 1868 later edition published in Bordeaux reduces Dazet to “D”: the final 1869 edition erases all biographical reference and puts an erotic metaphor in its place: “Oh, thigh with the look of silk” (Müller 75). Erasing his biography still further, his very short final texts called Poésies push the genre to its limits; Lautréamont

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engages here with the maxims and aphorisms of Pascal and the moralists La Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues. What Lautréamont finally understood through poetry was a philosophical or moral aphorism on the nature of writing or poetry, transcribed word for word, sometimes with no alteration, from philosophical or literary texts. Yet far from thinking of them as faint copies of great originals, Lautréamont saw his works as infused with a dangerous and uncanny power. He opened his Chants de Maldoror with a warning to the reader that could be written on the gate to Borges’ paradise of books: May it please Heaven that the reader, emboldened and become of a sudden momentarily ferocious like what he is reading, may trace in safety his pathway through the desolate morass of these gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water. Maldoror 1

Suspending all notion of distrust in his reading of Cervantes, Pierre Menard lets himself be completely absorbed by his text, to the point of becoming one with the words written by another.

Les Chants de Maldoror: from anonymity to pen name The history of the publication of Les Chants de Maldoror makes it the perfect text for Borges to engage with, as it is the clandestine history of a text that went through different stages of publication, with marginal editors or working at the limit of legality and with an author who first published anonymously, then under a pen name, until he finally revealed his identity. Staging the paternity of the text is a preoccupation that Lautréamont and Borges share. The fake paternity under which Les Chants were initially published was so persuasive that the surrealist Philippe Soupault, who edited his Oeuvres complètes at Au Sans Pareil in 1927, mistook Isidore Ducasse for the political agitator Félix Ducasse. Lautréamont’s playful use of the notions of authorship and paternity made him a great subject in the 1970s for the Tel Quel textualists like Philippe Sollers who found in him a very interesting case of thanatography/death of the biographical subject (Sollers 143). In Lautréamont’s case, the question of paternity was both biological and

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textual: “Les Chants configure the scene for a fierce fight against any principle of authority [Les Chants construisent le lieu d’une lutte farouche contre tout principe d’autorité]” (Steinmetz in Ducasse 35), as Lautréamont was rebelling both against his bourgeois father and the romantic literary tradition of his time. The history of Maldoror began in 1868, when the First Canto was published anonymously at the author’s expense by M.M. Balitout and Questroy, signed only with three asterisks ***. A year later, the first canto was reprinted in the anthology of Evariste Carrance, Parfums de l’âme, which resulted from a poetry contest. The index to Evariste Carrance’s anthology lists two different poems under ***: “Le Combat” and Les Chants de Maldoror. These documents were published in Minotaure by Curt Müller, who inferred that since the asterisks appeared in between the names Andrevetan and Autran, they ought to stand for “Auteur”—as Lautréamont sometimes signed himself in letters. Since it was known for a fact that Les Chants belonged to Lautréamont, Müller concluded that “Le Combat” must have been composed by the same “Auteur.” Even if the editor’s note following Curt Müller’s analysis rejects this hypothesis, the documents he discovered enabled him to trace Lautréamont’s complicated editorial trajectory, as well as his renegotiating of what authorship meant. The 1869 complete edition of Les Chants, published by Albert Lacroix and Verboeckoven in Brussels at the author’s expense, was signed for the first time with the pen name Comte de Lautréamont. Albert Lacroix was famous for publishing subversive writers, and didn’t bring the text into France but kept it in Belgium, where manuscripts banned in France often came into print. Lautréamont’s strange book thus arrived in Paris via a detour through the periphery. Auguste PouletMalassis, the publisher of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, was exiled in Belgium after publishing books that were considered immoral and subversive. PouletMalassis’s publication Bulletin des publications défendues en France imprimées à l’étranger included Maldoror, which made it part of a cluster of clandestine texts endowed with an aura of legitimacy by the very fact that they were banned as illegitimate to begin with. Albert Lacroix advised Ducasse to sell his books in Belgium and Switzerland rather than in France, as these semi-peripheral worlds would have grasped better the message of this outlaw, peripheral man who was Maldoror (Steinmetz in Ducasse, Les Chants 19). In April and June 1870, Lautréamont published his Poésies I et II with the same M.M. Balitout and Questroy and again at his own expense. A few months later, on November 24, 1870, he was found dead in his hotel. The cause was not identified, but on his death certificate his profession reads “homme de lettres.” A

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symbolic triumph of Maldoror, made of letters, over his very young creator, who became in the next century one of the cases of authors cannibalized by their own creation. Next to Cervantes’ Quixote and Valéry’s Teste, Maldoror grew into a larger-than-life creation.

Lautréamont’s Poésies, plagiarism, and surrealism The fact that Lautréamont could develop plagiarism as the new creative method in his Poésies also has to do with the fact that, at the time, the law for the authorship rights was developing. As Jean Luc-Steinmetz shows in the endnotes to the 1990 edition, Lautréamont’s plagiarism refers to the correction of maxims and aphorisms or of famous lines from literary texts. This collage of references shows a very well-read poet, from the marginal to the canonical: the Ecuadorian poet Dolores Veintemilla, but also Poe, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Adam Mickiewicz, Victor Hugo, and the Spanish romantic poet José Zorrilla y Moral. Les Poésies appeared under Ducasse’s name, but they had little impact on the contemporary field, until they were rediscovered by Remy de Gourmont and Valery Larbaud in the early twentieth century. The major question that the early Lautréamont criticism addressed was the relation between Les Chants and the Poésies: either the latter texts oppose the still Romantic Chants or they form an organic unity with the earlier work. Breton himself entertained this second view, even if he admitted that the poems show a stronger uncanniness. Most scholarship (Marguerite Bonnet, P.O. Walzer, and Michel Pierssens) took this stance, and discovered that Maldoror itself wasn’t very differently created from the collage-like Poésies. Although Lautréamont rewrites famous lines from The Divine Comedy and Hamlet, most of his text uses Pascal’s Pensées, La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, and Vauvenargues’ Pensées et Maximes. Jean-Luc Steinmetz defines Ducasse’s plagiarism in Poésies as “modified maxims which take the shape of slogans or philosophical propaganda” (in Ducasse, Les Chants 48). Lautréamont’s technique of condensing his predecessors’ philosophy in the form of maxims and aphorisms takes the form of “a striptease of the mind: rewritten, these texts are reduced to their essential articulations” (Perrone-Moisés and Rodriguez Monegal 364–5). Linguistically, too, Lautréamont provided a good model for Pierre Menard. Their bilingualism forms a chiastic relation: whereas Borges’ Menard writes in a language not his own—he is French and copies the text of Quijote in

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Spanish—Lautréamont writes in French but was fluent in Spanish from an early age; many of the literary texts that shaped his view of literature were Spanish. Both Lautréamont and Menard are masters of a complex rhetorical style that they owe to a language not their own. Whereas Lautréamont’s style has a certain affectedness that could be traced back to his reading in Spanish, Menard, a Frenchman writing in Spanish, has the same distinctive stylistic feature: “The contrast in style is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard—who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes—is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness” (94). Lautréamont’s bilingualism began to be an object of study following a discovery made by the critic Jacques Lefrère: a copy of the Iliad owned and annotated by Isidoro Ducasse. Lefrère writes: “It’s Homer’s Works: The Iliad, translated by D. José Gómez de Hermosilla, second tome (books 13 to 23 [sic!]; Paris, Rosa y Bouret Bookstore, 1862). The manuscript annotation is the following: Propriety of Mr. Isidoro Ducasse born in Montevideo (Uruguay)—I also have “The Art of Speech [Arte de hablar]” by the same author. 14 April 1863” (Lefrère 90). As Leyla Perrone-Moisés and Emir Rodríguez Monegal have shown, this inscription testifies that Isidoro Ducasse used this language not only at home, but also as a language of culture (376). The three conclusions the authors reach are that Lautréamont read Homer in Spanish; that he studied rhetoric in Spanish; and that he was very familiar with the Baroque, neoclassical and preromantic Spanish poetry from the numerous examples he read in José Gómez de Hermosilla’s Arte de hablar (376–7). Whenever Lautréamont is parodying the didactic discourse in Les Chants or the logical absurdity and the cold moralism in Poésies he is using the models provided by Arte de hablar (377). Often, Lautréamont rewrites with a difference. He opens his Poésies II with an unquoted line from the moralist Vauvenargues, and continues by rewriting the famous line written on the gate of Dante’s Inferno: “Vous qui entrez, laissez tout désespoir” [Abandon all despair, you who enter here] (Les Chants 345)—a rewriting that reverses both the morality and the syntax of Dante’s “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” He continues with a similarly doubly reversed line from Hamlet: “Bonté, ton nom est homme” [Kindness, thy name is man] (Les Chants 345), before concluding in his own voice: “C’est ici que demeure la sagesse des nations” [It is here that the wisdom of nations dwells] (Les Chants 345). Lautréamont’s Poésies becomes a text about how to write a poetic text and also one that revolutionizes the form and language of poetry.

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Lautréamont’s poetics is set out on the second page of his Poésies II , and this is likely the poetics on which Borges modeled his Menard. However, unlike Lautréamont, Menard doesn’t even bother to reverse the meaning of the unquoted sentences, he simply reproduces the original literally. Lautréamont’s rebellious character makes him write everything backwards, reversing a negative with a positive sentence or as in Tristan Tzara’s manifesto “Dada soulève TOUT !”, oui = non. “Any pawn can have a set of literary beliefs by stating the contrary of what the poets of this century say. He would replace their affirmations with negations” (Ducasse, Les Chants 346). Lautréamont’s idea that great literature could be produced by anyone was revisited half a century later by Tristan Tzara, who pushed it to its extremes through the belief that one can be a poet without having written a single verse; these ideas find expression not only in Borges’ Pierre Menard but also in another figure who appears in Ficciones, Herbert Quain. Published in 1941, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain” opens with the death of Herbert Quain, a writer of detective stories, who “played at being M. Teste” (Collected Fictions 105)—one of Menard’s own models—and dismissed the concept of genius. To him, the century that gave us Shakespeare— and we could also add, Cervantes—didn’t believe in the idea of genius either, and hence literature could be encountered in the street. The narrator disputes the idea that “works of art are few . . . the sixteenth century (we should recall the Voyage to Parnassus, we should recall the career of Shakespeare) did not share that disconsolate opinion. Nor did Herbert Quain. He believed that ‘great literature’ is the commonest thing in the world, and that there was hardly a conversation in the street that did not attain those ‘heights’ ” (Collected Fictions 105–6). If literary paternity is suspended and poetry in the future will be made by all, not by one, as Lautréamont writes in his Poésies II —a line that became one of the most quoted lines in the surrealists’ theoretical texts—then it follows that there is a single spirit that creates all literature. Such a hypothesis makes it irrelevant who the writer was, and a text could then be attributed to any other writer of his caliber. Filtered through Valéry’s idea of a literary history with no names, Lautréamont’s poetics is quoted obliquely in Borges’ story through Menard’s theory that some texts were necessary in the world—like those of Poe and Baudelaire—whereas others were not—the case of Quixote. Here is what Lautréamont writes in Poésies II : “Racine, Corneille would have been capable of producing the writings of Descartes, Malebranche, Bacon. The soul of the former is one with that of the latter” (349).

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It follows then that plagiarism will become a necessity in the future. “Progress implies it,” as Lautréamont declared, since the single creative spirit that is responsible for the existence of all literature ever written is constantly correcting itself. Following Lautréamont’s logic, this future is realized in Borges’ Tlön: “Within the sphere of literature, too, the idea of the single subject is all powerful. Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist” (Collected Fictions 76). For Borges’ Menard, what changes is no longer the content but the context: “Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’ ” (Collected Fictions 93); “The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Collected Fictions 94). Included in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) together with “Pierre Menard,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” shows that Borges’ deep engagement with the surrealists’ legacy was no passing fancy, but took account of the revolution that surrealism meant in literature, poetry, and the arts at the end of the 1930s, the most prolific decade for the international spread of surrealism. When Borges juxtaposed the original of Cervantes and the identical manuscript of Menard, he wasn’t being original, but rather was “plagiarizing” in Lautréamont’s creative sense, as Borges himself was using another surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, who published a selection of fragments from his forthcoming anthology Avenir de la poésie in the surrealist magazine Minotaure. Eluard’s “Premières vues anciennes” includes Lautréamont, Breton, Nerval, Dalí, Rimbaud, Novalis, de Chirico, Blake, Jarry, and Freud. In his article, Eluard gives extended space to Lautréamont and his theory of plagiarism as literary creation. Eluard develops this at length, closing with a few excerpts from Poésies II which he contrasts with Vauvenargues’ maxims on a page layout in two columns that literally mirrors them, much as Borges’ narrator pairs the only lines (themselves resembling Eluard’s maxims) that he actually quotes from Cervantes and Menard. Appropriately, Eluard frames his discussion of plagiarism with two pivotal quotes from Lautréamont: “Le plagiat est nécessaire” and “La poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par un.” And right in the middle, just under the mirrored texts of Vauvenargues and Lautréamont, Eluard theorizes plagiarism as the negation of ideas through their unattributed repetition in the very order of words used by a previous writer: “If plagiarism seems to Lautréamont the simplest means to affirm himself through negation, isn’t it because he read precisely in Vauvenargues, this irritating evidence: that invention is the only proof of genius” (Eluard, “Premières vues anciennes” 54)—not very different from Borges’ Menard who takes delight in stating the very opposite of his true thoughts. For Lautréamont, negation was

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inherent in the very texts he was negating: Vauvenargues offered his reader, Lautréamont thought, the very instruments for negating and thus overcoming his own text. A book that contained its thesis and antithesis at the same time: one more reason for the Marxist surrealists who worshiped dialectics to anoint Lautréamont as their prime model. One more reason for Borges to engage obliquely with Lautréamont’s poetics when he describes the literati of Tlön: “Their works of a philosophical nature invariably contain both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and contra of every argument. A book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete” (Collected Fictions 77). It is appropriate in this context that the poet Lautréamont thought that the ideal poetry was the philosophical maxim. Following this logic, Borges plagiarizes both Eluard and Dr. Pierre Menard, who write on the great master of plagiarism, Lautréamont, who plagiarizes Vauvenargues, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld. Playing on the idea of “l’art pour l’art,” Eluard goes on to extend plagiarism to the history of literature itself, expanding its meaning and bringing in new examples of “plagiarists” including Sade, Baudelaire, Jarry. “Lautréamont wanted to see where plagiarism for plagiarism’s sake could take him” (53), writes Eluard and goes on to cite Jean Paulhan on Lautréamont’s notion of plagiarism, which is almost a “demonstration through the absurd,” interestingly enough another phrase picked up and cited by the narrator of Pierre Menard. Eluard’s article in Minotaure was published two years before Dr. Menard’s article in Minotaure and Borges’ short story in Sur. Another surrealist to take up Lautréamont’s playful plagiarism was Jean Paulhan: The game we’re talking about here is not new, but is nonetheless not inoffensive: to be more specific, it requires that the phrases, especially those that we specify through the word “meditations”—be made of the same material as the ideas, so that it would only take returning to the same order of words in order to restore their meaning. A new maxim testifies to an opposed view, but which cannot fail to be just as pressing and pregnant—not being a different one, but the same.//In Poésies we’re dealing with a demonstration through the absurd. If language were what one thinks . . . or Marcus Aurelius thinks, or Victor Hugo, who calls the word “verb” . . . it is here that Lautréamont sets his infernal machine to work. “There’s nothing incomprehensible,” he writes. It follows then that we don’t have to think anymore, the phrases themselves suffice. Jacob Cow 22–6, my emphases

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Unsurprisingly, Jean Paulhan’s text was published by Au Sans Pareil, just like Lautréamont’s Poésies (1920) and then Oeuvres complètes (1927). As with Dr. Pierre Menard’s article on Lautréamont, it would be a doubly ironic coincidence that Borges just happened to do something strikingly similar with Paul Eluard, whose article in Minotaure was published two years before Borges’ short story. There are no coincidences when Borges is concerned. Reading Borges’ text closely, we don’t find plagiarism as a method of creation any different than it was for Lautréamont. Because Menard is used to putting forth ideas that are the exact opposite of those he held, when we read his text identical to Cervantes’ we should turn the affirmative into the negative and the other way round, which takes us back exactly to Lautréamont’s method, also mirrored in Borges’ text through the opposition between the visible and the invisible work. If we read this opposition through the surrealist context in which Borges’ Menard is set, we should say the opposition between the conscious and the subconscious. Dr. Pierre Menard believed that graphology is the science of revealing the subconscious through the analysis of handwriting. Borges’ narrator informing us of Menard’s “resigned and ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held” (Collected Fictions 93) could also be an ironic reading of Freud’s and implicitly surrealism’s theory that there is a subconscious of the text that needs to be revealed through analysis. Well trained both in philosophy and in the exact sciences—the word “geometry” occurs several times in his discourse—Lautréamont is a kindred spirit to Valéry. For Lautréamont, as for Valéry, it is philosophy that circumscribes every other type of discourse, poetry included: “The judgments on poetry have greater value than poetry itself. They are the philosophy of poetry. Thus understood, philosophy circumscribes poetry. Poetry can never pass for philosophy. Philosophy can pass for poetry” (Ducasse, Les Chants 354). Lautréamont believed that philosophy, through the condensed form of the maxim, can do a better job than any literary text illustrating the same idea. A preference for the condensed text in the shape of a maxim is, in fact, Menard’s principle for creation. The only selection of his transcriptions from Cervantes’ text that Borges copies out for us is precisely such a maxim, which should condense Cervantes’ Quixote. Condensation is in general Borges’ rule, in his rejection of novels and preference for the short story. The idea that he can condense a 900-page novel into a single page because he can dominate it spatially and visually draws on Lautréamont’s poetics: “Racine is incapable of condensing his tragedies into precepts. A tragedy is not a precept. For such a spirit, a precept

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is an action more intelligent than a tragedy. Put a quill pen in the hand of a moralist who is a first-rate writer. He will be superior to the poets” (Ducasse, Les Chants 354). The ideal literary form of the future will be the maxim, superior to any tragedy, to poetry—and we could add to Lautréamont’s list: to the novel. Borges’ Menard was definitely not inventing the wheel but drawing on his illustrious precursor: “Humanity’s ideal for poetry will change. Tragedies, poems, elegies will no longer be central. The coldness of the maxim will be central” (355). Looking closely at Lautréamont and his works, his presence in Borges’ text is no longer incompatible with Valéry’s. There is an almost perfect superimposition of the portrait of Lautréamont’s subconscious as revealed in Dr. Pierre Menard’s analysis in Minotaure and the portrait of Menard in Borges, modeled on Valéry. The emphasis on reason, the representation of thought as a geometrical crystal, brings together Lautréamont, Valéry’s poetics, and Breton’s dream house made of glass. “Thought is no less clear than crystal,” writes Lautréamont (347). Dr. Pierre Menard’s analysis opens and closes with a feature that is picked up by Borges for his own Menard and which is common to Valéry, Lautréamont, and Breton: “Lautréamont is a very reflexive man, a great observer, with a pronounced critical sense. He’s meticulous and inclined to be distrustful” (“Analyse” 83). Borges takes the great critical sense and the suspicious character and unfolds them in a metatextual text written by a highly distrustful narrator who suspects both the motives and the competence of his rival keeper of Menard’s flame. Sorting out the tangled relations between our narrator and “Madame Henri Bachelier” requires the reader in turn to practice suspicion as a mode of reading. The relation that Borges establishes with Dr. Pierre Menard’s analysis of Lautréamont creates a complex set of worlds within worlds which henceforth becomes Borges’ specialty: the way Dr. Menard describes Lautréamont is the way in which Borges’ narrator describes his character Menard, and hence Borges identifies the author—Dr. Pierre Menard—with the analyzed, Lautréamont. It is as if Dr. Menard writes about himself when he is writing about Lautréamont, just as Borges projects his own drafts—written on blue graph paper in an insect-like handwriting—as Pierre Menard’s.

Menard’s surreal bibliography The complex and puzzling bibliography that Borges’ narrator puts together for Menard points toward the intellectual networks of the 1920s and 1930s in Paris:

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more specifically to the avant-garde circle of the surrealists. One article in particular published by Breton on the symbolist heritage of surrealism opens a network of cultural references that appear more or less obliquely in Menard’s bibliographical list. On October 15, 1936, when Breton published “Le merveilleux contre le mystère. À propos du symbolisme” in the ninth issue of Minotaure, surrealism was becoming recognized internationally. Special issues were dedicated to surrealism by literary magazines abroad; one of the most important ones was Victoria Ocampo’s Sur. Breton felt the need to rethink the place of surrealism within the history of modern and modernist poetry; his article looks back at symbolism both as a dead-end street—the line of Mallarmé and his followers Stuart Merrill and Francis VieléGriffin—and as the gateway to the surrealist revolution. However, there are two ghosts who haunt Breton’s article: the first is Lautréamont, mentioned only in passing; the second, totally absent, is Valéry. Breton makes a very interesting oblique statement as to Lautréamont’s position when he reproduces photos of all the symbolists he is mentioning—Huysmans, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Gide, Maeterlinck, Saint Pol-Roux, Pierre Loüys, and Alfred Jarry, to cite a few—with the exception of Lautréamont. Symbolically, Breton represents Lautréamont as an absent presence by reproducing Félix Valloton’s portrait of him crossed out, just at the end of his article (see Figure 5), next to a letter he had received from Valloton in 1921 stating that the portrait was imaginary: “The portrait of Lautréamont that appeared in The Book of Masks is a pure fabrication, made with no document, no one, including Gourmont, having the slightest idea about him, even if I know they will search for one. It is therefore an image of pure fantasy, but the circumstances gave it flesh and everywhere it came to pass for truthful” (“Le merveilleux” 31). Just as symbolically, Breton obscures Valéry, who is the absent symbolist behind this article on symbolism, focusing instead on Mallarmé, whose portrait occupies the center of the first page of the essay. In 1936, Breton had long left behind his former master Valéry, whom he had found guilty together with Mallarmé of having locked language outside reality, making it mysterious for the sake of mystery, in a world of paper that is diametrically opposed to Lautréamont’s visionary language that aims to change reality through the constant appeal to the marvelous. Whereas Breton obscures Valéry’s name but references Lautréamont, Borges cites Mallarmé and Valéry when creating Menard’s genealogy but obscures Lautréamont’s name. In Borges’s story, the first item in Menard’s bibliography is a symbolist sonnet published twice in the magazine La Conque, in March and October 1899. In fact,

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Figure 5 André Breton, “Le merveilleux contre le mystère. À propos du symbolisme,” Minotaure 9 (1936): 31.

the magazine was published in 1891–1892 in Paris by the Belgian poet Pierre Loüys—whose name and photo are included in Breton’s article—in collaboration with Gide and Valéry. The first issue appeared on March 1, 1891. Loüys ended up publishing a total of eleven issues, the last one in January 1892. La Conque published only young poets, and each issue had a foreword by one of the mainstream poets of the day. On February 7, 1891, Loüys wrote to Mallarmé asking him to be the magazine’s leader and mentor. Each issue of the magazine was published in one hundred copies. These were not distributed through the open market and remained known only to insiders via the avant-garde circuits. After publishing this magazine at the age of 19, Loüys was encouraged to go into the poetry business by Valéry himself, just as Breton was later; he frequented Mallarmé’s literary mardis. La Conque is an important item in Menard’s bibliography because it is here that the symbolists of the second generation begin to publish.

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All the clues in Borges’ text point to Menard as a character made of bits and scraps from a whole family of kindred spirits. On the one hand, Borges felt close to Mallarmé and Valéry, both for their dream of the world as an infinite book, and for inventing a parallel language for poetry that would become a selfreferential language. This project isn’t far from the second item in Menard’s bibliography: “A monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary from concepts . . . ideal objects created by convention essentially for the needs of poetry” (Collected Fictions 89). On the other hand, Lautréamont and Breton are obliquely referenced on the topic of a new language for poetry, but with the essential difference that this language is an attempt to revolutionize reality, not flee from it as Mallarmé and Valéry supposedly did. Later in the text, Menard lists his predecessors in chronological order: he himself was a Symboliste, devotee of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, and Monsieur Teste. Aptly, the mix of writers and characters ends by coming full circle with the surrealists’ favorite character, Monsieur Teste. The third item is a monograph on the affinities between the philosophers Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins, a good mirroring of Lautréamont’s Poésies II , condensing and reversing his philosophical predecessors: “The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own” (Collected Fictions 91). Leaving out “el prólogo autobiográfico de la segunda parte del don Quijote” (“the autobiographical foreword of Part II ,” Collected Fictions 91) of Cervantes’ novel, Menard similarly suppresses his own personal history, much as Lautréamont theorizes the poet’s absolute impersonality: “Personal poetry has had its time of relative jugglings and contingent contortions. Let us take again the indestructible line of impersonal poetry bluntly interrupted after the birth of the failed philosopher of Ferney, after the abortion of the great Voltaire” (Ducasse, Les Chants 339). The fifth item listed in Menard’s visible oeuvre is “a technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by eliminating one of the rook’s pawns (Menard proposes, recommends, debates, and finally rejects this innovation)” (89). Balderston connects this entry to a quote from Valéry’s History in which the creator of Edmond Teste and Breton’s mentor compares one’s relation to destiny to a card game where new, unexpected cards appear while the rules change constantly (Out of Context 19). The entry, however, speaks of chess rather than cards and, once again, Valéry isn’t the likely prime reference. One of the allies whom Breton had brought into the pages of Littérature was the artist and chess

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player Marcel Duchamp. In October 1922, Breton published in Littérature an article praising Duchamp as someone who had perfected chess playing as a form of (anti)-art: “Today Duchamp doesn’t do anything else but play chess, and this will suffice for him to show himself one day unrivalled . . . he consents to pass for an artist, we could say, in this case, to pass for a man who’s produced little because he couldn’t help doing otherwise” (Breton’s emphasis, “Marcel Duchamp” 10). As the artist-chess player who always “rejected any thesis” (“Marcel Duchamp” 10), and who, according to the same Breton, liberated us from “the conception of the lyricism-blackmail of the readymade expression” (10), he’s the perfect model for Menard’s formulation and then rejection of a chess innovation. Even years later, in 1966, when interviewed by Pierre Cabanne on this particular article written by Breton, Duchamp acknowledged him as a kindred spirit: “He had enormous weight in the literary world, and it was odd that he was so far ahead of people like Aragon and Eluard, who were only his lieutenants” (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp 66). Serious play was not only Duchamp’s poetics, applied both to art and chess, but it also informed the surrealists’ parlor games, including their version of the Tarot of Marseille and even their cadavre exquis, the collective poems or drawings made when the players wouldn’t know what the previous ones had drawn or written on the piece of paper. As Duchamp would say, the movement on the chess board can be mechanical, but the beauty lies in the mind’s eye of the viewer, where the invisible work shows its true originality. This is a most striking resemblance with Menard’s own poetics, which places the emphasis on the invisible oeuvre. In the 1930s, Marcel Duchamp was preparing a book together with Vitaly Halberstadt on endgame strategies: Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled. A fragment of this work was published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 2 (October 1930): “Formule de l’opposition hétérodoxe dans les domaines principaux.” Duchamp’s idea was to turn chess into an art by deferring checkmate and keeping the two players’ pieces in a perfectly mirrored balance. “While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists,” declared Duchamp in his address at a banquet of the New York State Chess Association in 1952. In her book Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company, Dalía Judovitz writes that for Duchamp, chess and art were interchangeable; she argues that we should consider the readymade in the light of Duchamp’s understanding of chess as a logical set of decisions with a limited number of combinations, which would then entail that similar decisions lead to similar or even identical situations

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(107). Plagiarism would thus be legitimized if art and literature too were governed by the possible number of combinations, a theory that Borges toys with in “The Library of Babel”: “There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance” (Collected Fictions 117). Duchamp liked to read the possible chess arrangements as bearing a secret message: “A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing . . . it’s a mechanical reality . . . In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It’s the imagining of the movement or the gesture that makes the beauty, in this case. It’s completely in one’s gray matter” (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp 18–19). In this light, Menard’s gesture of proposing, examining, and then rejecting a chess innovation had a precedent in Duchamp’s serious joke of creating a possible art object articulated through Lautreamont’s absurd logic. It is worth mentioning that Duchamp’s reflections on chess come from the 1966 interview by Pierre Cabanne, the same interview where Duchamp confessed that “Breton and I are men of the same order” (Dialogues 16). After Cabanne cited Breton’s remark that Duchamp was the most intelligent man of the twentieth century, Duchamp replied: There is a logical or Cartesian form of intelligence, but I think Breton meant to say something else. He envisaged, from the Surrealist point of view, a freer form of the problem; for him, intelligence was in some way the penetration of what the average normal man finds incomprehensible or difficult to understand. There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary. Breton and I are men of the same order—we share a community of vision, which is why I think I understand his idea of intelligence: enlarged, drawn out, extended, inflated. Dialogues 16

He went on to say that “What little public life I did have was in Breton’s group” (17). By placing the emphasis on the invisible oeuvre—not the mechanical reproduction but what lies beyond it, in the mind’s eye of the reader—and on the explosive potential of repeating the same words used previously by Cervantes, Menard, and through him Borges, seems to share a community of vision with Duchamp’s readymade chess problems, and with Breton’s understanding of Duchamp as someone who produced little out of pure necessity. Menard confesses he created his Quijote as a serious game with strict rules by pure

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necessity: “I have assumed the mysterious obligation to reconstruct, word for word, the novel that for him was spontaneous. The solitary game I play [mi solitario juego] is governed by two polar rules: the first one allows me to try out formal and psychological variants; the second forces me to sacrifice them to the ‘original’ text” (Collected Fictions 93). Another item listed in Menard’s bibliography is “A study of the essential metrical rules of French prose” (89), perhaps one of the reasons why his Spanish sounded affected. Symmetrically, Lautréamont’s style was informed by his readings from the Spanish baroque and romanticism. In Poésies II, Lautréamont dismissed Gongorism and the excessive rhetoric of his contemporaries, including himself: “It’s not even sophism after the metaphysical Gongorism of the self-parodists of my heroic-burlesque times” (Les Chants 349). Looking further in Menard’s bibliography, we find “a dogged analysis of the ‘syntactical habits’ of Toulet” (Collected Fictions 89), published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in March 1921. This entry recalls a short note on a biography of Paul-Jean Toulet (who died in 1920) and his book Behanzigue (the life of a dandy in Paris), published in the NRF in July (not March) 1921. The note, by Roger Allard, remarks on the poor quality of Paul-Jean Toulet’s unimaginative prose, which doesn’t do justice to the author of Contrerimes, the volume of poetry that had made Toulet famous: “This cast of mind, charming in conversation and everyday life, and especially night life, fades and withers between the pages of a book” (Allard 119). In Borges’ story, it is unclear whether the problem lies with Toulet himself or with the doggedness of Menard’s analysis. Item “p” on Menard’s list points to André Breton: “a diatribe against Paul Valéry, in Jacques Reboul’s Feuilles pour la suppression de la réalité (which diatribe, I might add parenthetically, states the exact reverse of Menard’s true opinion of Valéry; Valéry understood this, and the two men’s friendship was never imperiled)” (Collected Fictions 89–90). Several pages later, Borges tells us more about this magazine when describing Menard’s “resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held. (We should recall that diatribe against Paul Valéry in the ephemeral surrealist journal edited by Jacques Reboul)” (Collected Fictions 93–4). This supposed surrealist magazine is not dated in the narrator’s list; its title, Feuilles pour la suppression de la réalité, is close to Breton’s “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité,” an important theoretical text from 1924 that appeared almost simultaneously with the first manifesto of surrealism. In his essay, Breton mentioned for the first time

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his intention to put into circulation oneiric objects such as the impossible gnome-book he saw in a dream; the essay became a foundational text for Breton’s theorizing on the surrealist object. Menard’s faux-antagonism toward Valéry in the (nonexistent) pages of the Feuilles pour la suppression de la réalité further recalls Breton’s diatribes against Paul Valéry for his academicism and his political compromises, despite which Breton continued to esteem and admire Valéry all his life. In light of the connection of item “p” with Breton’s companion text for the first manifesto of surrealism—“Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité”— we may reconsider item “b,” the monograph of poetic concepts, “ideal objects” that are meant to enlarge our impoverished notion of reality. These may be expressing more than Borges’ admiration for the poetic projects of Mallarmé and Valéry. When he announced his intention to circulate such oneiric objects as the gnome-book, Breton thought of them as companion objects to be offered together with his books to some of the elect. “I would like to put in circulation objects of this kind, whose fate seems to me eminently problematic and disquieting. I would add such an object to each of my books to give to selected people” (“Introduction,” Point du jour 28–9). Breton thought of such surrealist objects as poetic creations meant to make the impossible tangible and thus enrich our rationalist understanding of reality: “Are poetic creations called upon to take this tangible character, to disrupt in a singular way the boundaries of the so-called real?” (29). A reality enriched through an invented language in which poetic words function as objects was a fantasy that haunted Borges all his life. If Menard only envisaged this as a “possibility,” it actually becomes a reality for the poems written in Tlön. Whereas Breton’s surrealist objects or the 1935 “Poème-objet” brought together the collage, the art installation, and the poem to form a new, unnamed object or word, the poets of Tlön devised an enormous word-object that in itself stood for a poem: “There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a ‘poetic object’ created by the poet” (Collected Fictions 73). Years later, in the 1975 “Afterword” for his volume The Book of Sand, Borges notes that two other short stories of his dream of the word-object that comprises an entire literature: “ ‘Undr’ and ‘The Mirror and the Mask’ envision age-old literatures consisting of but a single word” (Collected Fictions 485). The poet in “The Mirror and the Mask” uses the technique of poetic compression, by which the poem shrinks in inverse proportion with the poet living the reality he’s creating; he thus transforms an epic into a single-line poem before he dies as a

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result of seeing the marvelous. In “Undr,” the poet of another invented Northern people, the Urns, searches for the one-word poem, which he hears from the mouth of his master on his deathbed: “He spoke the word Undr, which means wonder” (Collected Fictions 459). The poem in “The Mirror and the Mask” is thus a marvel of marvels: Borges uses the word maravilla in the original: “. . . murallas de fuego . . . un río abovedado y pendiente surcaba el cielo . . . Éstas son maravillas, pero no se comparan con tu poema, que de algún modo las encierra” (Obras completas II 47). The same word is used in “Undr:” “Dijo la palabra Undr, que quiere decir maravilla” (Obras completas II 51). It couldn’t have been a coincidence that in the first manifesto of surrealism, it was le merveilleux that stood at the center of Breton’s poetics: “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful” (Manifestoes 14). It is not surprising, then, that the surrealists were entranced by Jaquet-Droz’s automaton known as The Writer, whose first written word was “merveilleux.” In Minotaure 3–4 (1933), the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret published the article “Au Paradis des Fantômes” on the history of surrealist objects that goes from automatic pieces of machinery dating from the seventeenth century up to the present: clocks in the shape of flying butterflies, automatons that sing opera arias, an automatic scarab, a pistol with a singing bird and watch, robots. Péret presents Jaquet-Droz’s mechanical writer as the creator of all languages and literatures, including that of his own creator, Jaquet-Droz: “He knows all the languages and teaches me everything I don’t know. He thinks and writes for me what I don’t dare to write. He dictates my thoughts” (“Au Paradis des Fantômes” 32). Published in 1933, this essay likely caught Borges’ eye, as we’ve seen he was a reader of Minotaure. This article alone could have contributed significantly to “The Circular Ruins” in which the dreamer discovers in the end that he too is the dream of his own creation, and relates as well to the idea of a totalizing language or consciousness that can have access to the entire possible literature ever, which is in the background of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El Aleph,” “The Library of Babel,” and last but not least, to the idea of plagiarism as automatism of writing that is at the heart of “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” To sum up the discussion of items “b” and “p” in relation to Breton’s “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité,” it is significant that in the discussion about the gnomebook as poetic creation Breton mentions automatons as mechanisms that allow for the apparition of the marvelous: “Absurd and highly developed automatons that would do everything like no one else, would be tasked with giving us a proper idea of action” (Point du jour 29).

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The final item on the list is something worthy of Dr. Pierre Menard’s graphological interests: “a handwritten list of lines of poetry that owe their excellence to punctuation” (90). This item is strikingly similar to the final paragraph in Lautréamont’s last text, Poésies II , where he is addressing the issue of closing a text and dismisses the affected use of ellipses: “The three ellipsis points make me shrug my shoulders with pity. Do we need them to prove we’re men of spirit, that is to say, imbeciles? As if clarity couldn’t be vague as well, speaking of points!” (Les Chants 364). Borges engages ironically with Lautréamont’s final sentence from his final text, turning upside down what he writes about punctuation, and Lautréamont’s point about the pointlessness of ellipses becomes an important point for Menard, who copies—or creates, as the narrator is ambiguous about it—some lines of poetry whose entire value lies in the punctuation. Interestingly, the last page of the story tells us that Menard took care that his handwritten pages wouldn’t survive him: “His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages” (Collected Fictions 95). The footnote to this line gives information about their graphic character: “I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typographical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting. In the evening, he liked to go out for walks on the outskirts of Nîmes; he would often carry along a notebook and make a cheery bonfire” (95). The note reads like a little graphological analysis of Menard’s handwriting, which closely resembles Borges’ own; in Dr. Pierre Menard’s analysis of Lautréamont’s handwriting we read something similar: “paraphe compliqué, arachnéide” [complicated, spidery signature] (Menard, “Analyse” 84). If Dr. Pierre Menard was a graphologist from Nîmes, Borges’ Menard is a symbolist poet from the same city. Dr. Pierre Menard was close to both psychoanalysis and surrealism because his studies of graphology rely on the subconscious as revealed in the automatic quality of handwriting, as he says in the opening of his seminal book L’Écriture et le Subconscient: Psychanalyse et Graphologie (1931): “Graphology studies the automatic movements and we shall define it as a method for studying the subconscious” (7). Taken up by the surrealists, Menard published not one but two articles on the handwriting of key figures of the surrealist pantheon: on Lautréamont in Minotaure 12–13 (May 1939) and a decade earlier on Sade, in Bataille’s Documents: “Le Marquis de Sade: étude graphologique” (Documents 7, 1929). Understanding graphology as the study of the subconscious through the traces left automatically on paper, Menard proceeds to uncover the latent content

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of the psyche of the analyzed and hence to uncover an invisible text underneath the visible one, a feature that Borges addresses in the opening phrase of his story on the writer’s “obra visible.” The invisible part includes not only the rewritten Quixote but also, as we learn at the story’s end, all the manuscripts that Menard burnt for fear that history would end up destroying them in other ways. Following Dr. Menard’s logic, if the visible work corresponds symbolically to the conscious, then the invisible work would correspond to the subconscious. By reading Menard’s handwriting (the visible work), we could see perhaps something of the invisible one. This wasn’t the first time that Borges played with the surrealist poetics that aimed to restore man to his complete psychic unity by granting the creative force to the subconscious as manifested in dreams. Not mentioned directly in “Pierre Menard,” dreams become the creative force for the prophet-dreamer in “The Circular Ruins,” another short story from the same volume Ficciones. The main revolution brought on by surrealism as Breton saw it, which distinguished it from romanticism, was the irrational treatment of dreams, as opposed to the logical use of them as a theme. In a rewriting of the Jewish myth of the golem, Borges’ prophet-dreamer wishes to create a man by dreaming him into being. At first he fails because he uses the dream in a rational manner, much as Shakespeare’s Prospero attempted to order the world through a dream-trap he wove through his rational craft: “He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake” (“The Circular Ruins,” Collected Fictions 98). But only when he gives the irrational the lead like a true surrealist does he hear the beating of a heart: “He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming, and almost instantly managed to sleep for a fair portion of the day . . . Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart” (98). As early as 1924, Breton’s definition of the surrealist activity read “SURREALISM , n. Psychic automatism in its pure state . . . Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Manifestoes 26). But the ultimate ambition of surrealism, given just below this dictionary definition, reads “ENCYCLOPEDIA . Philosophy . . . to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life” (Manifestoes 26). Creating life not by childbirth but through dreaming as does the dreamer of “The Circular Ruins”, could solve the principal problem of life: death. Breton’s encyclopedia entry for surrealism was bound to interest the author of Ficciones. His taste

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for encyclopedias become the gateway for the manifestation of the surreal (e.g. Uqbar, the imaginary country mentioned only in one of the copies of The AngloAmerican Cyclopaedia/The Encyclopaedia Britannica). Dr. Pierre Menard based his approach on Freud, William James, and the Danish psychologist Carl Lange, all cited on the opening page of his 1931 volume, which includes analyses of a select cluster of artists, writers, and historical figures: Sade, Saint Teresa, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Napoléon, Gide, Freud, Wilde, and Pierre Loüys. Many of these are connected in one way or another to the surrealist group: either as symbolist-decadent precursors (Barbey d’Aurevilly), as founding figures for the libidinal liberation of desires (Sade) or for the phenomenon of ecstasy (Saint Teresa of Ávila) associated with Breton’s convulsive beauty. Pierre Loüys is the editor of La Conque, mentioned as the first item in Menard’s list of visible writings. When Borges cites Menard’s transcription from Cervantes’ Spanish original, he links him with William James: “History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality” (Collected Fictions 94).

The common denominator On the process of identifying an author and his character, Borges writes in his article “Valéry como Símbolo” that “Valéry created Edmond Teste; this character would become one of the myths of our century if we don’t judge him as a mere doppelganger of Valéry. For us, Valéry is Edmond Teste” (31). If we replace “Valéry” with “Borges” and “Teste” with “Menard,” we will have Borges’ own poetics. What is striking is that, in the same paragraph, Borges defines Valéry’s lucid rationality against both Nazism and surrealism: “Proposing lucidity in a decaying romantic age, in the melancholy age of Nazism and of dialectical materialism, of the prophecies of Freud’s sect and of the traders of surrealism, this was (and still is) the worthy mission of Valéry” (“Valéry como Símbolo” 31). Here, Borges polemically pairs the Nazis and their Communist adversaries with the Jewish Freud and the surrealists whom the Nazis despised as degenerates, and intentionally ignores Valéry’s influence on surrealism through the very figure of Monsieur Teste. Borges constructs his Menard from very different characters—Lautréamont, Valéry, Dr. Pierre Menard—whose common denominator is the person of André Breton. They become a meaningful semantic network only through the

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narrative of surrealism as Breton writes it: Lautréamont is his famous discovery whom he champions as a proto-surrealist. Breton and the surrealists think that Valéry’s real value is given by his creation of Monsieur Teste, a proto-surrealist character who is at the same time pure thought, a perfectly geometrical and abstract construction but also a highly sensual and perverse character. Monsieur Teste’s name plays upon the Latin words testa (pot, jug), which gave the French words tête (head) and testis, meaning both “witness” and “testicle.” Breton had objected to Valéry’s turn toward classicism in 1917 through the use of alexandrines in the poem La Jeune Parque; the final break between them came in 1927 when Valéry became one of the forty “immortels” of the Académie Française, accepting the chair previously held by the Nobel Laureate Anatole France. Upon France’s death in 1924, Breton had attacked him in the infamous pamphlet “Un cadavre,” which caused a scandal in the French field of letters. These conflicts resonate in Borges’ text in two places. Item “o” on the list of Menard’s visible works is “a transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Cimetière marin (NRF, January 1928)” (89)—a poem included in the 1922 volume of poetry Charmes and listed by Borges as an irony, as Menard/Breton condemned Valéry because of his return to the alexandrine, and in a different poem. The second resonance is toward the end of the story, where Menard rejects the mechanism of State consecration and decides to burn his drafts. “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be,” writes Borges’ Menard (Collected Fictions 95), echoing Lautréamont’s poetry that will be made by all, not by one. For Borges, this was no passing reference to Lautréamont. For the poets of Tlön, simply quoting Shakespeare enables them to actually be him, a transformation that is described on the very page where we’re also told that the inhabitants of Tlön have no concept of plagiarism: “All men, in the dizzying moment of copulation, are the same man. All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare” (Collected Fictions 76). But Menard’s revolution concerns reading as much as writing: “Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution” (Collected Fictions 95). Comparing Borges’ manuscripts in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the period framing the publication of the Menard text, to the description of Menard’s manuscripts, one cannot fail to be struck by the resemblance: “I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typographical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting” (Collected Fictions 95). The description mixes real with historical and literary references: as

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critics have often noted, the square-ruled notebooks, the black crossings-out point to Borges’ own manuscripts. A greater interest lies in a letter sent to Victoria Ocampo, evidently in 1942 (Borges begins by saying that in January he’d moved to Quintana 263, the house to which he moved in 1942). In this letter he declares that “Goethe says that after reading a page, he abandoned the study of Kant, because there was not a single moment in which he ‘felt a better man’; you and I, Victoria, could say the same about the Quixote and who knows, maybe even about Goethe.” This comment recalls the perspective advanced in “Pierre Menard,” that in the twentieth century a little of the Quixote would be quite enough: “This work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XII ” (90). Beyond his specific engagements with the surrealists’ poem-objects, automatic writing, and plagiarism, Borges’ fictional universe is structurally related to the world of surrealism as he defines his short stories as dreams that will only continue to grow and ramify through their readers’ imagination. As Borges remarks in concluding his “Afterword” to The Book of Sand, he hopes “that the dreams herein will continue to ramify within the hospitable imaginations of the readers who now close it” (Collected Fictions 485). Mapping such unknown territories of the imagination through dreams and surrealist objects was what Breton too dreamed of in “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité”: “we’ll draw finely detailed maps of immense cities which we’ll know we’re incapable of founding as we are today, but which will at least classify capitals of the present and future” (Point du jour 29). One such map of an immense, invented city would be Tlön, the kingdom where the concept of plagiarism doesn’t exist.

A retrospective prophecy André Breton, prophet of surrealism, knew in 1925 that the year 1939 would mark a turning point. The year indeed had a lot in store for Breton, though not entirely as he would have wished: it was the year that saw the cultural capital of surrealism being challenged, questioned, and pushed forward under new forms by writers coming from the semi-periphery of the field, such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose ironic and creative use of the surrealist legacy opened the path for what would be one of the major revolutions in twentieth-century fiction: magical realism. It was also the year that saw the beginning of World

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War II , whose aftermath seemed to envisage a world that the surrealists were dreaming about twenty years before: anticolonial, antinationalist, a world without borders. But not all the intellectuals who fought for such a world would live to see it. On July 20, 1945, Paul Valéry died in Paris, and with him was dying a whole world that had known Mallarmé, the Symbolist experience, and the experiments of language pushed to its limits. In 1946, Adrienne Monnier organized a memorial evening of readings from Valéry’s works; this brought together the international networks of intellectuals both from the older and the newer generations who had made Paris the center of cultural life. A letter sent by Monnier to Victoria Ocampo on October 4, 1946 as they prepared the event confesses how much Adrienne loved Ocampo’s text “Paul Valéry” published in Sur 132 (1945). This opened with Ocampo receiving the news of Valéry’s death in Llao Llao, Argentina. Symbolically, writes Ocampo, Valéry died for her in Argentina, buried at Lake Nahuel Huapi, the perfect place for the poet of “Le Cimetière marin.” It is there, writes Monnier in reply, that a future poet will appear, one who will symbolize the close friendship between Ocampo and Valéry, a poet who will be at once Latin American and French: “If, as I believe, a bodiless spirit can perceive something about an incarnated spirit, you must have transmitted to him the regret for the extraordinary and the desire to be reborn in Nahuel Huapi. I am sure that one day, he will be reborn there, a poet who will be your child and his.” Sometimes people prophesy backwards and read the past without knowing it. Maybe this poet of Spanish and French language had already been born, and his name was successively Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, Pierre Menard, and Jorge Luis Borges. Sometimes reality imitates art. Preparing a celebration of Valéry’s works when he was still alive, Monnier remembers his playful remark that he “would like to write something against [Paul Valéry] and sign with a woman’s name” (Monnier, Letters to Victoria Ocampo). Or with Pierre Menard’s name. Or with André Breton’s. Sometimes it takes a war or simply the passage of time to efface feuds of all kinds. The letter sent by Monnier to Ocampo on October 4, 1946 ended with a list of the people invited to the event dedicated to Valéry. Pierre Menard’s friends were gathering together to preserve his memory after his death. Monnier’s list brings together Valéry’s friends, colleagues of his generation, and former disciples who parted with him to follow their own path. It reads like a miniature version

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of the intellectual scene in Paris in the early 1920s. Old colleagues and friends with whom Valéry shared a history are here: André Gide, Léon-Paul Fargue, André Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, and Gaston Gallimard, who had become the most important publisher in France after publishing Proust’s Goncourt winning novel. The first generation of surrealists whom Valéry mentored in their beginnings with Littérature: André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Eluard, but also the second generation who later parted with the hard-core orthodox surrealism: Henri Michaux and Raymond Queneau. The rising generation of existentialists, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus is here, as well as intellectuals such as Jean Paulhan who migrated between the avant-garde circles and the established ones. Sometimes history comes full circle and effaces the borders between the lived and the written reality. At Adrienne Monnier’s Maison des Amis des Livres, everything was possible.

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Surrealism on the New York Market

There had been numerous international exhibitions of surrealism in the 1930s, and these had certainly attracted the public’s attention. They marked a necessary step for surrealism to become established as one of the most prolific group movements of both twentieth-century literature and art; the exhibition as an institution was halfway on the road to the museum. But no other market was as substantially transformed as the American market by contact with surrealism and especially with the star of the group, Salvador Dalí. His success wasn’t the result of the sheer force of his genius, as he liked to claim, but was built on foundations laid down over the previous two decades, most decisively in the Armory Show of 1913. As Adrienne Monnier noted in the early 1930s, it was the Americans in Paris who were the people most interested in the European avant-garde production and who invested in it. Their interest reflects the legacy of the Armory Show, the New York painting exhibition that brought all the modern and avant-garde tendencies in European art across the ocean. Twenty years had been enough to educate a public and create a clientele stimulated by an ardent need to be in step with the most recent tendencies of the cultural center that was Paris. However, the Armory Show also meant the beginnings of a creative internalization of the European tendencies in American art, more open to European avant-gardism than Europe itself. Even if it wouldn’t become a real cultural center until World War II when many intellectuals, writers, and artists emigrated from Europe, New York was already becoming a strong challenger of Paris’s supremacy. The Armory Show owed a lot to the publicity attracted by the inclusion of two avant-garde names, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia: two key agents in the avant-garde networks that connected Tristan Tzara’s Dada to Breton’s surrealism. Though the paintings exhibited by Duchamp and Picabia in New York were labeled “Cubist,” a few years later their names were associated with the New York Dada group that was coeval with the Zurich group founded in 1916 by Tzara. In 1919, Tzara moved to Paris and joined forces with Breton at Littérature. 127

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Interestingly, the movement that fueled Breton’s surrealism—Dada—had come from the periphery—Zurich and New York—and only afterward conquered Paris. The international character of both Dada and surrealism testifies to the constant flow and exchange of the intellectual networks that included several competing centers, institutions, and agents characterized by great sociability and mobility, both socially and geographically. Duchamp and Picabia moved between Paris and New York, and from Dada to surrealism. Paris was also part of a larger network of newer and rising centers among which several types of capital were exchanged. The story of the international market that made it possible for avant-garde art like surrealism to travel begins in New York with the scandalous Armory Show. Two paintings were the center of attention: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and Francis Picabia’s La Procession, Seville. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, brought to the United States by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, ran from February 15 through March 15, 1913 at the Armory in Manhattan. A retrospective of the most influential recent European movements in art, the exhibition comprised 1,200 works by 300 artists, including paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Redon, Renoir, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse, Manet, Dufy, and Braque. The show traveled to Boston and Chicago. The critics’ attention focused mostly on the European presence in the Armory Show, especially on Brâncui, Duchamp, Picabia, and Matisse. Gail Stavitsky identifies the context that made it possible for the Armory Show to exist in New York in 1913: independent exhibitions that could challenge established perceptions already had a model in avant-garde Paris (Stavitsky 9). Even if the Armory Show shocked both the media and its audience, the very fact that the show was possible to begin with, traveling through three important art centers—New York, Chicago, Boston—was a sign that this market was opening up to the possibilities of avant-garde art. Even if the audience wasn’t yet ready to fully receive and internalize this influence, it was the first opening that paved the way for Duchamp’s readymades, as well as for the first Dada exhibitions a few years afterward. Twenty years later, when Dalí was introduced to the American market and surrealism had gotten MoMA’s attention, the public had matured enough to fully receive what the more creative and magical part of avant-garde art had to offer. However, the Cubists shown in what the press called “The Chamber of Horrors” were considered at best a good joke by the American Art News reviewer L. Merrick: “The centre of attraction, however, for the mob is the so-called

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‘Chamber of Horrors,’ due of course to the American sense of humor, as it is really a room full of mirth-making spectacles, which no one has yet been found to take seriously” (Merrick 4). Even if Merrick is dismissive of Duchamp, he does grant him the merit of getting enough publicity for the show that produced also the first buyers, so even if he isn’t a genuine Navi or Pre-Raphaelite “prophet,” he exemplifies a different and very American kind of profit: Marcel Duchamp’s mixture of leather, tin and broken violins, which he calls “A Nude Descending a Staircase,” draws shrieks of laughter from the crowds who gather about it eight deep, in their eagerness to discover the lady or the stairway. Had the mind (or the stomach) which conceived this novel presentation of the female form divine invented some comprehensible title, the financial results would doubtless have not been as large, and certain it is that M. Duchamp has done his part towards swelling the door receipts, and may therefore safely be called a “Profit.” Merrick 4

Presented “the American way”—the phrase used by the show’s organizer Walt Kuhn as he put the exhibitions together—the Armory Show encompassed art spanning a century, from the classicist Ingres and the romantic Delacroix up to the post-Impressionists, Fauvists, Futurists, and Cubists. Art that would rarely hang together in the same gallery or exhibition in Europe could be exported to America under the broader label of modern and “recent”—not the European term “avant-garde”—art. Traveling beyond their space of origin, art movements that seemed at odds back home—like Ingres’ academism incriminated by the avant-gardes or the radical break between post-impressionists like Degas and Cubists like Duchamp and Braque—had their edges softened; they could be seen to feed into rather than opposing one another. A similar dynamic is observed by Matei Calinescu in the case of another semi-peripheral space, Latin America, which liberated itself from the Spanish model through Rubén Darío’s coinage of modernismo, a term that came to encompass many divergent, more parochial movements of the period: It was much less difficult to perceive this common element from a foreign perspective, and this was exactly what the modernistas succeeded in doing. As foreigners, even though some of them spent long periods in France, they were detached from the climate of group rivalries and petty polemics that prevailed in the Parisian intellectual life of the moment, and they were able to penetrate beyond the mere appearances of difference to grasp the underlying spirit of radical renovation, which they promoted under the name modernism. Calinescu, Five Faces 70

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A literary and artistic avant-garde was beginning to emerge in New York. Those responsible for the Armory Show collaborated with the avant-garde group that gathered at the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York. This was initially composed of a few European artists who found the European milieu too confining for their new art, including the painter and pugilist Arthur Cravan (see Figure 6), who would posthumously become an idol of the surrealists: born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, he was a nephew of Oscar Wilde and died at age 31, in 1918, drowned in the Pacific. Known for his black humor and absurdity—he claimed for instance that his uncle Oscar hadn’t died, and had visited him—he had become a renowned pugilist thanks to a great sense of publicity that made him win most of his matches without having to throw a single punch—his challengers dropped out when they heard his name and reputation. He traveled in Europe and the United States using several false passports, declaring no nationality but rather a very surrealist citizenship of twenty countries. From the beginning, Man Ray frequented the avant-garde circles in New York. He was introduced to modern avant-garde art through Alfred Stieglitz’s

Figure 6 Arthur Cravan by Jean-Paul-Louis Lespoir.

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influential gallery 291 and the Dada-oriented magazine 291 edited by Marius de Zayas, Paul Haviland, Agnes Ernest Meyer, and Stieglitz himself between 1915–1916. Man Ray was influenced by the Armory Show in New York and became a founding member of the Société anonyme that introduced avant-garde art to the New York market; he collaborated with Duchamp for New York Dada, a magazine in a single issue from April 1921. As we can see in a letter sent on June 18, 1921 by Man Ray to Tzara in Paris, even if there were attempts from Dada-oriented artists like Duchamp, Man Ray, and Tzara, New York wasn’t yet prepared to invest in them. Man Ray illustrates the poor American market for their art by running together the words “de la mer” as delamerdelamerdelamer, playing on the word merde (shit) and the phrase “de l’amérique,” split by a photo of a naked woman with her legs apart in the shape of an A for “America.” As he sadly declares: Cher Tzara—dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada and will not tolerate a rival. It is true that no efforts to make it public have been made, beyond the placing of your and our dadas in the bookshops, but there is no one here to work for it, and no money to be taken in for it, or donated to it. So dada in New York must remain a secret. Ray, Letter to Tristan Tzara 1

His only hope is for the future: “The appearance of New York Dada was made possible through the generosity of a few poor friends, but it cannot go on so. Perhaps in the future we may do something again” (2). Man Ray was half right. Dada would return to New York, but under the more creative and entrancing form of the surrealist product. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Tzara had already foreshadowed the surrealist object in a collaboration for the single issue of New York Dada, which included Man Ray’s first photo of Duchamp as his feminine double Rrose Sélavy and a readymade branding the new feminine identity. A perfume bottle chosen by Duchamp and with a label created by Man Ray was shown on the issue’s cover (see Figure 7). This object, halfway between Duchamp’s readymade and the future surrealist object, was called ironically Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette, playing upon the beautiful Helen of Troy and the mysterious, veiled beauty that would become a landmark for the surrealists. On the one hand, it was a readymade: Duchamp had chosen a bottle of the Parisian company Rigaud’s bestselling perfume “Un air embaumé;” but on the other hand, it became a pre-surrealist object

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Figure 7 New York Dada Cover (April 1921) © Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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through the collaborative intervention of Duchamp and Man Ray. As he was creating a new identity as Rrose Sélavy, following his previous one as “R. Mutt,” Duchamp used this new name on the perfume label, which showed his feminine hypostasis as captured by Man Ray. Under the letters RS , where R is written backwards as if to refract the S, we read “New York Paris” and the object is shown on the cover of New York Dada surrounded by a frame of four words written upside down infinitely: New York Dada Paris 1921. The entire product that was the magazine bore the Dada label as authorized by Tzara. Under the title “EYE COVER ART-COVER CORSET-COVER Authorization” we can read a real advertisement by Tzara of the Dadaglobe period warning a potential feminine reader not to take any glossy label—the perfume label included—for a dada product. Dada’s irony-tinged interest in advertising rhetoric fed into surrealism, and so we can date surrealism’s flirting more or less seriously with the advertising industry long before Dalí moved to New York. That neither Tashjian nor Kachur looks back all the way to the Dada years, which show a more complex situation than a commercialism that begins only in the 1930s (Kachur), or a simple polarization between an anticommercial Breton and a materialist Dalí who sold his soul to the Devil who wears Prada in New York. The Dada product aimed at conquering the two centers we can read on the label—Paris and New York. But it would take another twelve years to do so. If the New York market wasn’t yet prepared to grasp this new type of avant-garde product, it paved the way for the surrealists’ success in the 1930s. Years later, going beyond the merely conceptual Belle Haleine, in 1983 Dalí launched the commercial fragrance that bore his name. It came in a bottle in the form of a nose with a pair of lips inspired by his painting “Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Knidos.” The beautiful Helen of Troy would be surpassed by Aphrodite, and the surrealist object was now part of everyday life.

Introducing surrealism: Levy and Barr Two decades after the Armory show, surrealism made it to New York and in America via two important agents in the field who represented two institutions: the avant-garde gallery of Julien Levy in 1932 and only three years later, the much more established and better funded Museum of Modern Art through Alfred Barr. In this equation, a key agent was Harvard, where both Barr and Levy had been educated; the first major surrealist show that Levy put together

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in 1932 was followed by a surrealist exhibition at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Arts. Symbolically for the two poles Levy and Barr represented, whereas Levy enrolled in the Fine Arts Department at Harvard but dropped out, Barr pursued his PhD at Harvard. Close in age (Barr was four years older than Levy), and with similar cultural and social capital, they developed two different trajectories that reflected their differing personalities. Levy was himself more in the avant-garde, having entered the surrealist circle in Paris through his friendship with Duchamp, who introduced him to Man Ray. He became a surrealist himself, experimenting in Paris as early as 1927 with photography and readymades. Barr had a more scholarly profile, having pursued an academic career that led to his promotion while still very young as art director at the newly established MoMA . It was his Harvard professor Paul J. Sachs who recommended him in 1928, when Barr was only 26, to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to direct the future MoMA . (Having accepted the position, Barr didn’t finish his dissertation for another twenty years.) What is of note is the very short time in which avant-garde art made it into established institutions with greater visibility and impact. Already at the peak of its trajectory, surrealism could make the leap from the less visible art galleries to the upscale and generously funded MoMA . Both Levy and Barr were very open to avant-garde art, though perhaps in Levy’s case with a more focused perspective on surrealism, and with a broader understanding of modern art in the case of Barr, who had the advantage of the scholar and art historian, less directly involved than Levy in the production of the art he was promoting. Julien Levy was the son of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and real estate businessman. He became an art dealer in New York, and married the writer Mina Loy’s daughter, Joella. (Her other daughter, Fabienne, was the child she had by Oscar Wilde’s wild nephew, Arthur Cravan.) Levy had started to study museum administration at Harvard under Paul Sachs, but dropped out and traveled to Paris, where he entered the former New York Dada group, befriending Duchamp and Man Ray. In 1931, Levy opened his gallery at 602 Madison Avenue, and as early as 1932, he started to introduce surrealism on the New York market. He began by staging Man Ray’s first major show, and continued in 1932 with the exhibition that brought together Picasso, Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Joseph Cornell. Levy’s exhibition worked both ways in terms of establishment: it marked a key moment in the history of surrealism and it established Levy’s gallery on both the European and American market of art galleries as a respectable avant-garde institution. Late in life, Levy published

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his Memoir of an Art Gallery (1977) in which he recalls this exhibition with pride: This group of Surrealist objects, literature, sculpture, and paintings was dear to my heart. Contemporary art historians will never convince me that the first American Surrealist show was not mine . . . My Surrealist exhibition in January, 1932, was, overnight, to turn my gallery into the unforgettable moment in art history I can still claim. I could not have been more delighted with the phenomenal excitement it achieved, in New York and elsewhere, especially because from lack of money and lack of space I had worried it might seem a bit sketchy. Even Europe was suddenly conscious of the Julien Levy Gallery, it seemed. Mail and press clippings poured in. 76–9

In a review, Harold Rosenberg described Levy’s memoir as “the adventures of a romantic, but one tempered by business instincts” (“Vanguard Dealer” 84). Though Levy wrote that his gallery “was to be the gallery that represented the most enduring artists of the period: the Surrealists” (Memoir 12), Rosenberg doubted that one could really be a Surrealist art dealer at all: “But is it possible to be a Surrealist art dealer? Hardly more than to be a Surrealist magistrate or a Surrealist first baseman” (“Vanguard Dealer” 85). Rosenberg doesn’t take into account that Breton and Eluard themselves behaved as art dealers from the beginning by purchasing new avant-garde art that they would exchange later for the work of other rising artists as the former would become well-known and had a higher market value. Newer approaches more fully understand the multiple roles played in the social networks by the surrealists, as can be seen in Adam Jolles’s The Curatorial Avant-Garde, which dedicates an entire chapter to “The Artist as Dealer,” focusing on Dalí, Man Ray, and Duchamp. What had prompted Levy’s interest was a drive similar to that of the Armory Show’s organizers back in the 1910s: to bring the most recent and also durable avant-garde work in Europe to the pragmatic United States: “My dream was that America, so common-sensical, my country of pragmatism, would see more of that undoing (or should I say unraveling?) in my gallery if my efforts might persist over the next several decades” (Memoir 13). As Levy notes, his gallery was a tribute to Alfred Stieglitz and Marcel Duchamp: This particular rainy day on the corner of 57th and Madison, during the short walk to Stieglitz’s An American Place, I found myself thinking with poignant immediacy not only of Alfred Stieglitz, but even more of Marcel Duchamp, the

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two men who have had the greatest formative influence on my present temper. I thought how I would like to have both as spiritual fathers. I decided to adopt them as godfathers, and in my mind I did. 17

Levy was thus connecting his art gallery to the previous avant-garde circles in New York, and mainly to Duchamp, the figure who had back then been the scandal of the Armory Show’s Chamber of Horrors. The twenty years that had elapsed since the Armory Show had provided the time needed for avant-garde art to create its audience and be circulated through the art collectors and the galleries that had purchased their products. Levy entered the Monnier and Beach circles, including the soirées of Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Stein, and as he writes in his memoirs: At gatherings such as this the most fertile contacts between the best talents of Paris and New York could be made. At Gertrude Stein’s I was to meet Pavel Tchelitchew and many others. My lifetime love for French literature began when I met Adrienne Monnier, and through her, Paul Valéry, and Max Jacob. Adrienne was a friend of Sylvia Beach and her bookstore was across the street from that of Sylvia’s Shakespeare and Co., where the English-speaking writers gathered, notably Joyce and Hemingway. This was a heady brew such as one could not hope to find assembled and accessible in New York in those days. 35

While in Paris, Levy stayed with his mother-in-law Mina Loy, who had many connections to artists as well as to her fellow writers. This place was ideal for someone like Levy, who wanted to have a good exposure to the art world from a certain distance that would help him better internalize the influence of both Americans and Europeans: I was to stay with Mina Loy, my delightful mother-in-law, in her Paris apartment, across the court from her friend, Djuna Barnes, near enough and yet far enough from the artists’ quarter of Montparnasse and the Saint-Germain district. Mina’s household, always in a state of delicate equilibrium between threadbare poetic freedom and aristocratic elegance, would be a perfect location for my own balancing act between America and Europe, the new world and the old. 118

He had now to return to New York where he was to work in his father’s real estate business, not exactly an artistic enterprise. However, Levy soon came into

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possession of a small trust fund, which was enough to open a small art gallery that would become the surrealists’ New York headquarters. Over the years, from 1931 to 1948, Levy organized as many as thirty-seven group and individual shows dedicated to members of the surrealist group, including individual exhibitions for Man Ray, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, and especially Dalí, the great discovery of Levy who had the intuition to purchase what would become an icon of surrealism in America: Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory,” more popularly known as the “Melting Watches.” Levy was the first to organize individual exhibitions for Dalí. The first was in 1933, from November 21 through December 8, followed by two shows in 1934: Dalí’s drawings and etchings (from April 3 through April 28) and another painting exhibition (from November 21 through December 10). After that, Levy organized an individual exhibition for nearly every year. The network that attracted Dalí to New York included the Parisian avant-garde art dealer Pierre Colle, who introduced him to Levy. As Levy recalls: In 1931, I had encountered Pierre Colle, a younger man than I, dark, magnetic, and burning with enthusiasm in his new gallery in Paris on the Rue Cambacérès, where he had been showing such painters as Derain and Matisse . . . He was a man of great perception and honesty, and was to become an associate of mine, quite like a Paris partner, as I was to be his unofficial associate in New York . . . Pierre and Dalí were interested in arranging an exhibition in New York. Memoir 70

Levy writes that Dalí was ready to comply with the exigencies of the New York public and tame his coprophilia, which somewhat worried Levy. What Dalí wouldn’t do for Breton he would do for a gallery show. For Levy, the fact that Mrs. Murray Crane, a generous donor and trustee at MoMA , owned a Dalí meant that “even the old ladies might approve,” and he took the plunge and bought “The Persistence of Memory”—for the grand sum of $250. Levy was pleasantly surprised to find that his businessman father liked it: “In those days, $250 was a high price, more than I had ever spent for a painting . . . My father was also pleased when I told him that if he liked it ‘so would America’ ” (71). Art dealers like Colle and Levy weren’t the only ones managing Dalí’s entry into the United States market, as Gala was closely involved as well: In practical matters, theirs was a very smooth-working team. It was Gala-Dalí or Dalí-Gala . . . I soon came to intensely dislike dealing with such artist-manager combines, particularly if the manager was an inartistic spouse. I thought of

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myself as dealing from enthusiasm and not from cupidity, whereas the wife, like a tiger defending a cub, took for granted that I, or any art dealer, was a predator. 73

With no investment on Levy’s part except the offer to show Dalí’s paintings solo in New York, the first show from 1933 proved a success: Pierre Colle “shipped me my first Dalí show with no guarantee of sales from me, no cash down, and framing and shipping expenses prepaid. For my part I managed, fortunately, to sell out the show” (75). But the best thing for Levy was that the show cemented the reputation of the Julien Levy Gallery as well as of Salvador Dalí. “Almost immediately, the gallery assumed a certain prestige, already seemed more assured and established than it really was. A small but steady stream of the general public was supplementing the friends, artists, and gallery habitués who constantly came in and out” (75). Levy believed that avant-garde art, and specifically surrealism, could stimulate American artists, and he “understood that Surrealism, far from being a mere style, required cultural assimilation if it were to take root in America” (Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen 41). He recognized Joseph Cornell as an American who could internalize the influence of his idols Max Ernst and Man Ray, hence Levy decided to include him in the 1932 show: “the spirit of execution was entirely that of Cornell, quite unlike Max’s or Man Ray’s or any other Surrealists then working in Paris. The results were a new thing to the world, perhaps the first series of Surrealist objects made in the U.S.A.” (Memoir 79). Levy believed in a real stimulation of American art rather than in a “translation” of Breton’s version of surrealism, and he was happy that Breton wasn’t involved in organizing the show. Had he been, Levy thought that the exhibition would have turned into an orthodox manifestation of surrealism and into another manifesto-like event. This view illuminates what it takes for an artistic ideology to travel beyond its country of origin: creative local interpretation and a strong and visionary sense of the local market’s needs. Hence, Levy writes, his exhibition lacked nothing in surrealist spirit, but he wasn’t merely importing Breton’s version of surrealism. What could speak to the Parisian audience couldn’t speak fifteen years later to the American audience. So he considered that the whole political engagement of surrealism, which played such a key role for Breton, had to be left out for the American market. A depoliticized view of surrealism pervades also Levy’s account in his memoir, in a way the typical attitude of an art dealer who claimed for himself an

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autonomous avant-garde position, liberated from politics. This is a major reason why Harold Rosenberg argued in 1977 that Levy failed to represent surrealism in the United States despite his claim to be the main American promoter of the movement. Rosenberg shares Breton’s resistance to seeing his movement reshaped for a different market: No wonder that, with his aversion to “propaganda,” Levy was told by Breton that he could “never be a true surrealist.” In its failure to reflect what was happening in surrealist thinking and expression, Julien Levy Gallery was essentially an anachronism, intellectually situated in the nineteen-twenties, before the stockmarket crash, when the carefree American aesthete could enrich his senses at the moveable feast of Paris-New York. Rosenberg, “Vanguard Dealer” 86

More recent approaches, such as Richard Woodward’s “Snapshot of an AvantGarde Collector” (2006), give Levy more credit for having mediated the cultural exchanges that led to the development of American modern art. Woodward calls Levy “a dashing figure who perhaps did more than any dealer other than Alfred Stieglitz to establish modern art in America during the first half of the 20th century,” and he observes that “in that brief period [1931–1948] he managed to meet and promote most of the avant-garde figures of his era and to help tilt the balance of power in the art world from Paris to New York” (Woodward 6). A new era opened for surrealism. What Levy found in surrealism was a revolt against the mechanical Cartesian world: “Man is not a calculating machine which would conquer the world, but engagingly human . . . For these reasons, and because above all the Surrealists valued intuition and the irrational, Breton and Dalí proclaimed the fall of the Cartesian thought . . . The Surrealists remontaged man” (Levy, Memoir 108). In a way, Levy’s view came close to that of Breton, who constantly reaffirmed surrealism’s aim to change the world as a new humanism, but he had little taste for the manifesto-driven polemical violence that had built the movement to begin with. And so he made a deliberate decision to exclude Breton: The show’s somnambulistic improvisation was original, spontaneous, and lively, essentially Surrealist in spirit. If Breton had been there at that time there would no doubt have been a more orthodox representation. Manifesto-heavy, it might have collapsed of its own rigidity. I wished to present a paraphrase which would offer Surrealism in the language of the new world rather than a translation in the rhetoric of the old. 79–80

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Not only benefitting the surrealists, the exhibition was also a way for small, unestablished art galleries and museum directors to make a name. Before the show had even taken place, rising museum directors like Chick Austin in Hartford were signing on to circulate Levy’s surrealist exhibition. Levy made a strategic decision to let Austin inaugurate the series of surrealist exhibits even before his own show opened, and he lent him his show for Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum in 1931: It had been to strengthen its impact, to lend it museum authority, but above all to do a favor for one of my best and stimulating friends, Chick Austin, who begged to have it, that I lent him the whole group of paintings and drawings so painstakingly collected. Chick had only recently been made director of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, and we both understood that the show would lend him prestige. 80

It was this decision that led to Levy’s complaint that art historians weren’t giving him proper credit for introducing surrealism across the Atlantic. With a very perceptive eye, Levy sensed even before Breton that Dalí was entering a new stage of his trajectory, one that was set to please audiences both in Paris and New York. Unlike Breton, who believed that Dalí was fatally compromising himself with the fashion industry and his need to market himself, Levy felt that Dalí’s art could regain its initial force and violence only once he became established and could experiment anew: There hung “The Persistence of Memory,” 10 by 14 inches of Dalí dynamite. Although this particular painting was to attain inordinate fame (cartoons of it were in the more lurid tabloids, journalists from coast to coast wrote stories about “Limp Watches”), its duality showed the beginning of a temporary adulteration of Dalí’s style, introducing a new period of his that was to last for about two years. During this period he readjusted to commercial necessity, to success in the Parisian market, to an indolence resulting, no doubt, from the security of his contact with Pierre Colle . . . In any event, there was, I say, dilution. Dalí was not to regain his pure, agonizing Spanishly cruel brand of Surrealism until he was again, for a while, independent of the art markets of Paris and America, with a generous subsidy from the English patron Edward Jones. This was to last for several years, a period of really high achievement, 1933 to 1937. Memoir 80

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Dalí could reinvent himself not only thanks to Edward Jones’ support but also to a complex network of socialites that had been brought together in a very strange pact, which was very profitable for Dalí. It was Gala who knew how to sell his work and circulate it through the best networks. One winning idea was the Zodiac or “Save Dalí” group, which existed between 1933–1939. Gala contacted one of the richest art collectors in Europe, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, and together they created a network of twelve collectors. Not only did this guarantee Dalí a monthly income, but it meant that his works would become part of the best circuits of collectors. Along with FaucignyLucinge, the network included the wealthy Caresse Crosby and the Vicomte de Noailles, who constantly supported Dalí financially. Edward Jones, who paid Dalí a retainer from 1935 through 1945 for the right to buy from Dalí any painting of his choice, was the godson of King Edward VII . It was for him that Dalí created the luscious lips sofa in 1938. Despite Levy’s claims that he was devising a Breton-free version of surrealism, he kept justifying the inclusion of non-Parisian affiliated artists who would have won Breton’s approval: “I borrowed a Pierre Roy from Brummer because, although Roy considered himself independent of the Surrealist movement, Chick and I thought that the spirit of his work was entirely within the definition Breton had established” (82). However, Levy dismisses the preconception that before reaching the United States, surrealism hadn’t been involved in commercial art, using Herbert Bayer as an example: “Bayer was an advertising man, working in Berlin with an international agency, which only goes to show that Surrealism was creeping into commercial art in Europe before Madison Avenue ran it into the ground” (83), something that Lewis Kachur’s Displaying the Marvelous illustrates very well through the close reading of the relationship between surrealism and fashion in the 1930s in Paris. Levy, Barr, and Chick Austin discussed the possibility of rebranding surrealism under a different name. Whereas Barr and Austin voted for translating the concept, Levy stuck to the word invented by Apollinaire, preferring what the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti would call a “foreignizing” effect: Hartford held the show in the fall of 1931 and I presented surrealism to New York after the first of the year. We had some lively debates with Alfred Barr about the name, Chick proposing his mischievous Newer Super-Realism, Barr electing Super-Realism and I held out for Surrealism. The ticklish point was whether one should try to translate the French at all. I thought it a very un-Surrealist thing to

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do—it was trying to be logical, Super-Realism, like Superman, was a vulgarization, I said, Surrealism was a French word invented by Apollinaire. As an invented word it should exist in its own right. It was, I maintained, untranslatable. Although temporarily Chick and Alfred played around with various translations, the word Surrealism stuck. Usage was to prove in my favor. Memoir 137

Thinking of the interactions among the different agents on the market, Levy believed that a museum like MoMA should collaborate with galleries like his to speed up the process of recognition. This would yield the financial profit that would allow small avant-garde galleries to continue discovering new artists whom museums could one day house, thus renewing the museum collections for the benefit of all involved: “I still feel museum and gallery are two parts of a whole and ought to be mutually helpful” (138). But Barr didn’t share his view: “Alfred did not see this need for cooperation. First of all, he resented a gallery that had more mobility than his museum. He complained to me about it. He wanted to give novelty shows, but a gallery like mine took the novelty out of his hands by giving shows before he did” (137). Barr also wanted Levy to sell him paintings for bargainbasement rates, expecting that the museum’s prestige should substitute for hard cash—not an entirely unreasonable expectation, as an artist’s value was raised by having pictures in museums. Yet, as Levy remarked with some asperity, “No doubt a good case can be made for Alfred’s position, and the argument could be indulged in a greater length. Chick, however, didn’t try to drive my prices down” (138). During the peak years of surrealism on the American market, the gallery owner and the young museum director proved that they could cooperate, even if from different positions and with different means. Their cooperation had a decisive impact when they joined forces in 1936. The avant-garde publishing house The Black Sun published Levy’s volume Surrealism and at MoMA , Barr hosted the grandest surrealist exhibition ever,“Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.”

Barr’s fantastic art exhibit and Levy’s Surrealism From 1929 when the MoMA was founded and until 1968, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. invested four decades of his life in what would become, in large part thanks to his vision, one of the most famous museums in the world. Unlike the Armory Show, which had exposed an uninformed and unprepared American public to the products of Western modern and avant-garde art, the MoMA was established

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with the purpose of cultivating “an informed public for avant-garde art”; it wanted “to be substantially a teaching institution” (Thistlewood, “The MoMA” 316, 320). From 1929 through 1943, Barr was Director of the museum, then VicePresident and Advisory Director; from 1947, he acted as Director of Museum Collections. The bold experimentalist Levy was a gallery owner, whereas the more socially connected Barr became the director of a rising and well-funded museum. For all his gallery’s cachet, Levy didn’t have a stable position in the art market; he had to close the gallery in 1948, whereas Barr had a far more stable position at the MoMA that allowed him to sign on for life. With a more solid and broader intellectual formation as a scholar of modern art than Levy, Barr had also proven to be his teacher’s favorite. Both had worked at Harvard with the most important name in the Fine Arts Department, Paul J. Sachs, himself a trustee of MoMA , but he nominated Barr in 1928 when Abby Aldrich Rockefeller asked him for someone who could direct a new museum of modern art. When he met Alfred Barr, who was then a graduate student at Harvard, Levy was in his senior year in the college. From the beginning, Barr proved to be more successful than Levy in persuading the art department to become interested in modern art. Sachs entrusted him to organize a small exhibition at the Fogg Museum. Barr borrowed some items from Levy for the show, including a Chagall etching, a Klee lithograph, and a drawing by Schiele (Levy, Memoir 104). That was the beginning of a collaboration between the two Harvard students that would last for many years and would become especially close when they began to introduce surrealism in the United States. From a position of more authority and with a greater outreach than Levy possessed, Alfred Barr contributed in major ways to the formation, canonization, and consecration of our current idea of modern art, first through the selection of what would be shown in the MoMA’s exhibitions and then through his acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection. In a programmatic essay written in 1934, Barr observes that “The term modern art, chronologically speaking, is then so elastic that it can scarcely be defined . . . ‘Modern Art’ is recurrently a matter for debate, to be attacked or defended, a banner for the progressive, a red flag for the conservative. In this sense, the word modern can become a problem not of periods but of prejudices” (in Barr, Defining Modern Art 83). The surrealists—or as he calls them, despite Levy, the Superrealists—are his prime example of untraditional modern art: “The Superrealists, the most conspicuous advanceguard movement of today, even more than the Pre-Raphaelites, disregard at least so far as their program is concerned the importance of ‘plastic values’” (83).

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Barr couldn’t be left behind by his younger Harvard classmate, who had inaugurated the first surrealist exhibit in 1932. Not able to play the card of the discoverer, Barr could outdo Levy in terms of proportions. His “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,” mounted at the MoMA in 1936, was the grandest surrealist exhibition ever. It also displayed the most comprehensive contextualization, through exhibits that marked the stages of surrealist art from the Middle Ages onwards, culminating with surrealism itself. Certainly, it was the exhibition with the best press coverage, thanks to funds Barr put into publicity and also to the greater visibility of the MoMA . As Lewis Kachur shows, even though Barr’s understanding and approach to surrealism wasn’t to Breton’s and Eluard’s liking, they didn’t fail to understand the commercial value his exhibition might represent: “While the poets Breton and Eluard strove to pressure Barr to limit his focus to Surrealism, they also were well aware that he wielded considerable clout on behalf of the Museum, notably acquisition funds and the commissioning of catalog essays” (14). As in many cases in this story of the circulation of surrealist ideas, an important role in mediating the difficult negotiations between Breton and Barr was played by a woman: “Mrs. Barr herself, with her fluency in French, played a central, unacknowledged role in securing the collaboration of Breton and Eluard” (16). In the book-length catalog for the exhibit, Barr took Breton’s view that poetry was the basis of the revolution in modern painting: The explanation of this kind of art shown in this exhibition may be sought in the deep-seated and persistent interest which human beings have in the fantastic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the marvelous, the enigmatic, and the dreamlike. These qualities have always been present in metaphors and similes of poetry but they have been less frequent in painting, which in the past was largely concerned with reproducing external reality, with decoration, or, as in some of the more advanced movements of recent years, with the composition of color and line into formal design. Fantastic Art 9

He also followed Breton in presenting surrealism as the new and improved successor to Dada: “Dada died in Paris about 1922 but from its ashes sprung Surrealism, under the leadership of the poet André Breton. The Surrealists presented the antirational character of Dada but developed a far more systematic and serious experimental attitude toward the subconscious as the essential source of art” (11). Beyond paintings and drawings, Barr’s selection included a special section for the surrealist object: “Cubist objects appealed to a sense of

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design or form but Dada and Surrealist objects have primarily a psychological interest—bizarre, dreamlike, absurd, uncanny, enigmatic. They are objects of ‘concrete irrationality’ ” (12). The exhibition included Duchamp’s readymade “Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Selavy?” and Meret Oppenheim’s fur cup and saucer. Barr presented the New York audience with a comparative selection of European and American fantastic art over the previous 500 years, with a focus on what he called the “Dada-Surrealist movement.” He unified the two movements and in the catalog he reinforced this position through the inclusion of essays on the international character of Dada and surrealism written by Georges Hugnet, himself a surrealist. Barr’s decision to include an inner perspective on surrealism followed the avant-garde strategy of self-legitimation. The comprehensive survey of fantastic art began with Archimboldo’s Baroque anamorphoses that inspired Dalí, Bosch’s illuminated hell and “The Temptation of St. Anthony” with its protosurrealist animated and composite objects, da Vinci’s impossible geometric objects, and Holbein’s anamorphic skull in “The Ambassadors.” The exhibit continued with the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Bracelli’s drawer and mechanical silhouettes made of objects that inspired Dalí’s drawer bodies, and Hogarth’s play upon antique ruins and objectlike parts of the body that inspired both de Chirico’s and Dalí’s playful dialogue with Greek sculpture. Later art included Blake’s “Dream of Things Impossible,” a drawing of the lobster quadrille in Through the Looking-Glass that preceded Dalí’s obsession for lobsters; Füssli’s “Nightmare,” and Odilon Redon’s “The Eye like a Strange Balloon.” After sections devoted to the twentieth-century pioneers of surrealism (including Chagall, de Chirico, and Duchamp) and the central part on Dada (1916–1922) and Surrealism (1924 to the present, i.e. 1936), Barr provided a section dedicated to artists independent of the Dada-Surrealism movements, where one could even find Walt Disney’s cartoon “Wolf Pacifier,” a great intuition of Barr’s, given the future collaboration of Dalí and Disney. A seventh section, called “Comparative Materials,” reads like Breton’s manifesto, outlining all the types of art with which surrealism overlapped and from which it drew its inspiration: children’s art, art of the insane, folk art, commercial and journalistic art, objects with a surrealist character, and scientific objects. A section on “Fantastic Architecture” was drawn directly from Breton’s Les Vases communicants and from Dalí’s articles on Gaudi’s soft architecture in Minotaure. Barr concluded his introduction to the exhibition catalog by outlining the international growth of surrealism in the 1930s:

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under the name of Surrealism it is now active in a dozen countries of Europe, in North and South America, in Japan; it is influencing artists outside the movement as well as designers and decorative and commercial art; it is serving as a link between psychology on the one hand and poetry on the other . . . its esthetic of the fantastic, hypnagogic and anti-rational is affecting art criticism and leading to discoveries and reevaluations in art history. 13

Barr’s perceptive comment shows all the symptoms of an established movement: traveling beyond the country of origin and developing new and innovative forms of art; entering elite, scholarly, and commercial circuits alike; reevaluating both the art and literary fields. As Kachur notes, the catalog had a great impact on the surrealist writers in turn, and its documentary value paired perfectly with the surrealists’ magazines as group strategy: “The significance of such a catalogue as a historical document must have especially struck the Surrealist writers, who had long labored to produce the group’s magazines. Barr had set an impressive, positivist example that Eluard and Breton soon were prodded to rival with the more antirational Dictionnaire of the Surrealist world view” (Kachur 17). When discussing the highly inclusive MoMA exhibition, some American scholars confuse avant-garde with elitist culture and are surprised that surrealism appealed “to the masses” in the United States. Thus Sandra Zalman thinks that it was only in the United States in the 1930s that Surrealism became “a site where high and low existed in a collaborative rather than oppositional dialogue, and where avant-garde production mixed readily, if uneasily, with kitsch. As such, it was actively absorbed into American mass culture” (“The Vernacular as Vanguard” 45). Yet, from the very beginning, surrealism wanted to make an impact beyond the aesthetic and moral, and as Matei Calinescu showed in his seminal study Five Faces of Modernity, the idea of the avant-garde has at its core eliding the distinction between high and low, between elitist art and what can be considered popular culture or kitsch. Rimbaud loved the naïve art of Henri Rousseau, and the surrealists always wanted to make an impact on our immediate, daily lives. So Barr’s expanding on the structural affinities of the surrealists with everything from Hieronymous Bosch to the art of children and the insane to cartoons was no American invention but reflected a very deep understanding of the surrealist practice from its very beginning. Despite the limitations in her understanding of the idea of avant-garde, Zalman rightly concludes that Barr’s two major insights were “that Surrealist art could be

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pedigreed by means of a genealogical lineage within the history of art, while being made to represent a movement that had relevance because of its associations with everyday modern life” (Zalman 58). Barr’s show made enough of a splash to generate an illustrated spread in Vogue, among many other articles (see Figure 8). Comprehensive though Barr’s show was, Vogue’s account reduces the show to Dalí: “the Surrealist school (or, rather, Dalí, because he is the Surrealist school of today) has such an immense capacity for propaganda, and for making converts, that its influence is felt everywhere” (Agha 131, author’s emphasis). Dalí was beginning to sell better on the American market than Breton. Vogue’s Dalí-centered understanding of the movement is grounded not only in his theory of critical paranoia and his understanding of the surrealist object, but also in the commercial editors’ need to promote a readily digestible form of art. The article shows only one large photo, of Dalí himself rather than an artwork, and aptly begins the article with

Figure 8 Salvador Dalí Portrait. Cecil Beaton/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, November 1, 1936: 60–61.

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the words “WHO is Surrealism,” with an emphasis on the capitalized “WHO.” Whereas the MoMA exhibition introduced the entire surrealist group, Mehmet Agha, director of the glossy and popular Vanity Fair, doesn’t mention Breton’s name except as part of the group. There is also an odd statement that the movement “reached its apogee about ten years ago and has been on the decline ever since” (61), which is certainly not true; but Agha probably had had this idea from Dalí, already a protégé of the magazine. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the Catalan noted the huge difference between European journalists who have no sense of humor and the American journalist who is eager for the sensational and the exhibitionist. Here, Agha admires the surrealists because “they practice what they preach. Dalí receives reporters either sitting on the desk placed on the top of the bed in his hotel room, with all the lamp-shades turned upside down; or on less formal occasions, wearing a loaf of bread instead of a hat” (Agha 131). Other press accounts weren’t substantially different from Vogue’s, as when Time published Man Ray’s photo of Dalí on its cover (see Figure 9). The cover article gave a more objective account of the entire group, recognizing Breton as its spiritual leader (“In the autumn of 1924 he wrote his Manifesto of Surrealism, and a word and a school were born”), but still focuses on the more marketable Dalí: “But surrealism would never have attracted its present attention in the US were it not for a handsome 32-year-old Catalan with a soft voice and a clipped cinema actor’s mustache . . . Artist Dalí who wears a knitted Catalan liberty cap whenever possible, takes surrealism in dead earnest, but has a faculty for publicity which should turn any circus press agent green with envy” (“Marvelous & Fantastic”). Under these circumstances, it was only logical for Barr to close his preface to the Fantastic Art catalog by saying that “It should however be stated that Surrealism as an art movement is a serious affair and that it is more than an art movement: it is a philosophy, a way of life, a cause to which some of the most brilliant painters and poets of our age are giving themselves with consuming devotion” (8). Interestingly, like Levy, Barr echoed Breton’s writings and strategies when validating surrealism. Aiming from the beginning to take over all the domains of life, as the 1924 manifesto announced, surrealism was developing into much more than a poetic and artistic style and movement. Both Barr and Levy had noticed its engagement with real life. Also published in 1936, Julien Levy’s book Surrealism offered a complementary account of surrealism, this time with an emphasis on the surrealists’ writings.

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Figure 9 Salvador Dalí holding Time © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos.

Conceived as an anthology with a long introductory essay by its editor, the volume was divided into sections ranging from literature (Lautréamont, Sade, Rimbaud) to play, behavior, politics, architecture, photography, cinema, and special practices like proverbs, metaphors, and dream narratives, and extending to fetishism, as illustrated both by primitive objects and by surrealist objects by Dalí and Meret Oppenheim, as well as Duchamp’s readymades. The second part of the book was an anthology that introduced the major names of the movement through their artistic and literary creations. This part gave preeminence to Breton, and continued with Eluard, Ernst, Duchamp, Tzara, Crevel, Hugnet, Peret, Arp, Giacometti, Magritte, Man Ray, Miró, Tanguy, de Chirico, Dalí, Picasso, Gisèle Prassinos, and Joseph Cornell. Levy’s book included selections from the surrealists’ literary writings, which were still largely unavailable in English. Some of the translations were made by Levy himself, including excerpts from Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Sade’s Juliette, Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer, Breton’s 1934 lecture in Brussels, Dalí’s Babaouo,

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Eluard’s poetic prose from La Révolution surréaliste, and poems by Dalí and Picasso. Levy’s anthology worked in two directions: consecrating surrealism as a comprehensive movement and mode of living, and also associating the names of the English translators with the symbolic capital of surrealism. The translators included Samuel Beckett, who translated four pieces by Breton and Eluard, and Eugène Jolas, the editor of transition, the magazine which circulated translations from Breton’s Nadja along with fragments from Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” the future Finnegans Wake. Despite Levy’s intention to not turn any surrealist event into a manifesto, he opens his introduction with the final sentences of Breton’s 1924 manifesto: “Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere,” and the layout, structure, and substance of his text are modeled on Breton’s 1924 manifesto. Published on alternating pink, greenish, yellow, and white pages, Levy’s anthology includes an announcement written out phonetically by Dalí, whose English wasn’t exactly good, to be read aloud upon his first visit to New York in 1935, asserting the movement’s seriousness in a hilariously absurd transatlantic patois: aye av ei horror uv joks Surrealism is not ei jok Surrealism is ei strangue poizun Surrealism is zi most vaiolent and daingeros toxin for dsi imaigineichon zad has so far bin invented in dsi domein ouve art Surrealism is irrezisteible and terifai-ingli conteichios Biuer! Ai bring ou Surrealism Aulredi meni pipoul in Nui York jave bin infectid bai zi laifquiving and marvelos sors of Surrealism Levy, Surrealism 160

The life that was to begin for Dalí in the aftermath of 1936 was indeed a pink one; this Joycean rendering of Dalí’s declaration for the New York audience was a new beginning, not only for Dalí but also for surrealism.

Dalí at Levy’s gallery and at the New York World’s Fair In his 1936 trip to Paris, Levy had found a radically new Dalí, one who now was all set to move across the ocean:

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When I again saw Dalí, in this summer of 1936, he was no longer the half-timid, half-malicious foreigner, but now expensive and elegant and quite formidable. His connection with Pierre Colle was severed . . . Dalí had become his own impresario and the darling of that part of the Paris haut monde which patronized the arts. He now owned a house in the suburbs out past the Lion de Belfort, which had been remodeled with the help of the gentleman architect whose models I had exhibited two seasons before, Emilio Terry. Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli competed in the robing of Gala. Memoir 173

Pierre Colle had been replaced by Edward James, the wealthy English heir who bankrolled Dalí’s change of lifestyle. When Levy met him, Edward James announced that he’d acquired all of Dalí’s production that year and that he intended to introduce it to New York through Levy’s gallery. From 1933 through 1938, Edward James was Dalí’s goldmine; he ordered some of the most expensive items, including the Mae West “luscious lips” sofa and the lobster telephone. As James told Levy, it was “All honor to me, all profit to Dalí and you” (Levy, Memoir 175). A true devotee, Levy reports, the eccentric James “had installed red-gold lobsters as mouthpieces on all telephones in his Wimpole Street house. And for his country place in Sussex there was to be a Surrealist garden, in which he had already placed statuary in the form of Lautréamont’s ‘Chance Meeting of an Umbrella and a Sewing Machine on a Dissecting Table’ ” (175). Surrealism was now just one step away from fashion, advertising, and from daily life in general. The taste for eccentricity reinforced by his new patron was what it took to bring Dalí from 1936 onwards into the gossip columns of the chic magazines for New York socialites. When Levy put together Dalí’s exhibition that winter, he also organized some “nonsensical” publicity events: Dalí had been pleased with the nonsense I had arranged for him with the Hearst papers after his last visit. It was sensational publicity, and Dalí was paid for it in the bargain. He now authorized me to arrange some other “manifestation” as he called it. I first approached Saks Fifth Avenue with the project of window dressings by Dalí. Saks had made a fine reputation with its novel displays when it had first moved uptown, but now they were resting on their laurels and were not interested in further extravaganzas. Tom Lee at Bonwit’s, however, got wind of my scheme and called me. Memoir 197

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Dalí’s dream of surrealist objects that would invade New York included transparent mannequins filled with water and goldfish, looking like walking aquariums. No longer presented in glass cases in a gallery or a museum, surrealist objects now invaded the larger glass cases that were the window displays of upscale stores. For Dalí, it seemed like a new provocation: “What a chance to ‘paint’ in three dimensions! The thousand dollar fee seemed inconsequential by comparison” (Levy, Memoir 98). The strategy that Levy devised with Bonwit Teller was to have the inauguration of Dalí’s window display on the same day as the opening of Dalí’s show at Levy’s gallery, thus addressing the female clientele of the expensive fashion stores, interested in an artistic experience that would grant an aura of distinction to their shopping, and encouraging their husbands to buy Dalí’s paintings. But what happened instead was either a surrealist act, if it was staged, or a spontaneous surrealist event: The story of the fracas made headlines in the evening papers. As Dalí conceived it, the central object of interest in his display was the old-fashioned white enamel tub in which was to lie a fully clothed mannequin, wearing one of the dresses Bonwits was promoting. The window had been carefully arranged to Dalí’s satisfaction the night before, but when he came back the next morning to look at it again, he found the management of Bonwit Teller’s had removed the prone mannequin from the tub and stood it to one side, to better display the costume. Seeing this, Dalí plunged raging into the store, into the window scene—and somehow, in the melee and confusion, the tub was shoved through the huge plate glass window . . . I do not believe it was calculated—although I was not there at the time. Levy 198–9

Levy believed that what seemed to be charlatanism was, in fact, Dalí’s pure faith that any idea of his could be transmuted into gold. “Dalí was not a charlatan and, contrary to the general opinion, not even the extravagant showman the press called him. His news-catching escapades, at least while I knew him, all grew from his conviction that the least ‘Dalínian’ idea was worthy of realization, and this combined with passion for precision achieves an impressive effect whether calculated or not” (197). Whether planned or spontaneous, the Bonwit Teller incident helped Dalí’s show to sell out in the blink of an eye: “the opening of Dalí’s exhibition that afternoon was almost an anticlimax, at least for me. I had seen all the pictures, knew they were good, and felt sure they would sell. With the publicity of the Bonwit window they went like hot cakes” (Levy 199).

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But the Bonwit surrealist act was only the beginning. One of the ways surrealism entered real life was through the artificial paradises of Manhattan shop windows: “New York, your beheaded manikins are already asleep, spilling all their ‘perpetual blood’ which flows like the ‘surgical fountains of publicity’ within the display-windows dazzling with electricity, contaminated with ‘lethargic surrealism’ ” (Dalí, Unspeakable Confessions 332). As late as 1978, an article in Vogue by Thomas Hess, “Store Windows: They Involve Our Dreams, Embody Our Hidden Desires,” gives surrealism full credit for having transformed the windows in New York into a liminal space: The sensation of dreams, of Eros and Thanatos, of otherworldliness, in shop windows is what made them so popular with the Surrealist artists. De Chirico, Dalí, and Bellmer fell in love with mannequins and transformed them into internationally celebrated fetishes. By the 1940s, shop-window dummies became the Surrealists’ best friends and loved objects . . . These artists profoundly influenced commercial window-display designers, especially those in the more ambitious and adventurous luxury stores. Fashion used vanguard art for the first time since the eighteenth century. The painters’ startling perspectives, unusually juxtaposed found objects, exotic posturings and costumes became part of the argot of chic shop fronts. Hess 176

Hess’s article shows which version of the surrealist object traveled to New York and then to the world through the fashion industry. It is interesting that even a concept that was Breton’s property, his version of the surrealist object—the trouvaille or found object—was received across the Atlantic as if it were Dalí’s. A new stage of Dalí’s conquest of New York came with his creation of a pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, using new technology to create the wildest dreams (see Color Plate 1). He announced his concept to Levy in typically bombastic style: Very dear Julien, I come with an entirely new philosophic ideology, also I have made technical discoveries which permit me to approach the dream of the ancients. One thing I wish to build is an interuterine room, portable, with heated saliva inside flowing down the hairy walls. When one is distressed by anything at all, one mounts this apparatus and enters in, as one would enter into the belly of the Mother! It’s very hallucinating—you’ll see. We kiss you. I am here, because I have just arrived. Be terribly energetic, we’re going to accomplish a great many things. Levy 205–6

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This period of Dalí’s life, heavily promoted in Vogue, opens with the wildest of Dalí’s surrealist objects yet: the huge pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, shaped like an immense coral reef with crutch-like protuberances, whose entrance is marked by a pair of giant parted legs—an image Dalí will use seven years later in an advertisement for Bryans Hosiery’s Stockings published in Vogue (April 15, 1946: 69) (see Figure 12a). Just above the pavilion’s entrance is a huge reproduction of Botticelli’s Venus. Next to it are a mermaid and a reproduction of da Vinci’s haunting “John the Baptist” with Mona Lisa’s head pasted on. It is quite understandable why Dalí chose this image: da Vinci had represented himself as John the Baptist. Dalí often referred to himself as a saint, the savior of surrealism and of modern art. He was indeed a savior of surrealism, as Levy would agree once he saw him in 1938 in New York, ready to materialize his wildest dreams into reality. But Levy realized that the process had worked both ways, as surrealism in the form of Breton had saved Dalí from perishing in anonymity under his Spanish professors’ jealousy. “He was saved by the Surrealists in Paris who found his expert doodles corresponded with their own experiments—and he saved the Surrealists because he was of a younger generation and had intense drive. They were somewhat discouraged and beginning to despair of conquering the future. It was by reason of Dalí, out of Breton, that surrealism was reproduced” (Levy 209–10). The commission to build the Venus Pavilion came about through complex relational dynamics that illustrate the strategies functioning in the American art field, benefitting both the exporter and the importer. The idea of a Surrealist pavilion at the World’s Fair was presented to Levy by a young architect, Woodner Silverman. He wanted Levy to hire him to design this pavilion, in which Levy would organize a new surrealist exhibition. For a young architect who needed to make a name for himself—he later changed his name into the less Jewishsounding Ian Woodner—Surrealism represented considerable symbolic capital. He hoped for an association with the American gallery owner who’d been instrumental in importing surrealism. Woodner Silverman knew that the World’s Fair would attract a massive audience, to both his and Levy’s benefit, and assured Levy that “he knew all the ins and outs of how to secure a concession area from the Fair corporation” (Levy 206). Inspired by Silverman, Levy didn’t begin by entrusting the project to Dalí, but developed elaborate plans for the pavilion as the stage for a Freudian dream experience:

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In my pavilion I imagined a Dream Corridor, a dark maze in which the public would be subjected to the typical experiences of a dream. This would end in an Audible Corridor, a circular flight of steep stairs with microphones hidden in the walls and connected with a loudspeaker in the main hall where the public could hear reproduced the unconscious remarks, heavy breathing, and laughter of those traversing the Dream Corridor and staircase. Rocking floors, pneumatic walls, and various vivid hallucinatory experiences would be provided until the finale would be the Sensation of Falling, quite real, for those climbing the stairs would find themselves catapulted down to the exit. Levy 206–7

In a kind of mise-en-abyme, the pavilion would include a Grand Hall with a miniature fairground with peep shows, slot machines, and pinball games, culminating in an incredible sexual surrealist object: “an apparatus I called Feelie—two great lips of red velvet, six feet long, in back of which, hidden in the wall, would be a revolving cylinder covered with a heteroclite assortment of objects: sandpaper, hot and cold air vents, silken tassels, sensory rubber landscapes: thrust a hand through the lips and feel!” (207). The vagina-like pair of lips outdid Dalí’s Mae West’s lips couch, and was worthy of Levy’s master Duchamp, who projected a sort of “machine-onaniste” that he described to Levy on their first voyage to Paris. Its fantasy proved to be a bonding experience for the two men: Marcel toyed with two flexible pieces of wire . . . He was, he told me, devising a mechanical female apparatus. His painting of the bride could be the diagram of a soft anatomical machine. He said, jokingly, he thought of making a life-size articulated dummy, a mechanical woman whose vagina, contrived of meshed springs and ball bearings, would be contractile, possibly self-lubricating, and activated from a remote control, perhaps located in the head and connected by the leverage of the two wires he was shaping. The apparatus might be used as a sort of “machine-onaniste” without hands. I fell in with this fantasy and suggested that she could be equipped with a mechanism by which the lower portion of her body was activated by one’s tongue thrust into the mouth in a kiss. It was then that Marcel unbent, giggled for the first time, and admitted me to his inner circle of intimate friends. Levy 20

Sadly, like Levy’s Feelie, Duchamp’s machine-onaniste would remain only a fantasy. So too would the Feelie that Levy was inspired to envision for his pavilion, as would his idea of asking all the most important surrealists to

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contribute an object to this pavilion, to the symbolic and economic profit of all. But the dynamics of the field can be ironic. What Levy projected as a strategy to benefit the surrealist group ended up once more bringing into the spotlight only Dalí, its star. Levy’s project was just too expensive and elaborate for what any investor would have been willing to put into a pavilion for a fair, and only Dalí’s name had the power to attract funding for even a scaled-down version of the plan. Having failed to secure funding, Levy recalls, “it became apparent that the energy of my imagination might not be equal to the task of real-izing the conception. A more violent, bombastic, and experienced imagination such as Dalí’s might be essential, to condense the immaterial into being . . . I must resign myself to handing over to Dalí (with all the foundation work I had prepared) whatever autonomy was mine over my own project” (Levy 209–12). As he ruefully concludes: “This is a custom of choosing up in America, even among children. When we tossed for baseball sides at school, a bat was thrown in the air. Not the first one to catch it, but the last to get his full fist upon it, was captain” (212). Dalí had certainly gotten his full fist upon the ivory cane that was part of Breton’s arsenal together with his bottle-green suit. To make it in America was not only a question of excellence in the practice of the game but also of one’s popularity and sociability, and, last but not least, of chance encounters. Nothing could be more surrealist. Both Levy and Dalí had to put up with a narrow-minded investor, whom Levy called “Rubber Man” because of his cheap idea of showing mermaids with rubber tails in the dream for the Fair. Dalí proposed instead showing Botticelli’s Venus with a fish’s head—a nice chiastic reversal of a mermaid—but the investor strongly opposed the idea, which was also rejected by the Fair’s Committee. In response, Dalí wrote a manifesto parodying the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and arranged to have hundreds of copies of his “Declaration of the independence of the imagination and the rights of man to his own madness” dropped from an airplane over New York. The manifesto quoted Breton’s definition of surrealism. Dalí was very much following Breton’s lead in staging a surrealist event in the name of the freedom of the imagination. Dalí’s “Declaration” cannily evokes the American Revolution and the Liberty Bell, even as he connects Ben Franklin—former ambassador of revolutionary America to France—with Lautréamont, the surrealists’ rediscovered idol: Artists and poets of America! If you wish to recover the sacred source of your mythology and your own inspiration, the time has come to reunite yourselves with the historic bowels of your Philadelphia, to ring once more the symbolic

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bell of your imaginative independence, and holding aloft in one hand Franklin’s lightning rod, and in the other Lautréamont’s umbrella, to defy the storm of obscurantism that is threatening your country! Loose the lightning of your anger and the avenging thunder of your paranoiac inspiration! quoted in Levy, 221

The manifesto closed with Dalí’s triumph over New York through the madness of the discoverer, the new Columbus: “But one thing is certain,” wrote Dalí. “A Catalan, Christopher Columbus, discovered America, and another Catalan, Salvador Dalí, has just rediscovered Christopher Columbus. New York! You who are like the very stalk of the air, the half-cut flower of heaven! You, mad as the moon, New York! I see you won by the Surrealist ‘Paranoia-Kinesis.’ You may well be proud. I go and I arrive, I love you with all my heart.” Levy, 222

Here, Dalí was closer to Breton than ever. The first manifesto of surrealism spoke of the surrealist as a mad Columbus discovering a new kingdom— “Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured” (Breton, Entretiens 5–6).

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New York may have made Dalí delirious, but Breton felt differently during his wartime exile. Breton fled Nazi-occupied France in March, 1941 together with his wife Jacqueline and their daughter, in a boatload of refugees including Claude Lévi-Strauss. The image of Breton on board, which Lévi-Strauss records in his Tristes Tropiques, is symbolic of his isolation and solitude during his American exile: “Breton, by no means at his ease in such a situation, would amble up and down the rare empty spaces on deck, looking like a blue bear in his velvety jacket. We were to become firm friends in the course of an exchange of letters which we kept up throughout our interminable journey; their subject was the relation between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality” (Tristes Tropiques 26). The image of Breton as a blue bear in his—most likely green—velvety jacket makes him into an almost surreal object. He here appears in a defamiliarizing context: Lautréamont’s dépaysement, which was supposed to be the effect of the object or image, was now literally lived by Breton. A blue bear dressed in a green velvety jacket is certainly a surreal image, all the more so in the tropical climate of Martinique to which they initially sailed before reaching New York. Isolated, removed from his habitat, for Breton his New York stay was perhaps the saddest and most solitary part of his life. Breton understood from his New York experience only what his Parisian habits of perception allowed him to. He sought out bistros and cafés with a Parisian flavor, mostly keeping company with other surrealists and friends in exile, such as Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, the British painter Stanley William Hayter, and Lévi-Strauss, whom he saw a lot of during his New York stay. From the point of view of the now more politically committed surrealists Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara, Breton’s absence from the Resistance was tantamount to treason, which they held against him for the rest of his life. In 1940, Breton was 44 years old. Without a university degree and with a poor command of English, he couldn’t find a job in academia, and the compensating strategy that worked for him in the 1920s in Paris—running a magazine and 159

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becoming a self-made poet and theorist—was much less successful in New York. The five years he spent there were marked by bad luck on all levels. Jacqueline left him for the American painter David Hare, who ironically was also the editor of the magazine that Breton and Duchamp had begun publishing in New York, VVV. He had serious financial as well as linguistic difficulties, and in general he was reluctant to adapt to a new place where he wasn’t the uncontested leader of the most important group of artists and poets in the capital of the world. Breton couldn’t put up with American informality; one day, trying to chair a meeting of the surrealist group at a bar in Greenwich Village, he became annoyed that people weren’t taking the meeting seriously; he expressed the wish to have this organized like a parliament, where he would preside over the meeting and grant people the right to speak upon request (Polizzotti 502). At his age, Breton couldn’t change his perspective; he had always been the group’s leader and was accustomed to having his own way. Language problems compounded his difficulties. Fear of being ridiculed for mispronunciation—an issue that we’ve seen Dalí embrace—made Breton unusually quiet, which to some passed for arrogance (Polizzotti 503). His incapacity cost him a teaching position at the recently founded New School for Social Research. Nor did his writing fare much better. His works weren’t all translated into English, and the existing translations weren’t very good. Surrealist poetry would be absorbed by the American literary world only a decade later, through the New York School poets. Breton wrote to Benjamin Péret that New York was no more than a prison, as he couldn’t connect to a different market, represented by the high-end art galleries on Manhattan’s 57th Street: “I don’t have to tell you how I feel about New York, its sites and its customs. I sometimes wonder if you were worse off in Rennes [a prison] than I am in pacing five or six times a day down Fifty-seventh Street” (Polizzotti 515). Breton did make some connections in the New York world, notably the erudite Meyer Schapiro, who had already given courses in surrealism in the 1930s at Columbia University, and who wrote articles on surrealism in The Nation. Fluent in French, Schapiro became precious as a friend to Breton. Some other friends also tried to promote surrealism and to give Breton and his group a hand while they were fighting the difficulties of exile. Mostly, these were academics who became interested in surrealism—like Schapiro and his then graduate student Anna Balakian—or foreign-born avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, who had always been a close supporter of Breton and who oscillated throughout a lifetime between New York and Paris and had better

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connections to the New World. There were also some American painters and poets who collaborated with Breton’s group; the most important were the painter Robert Motherwell and the poet William Carlos Williams. More traditional histories of American avant-garde art like Serge Guilbault’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art insist that Motherwell and Pollock developed Abstract Expressionism against national American art at the same time as they were trying to detach themselves from the Parisian School: “American art moved first from nationalism to internationalism and then from internationalism to universalism” (175). Such accounts ignore the impact of surrealism in shaping avant-garde American art during the 1940s: Guibault’s discussion of Motherwell and Pollock doesn’t even mention surrealism as one of the forces lying behind their art or their internationalism: “Following Pollock, Motherwell declared in 1946 that ‘art is not national, that to be merely an American of French artist is to be nothing’ . . . This, then, was the intellectual setting in which the idea of national schools of painting—in particular the Parisian school—was rejected in favor a universalist humanism” (Guibault 175). Newer approaches like Martica Sawin’s are restoring this missing piece of the story: Surrealism played a catalytic role and drew a good number of American painters of the younger generation toward the advantages of spontaneity, toward discovery and the expression of their interior necessity. Its presence had the result of liberating among the painters a new form of artistic energy that led them to consider the canvas as the field of action and not the place to inscribe a composition, and shifted toward American art the avant-gardist dynamism that had formerly characterized surrealism. Sawin 105

It was surrealism’s multilingualism that was so stimulating, Sawin writes, for the future American abstract expressionists: “the possibilities for meetings and for conversations in various languages with these refined strangers furnished the necessary stimulus that enabled them to escape the impass in which American art had been caught” (106–7). Robert Motherwell was close to the surrealist group in New York during the war and participated in the 1942 exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism” organized by Duchamp and Breton. Motherwell had the chance to participate in the surrealists’ meetings in New York, in cafés or at Breton’s house, but he felt a bit uncomfortable about actually joining the movement, which seemed to treasure poets more than the painters. In an interview with Mary Ann Caws, Motherwell

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remembers feeling that the surrealists “were not painterly enough. The painters were definitely secondary to writers. The unexpressed opinion was the writers were good and the painters existed primarily to illustrate the writers’ ideas” (Caws, Surrealist Painters xx, xxii). Unlike Dalí, who knew how to speed up the process of becoming socially and financially successful, and who had the advantage of practicing an art that needed no translation, Breton wasn’t interested in immediate gain, took the longer road to establishment, and remained confined within the boundaries of the French language. When he arrived in New York, it was already too late for his brand of surrealism to be successful. Another reason for the rather weak impact of surrealism in New York during the war were the ideological crises that had always riven the movement, which prevented any long-term project from being developed as long as the exiled surrealists had no financial and social stability. To accept positions in the capitalist world meant a compromise that ran against their ideology, and the first to be confronted with this difficult choice was the leader himself: “I remember one of the crises. They were worried about being exiles, and all the rest of it. Breton was offered a position, to be regularly on the Voice of America, to broadcast to Europe in French, and was this giving in to capitalism and imperialism? and so on” (Motherwell, in Caws xxii). Breton reluctantly ended up accepting. Cultural differences also came between Breton’s understanding of surrealism and what the Americans who were now joining the group’s séances were able to grasp: I remember once Breton had a meeting—there were occasional meetings—and it was to choose new saints for the calendar, the Bloody Nun, and so on. So everybody had to write about fifteen mythological personages that interested them. To Breton’s rage, the three or four Americans present all put down the unicorn, whereas he preferred the Bloody Nun or the Black Mass. Finally, he wanted it to be part of the Surrealist document, this thing on the saints, and there was no consensus at all. in Caws, xxii–xxiii

In fact, Breton won out on this matter. The 1942 First Papers of Surrealism opens with an article “On the Survival of Certain Myths and on some Other Myths in Growth or Formation. Mise en scène d’André Breton.” The myths included those of the golden age, Orpheus, original sin, Icarus, the philosopher’s stone, the Grail, the Messiah, the androgyne, the myth of Rimbaud, and the superhuman. Breton had agreed to include a cartoon illustration of Superman along with a photo of Nietzsche, but the unicorn is demoted to fifth place, after the sphinx, the

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chimaera, the minotaur, and the gorgon. In an article published in the first issue of VVV, “Concerning the Present Day Relative Attractions of Various Creatures in Mythology and Legend,” there was no trace of the unicorn. As Motherwell’s interview obliquely shows, Breton’s stubbornness in remaining French not only linguistically but also mentally was at the root of his unsuccessful New York stay: I remember VVV, which also reminds me—they wanted a new letter, and I kept explaining that in French it makes perfect sense: “double-V, triple-V,” but in English, “double-u,” you can’t say “triple-u.” I remember another time Breton wanted a column called “The Conscience of Surrealism” in a magazine, and I asked if he means “consciousness” or “conscience,” and he couldn’t get the distinction with “conscience.” He made it all quite ambiguous. in Caws, xxiii

As in the case of the First Papers of Surrealism, Breton had to have the final word on the shape, branding, and contents of any surrealist magazine or publication. VVV was published in English, but it continued to publish untranslated French poetry (by Aimé Césaire and Breton among others) and Breton’s theoretical texts in French, sometimes with a facing English translation. Despite these challenges, what made surrealism such an interesting option for an American painter was the group’s solidarity and programmatic camaraderie. This group strategy wasn’t too familiar to the highly individualistic American artists—one reason why Dalí’s individualistic position was better received on the American market than Breton’s—and was something to be admired and envied, despite the tensions in the group: But basically I stayed on the sidelines, because what did interest me was the fraternity. All the American painters were basically rivals, and the collaborativeness of the Surrealists was something really amazing . . . It was the idea of poets sticking together—there was a real fraternity, with very high stakes, in the sense that if somebody was thrown out, it was almost like a family disinheriting a cousin or a son. Motherwell, in Caws xxi

Motherwell presents us with a different conception of the surrealists than the banal one which Dalí himself often evoked in America against the French surrealists—the clichéd religious frame of excommunication. Instead of a religious sect, Motherwell speaks of a family and an inheritance. For a young painter such as Motherwell, the younger generation of surrealist

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artists presented more interest than the older generation, which was more influential for academia and the literary milieu. Whereas young Anna Balakian was mesmerized by Breton, Motherwell was under the spell of the Spanish painter Roberto Matta: “I was particularly friendly with Matta, who was brilliant in his way, and generous, and my age. The Surrealists in general were a generation older” (Caws 23). Matta tried to promote automatism as painting technique, but the American painters had little interest in group projects. In New York, Breton’s group continued their old habit of playing games, and as Motherwell remembers, what was odd was the solemnity with which they played, which brings to mind Carroll’s Alice, who always played her games very seriously: “We played the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ a lot, and in one sense there was a lot of childishness, from an American standpoint, I mean. Americans in an equivalent mood would be much more apt to horseplay, but the solemnity of these childish games was funny” (in Caws xxiv). What was appealing to an American and to young artists and writers everywhere was surrealism’s attention to the young generation, as Breton’s strategy was always to seek support from the rising generation that could reconfirm his own project and reproduce it: “I think they tolerated me because one of their admirable qualities was to believe in young talent. Because after all, their heroes were Rimbaud and Lautréamont, Seurat, all of the great young people” (in Caws xxvi). Yet surrealism lacked the political appeal for the American artists that it had in Catholic countries. As Motherwell remarks, the surrealists’ politics were closely tied to their anti-Catholicism, but their frequent attacks on Catholic morality and their subversions of Catholic symbolism had little resonance for their American friends, none of whom were Catholic. A disjuncture in historical experience further limited the political force of the surrealists’ work: “Something that is not emphasized enough about the Dadaists is their involvement in World War I; I imagine if you have gone through something like that, then Dadaism and Surrealism would seem far more real, instead of parlor games and pure intellectualism” (in Caws xxvii). As a result of these differences in cultural and historical outlook, the Americans tended to see the surrealists more as artistic than political revolutionaries—and to an admirer like the poet William Carlos Williams, this artistic innovativeness seemed quintessentially, even traditionally, French. As he wrote in a review of Breton’s poetry volume Young Cherry Trees Secured against Hares, published in New York in 1946, “Everybody knows beforehand everything that will be said. It is completely without invention in the American sense—this

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is its greatest achievement. . . . WE CAN EXPECT NOTHING NEW FROM FRANCE IN THE WORLD ANYMORE . This Breton recognizes and proves in his revolutionary work” (quoted in Caws xxviii). Williams’ observation can point to the new poetics that came through Lautréamont’s notion of plagiarism, Tzara’s negation and reversal, and Duchamp’s readymade all the way to Breton’s found surrealist object, and in this sense, the old notion of the new in art and poetry has changed. Williams finds in Breton’s volume of poetry a great indebtedness to the French tradition and even a conventionalism of thought that Breton tries to obscure even as he frees himself from it: One could see Breton in New York for the past four years walking the streets or sitting drinking with his cronies at the Mont D’Or on E. 48th Street but never, never could one see beneath that pudgy surface the true son of France sleeping far from the dull gazes of the casual passerby. Thence emerges this magnificent and quieting book. . . . It is France redivivus. . . . [representing] ‘the continuing great conservatism of French thought—which no one but he who in himself personifies that pure lineage can fully know. It is a flight from abstraction to common sense. What is liberty? André Breton. in Caws xxviii

Williams showed a similar view in the only poem he published in VVV: “The change impends! A change stutters in the rocks. We believe nothing can change” (“Catastrophic Birth” 3). Working in this new and very foreign context, Breton pursued his time-tested strategies of creating an impact on several fronts at once. He assembled impressive networks that he used to put together simultaneously with the publication of VVV an exhibition called “First Papers of Surrealism,” which was held at Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue, from October 14 through November 7, 1942. Playing upon imagery of lock, key, and peeping, the catalog put together a very diverse and international set of artists regrouped under the surrealist label in New York. Arranged in the shape of a keyhole are the names of the artists included in the exhibition: the Parisian group (Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Kurt Seligmann, Alberto Giacometti); René Magritte from the Brussels group; Oscar Domínguez of the Spanish group; the Swiss conceptual artist Meret Oppenheim; the English group (Leonora Carrington, Gordon Onslow Ford), and the American group (David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Kay Sage). Next to these names appear names only tangentially related to surrealism:

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Picasso; Chagall; the Romanian avant-garde painter Victor Brauner; the Cuban Wifredo Lam, who tried to resurrect the Afro-Cuban tradition through minimalist Miró-like painting; the Mexican Frida Kahlo, whom Breton had met during his 1938 trip to Mexico. He promoted her paintings after his return, but this didn’t prevent the sharp-tongued Frida from scorning the surrealist “cacas” that she saw at Breton’s house when she visited him in Paris in 1939 (Polizzotti 471–2). Nonetheless, in 1942 she exhibited in New York under the surrealist brand next to these objects that had seemed so disgusting only three years before. This was just a sample of the value of the surrealist label on the American market, which could introduce a Mexican painter next to the exiled Parisian surrealists. Made possible through the support of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and MoMA , the exhibition put together by Breton and Duchamp had a generous list of eighteen sponsors, whose names appeared on the second page of the accompanying catalog. Reflecting Breton’s entrepreneurial spirit and Duchamp’s extensive connections, this list is comprised of rich art collectors interested in avant-garde art, American business magnates, socialites, art designers and cosmetics entrepreneurs, art dealers and museum curators. The list opens with two pivotal collectors and proponents of contemporary art, Peggy Guggenheim (who in 1942 was the wife of the surrealist Max Ernst) and Sidney Janis, whose life is a story of upward mobility, both economic and cultural, in tandem with the artists he championed. Son of a traveling salesman in Buffalo, New York, Janis never attended college, but he became wealthy by designing and manufacturing shirts (under the Anglophile label “M’lord”). He and his wife Harriet, a poet, began spending their summers in Paris. They were passionate collectors of modern art, and in 1939, he shut down his company to devote himself full-time to collecting and writing about art. Following the 1942 exhibit, he wrote a book on Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (1944)—the national designation in the title is significant—before opening his Sidney Janis Gallery on 57th Street in 1948. His gallery became a beacon for collectors of avant-garde art, showcasing Léger, Mondrian, and especially Duchamp together with a growing number of major American artists, including Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Also included as patrons of Breton and Duchamp’s exhibit was the American artist Katherine Dreier. A great friend of Duchamp, she was a co-founder of the Society of Independent Artists, the institution that emerged from the Armory Show, and together with Man Ray and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, which had promoted avant-garde art in New York since 1920. The list includes

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the art dealer Pierre Matisse, Henri Matisse’s youngest son, and Helena Rubinstein, who appears listed as “Princess Gourielli,” the royal title she acquired through her marriage in 1938 to exiled Russian Prince Artchil GourielliTchkonia, who was twenty-three years her junior. The list concluded with the fashion designer “Madame Elsa Schiaparelli,” who was also a supporter of VVV, which advertised her brand, even if she was one of Dalí’s doors to the fashion industry that Breton condemned. With fashion designers, cosmetics producers, socialites, and wealthy businessmen supporting the surrealist exhibition, Breton wasn’t that far from the type of audience that made up Dalí’s New York clientele. Lewis Kachur sees this connection with Schiaparelli as Breton’s compromise with commercialism: “Breton had formerly opposed Surrealism’s alliance with fashion, but in exile he had to compromise his anti-commercialism, perhaps in relation to his stipend” (172). Yet this wasn’t the first time that Breton had collaborated with people working in the world of fashion. Back in the early 1920s, he and Aragon had worked for the couturier Jacques Doucet to improve his collection of art and manuscripts. These networks were available to the exiled Breton through the New Yorkbased surrealists (Man Ray) and artists associated with surrealism (Duchamp), and through the friendships or love relationships of the surrealists. Max Ernst’s relationship with Peggy Guggenheim provided one of the steadiest sponsorships for Breton’s group during their New York stay, and contributed greatly to the diffusion of surrealist products on the American market. European avant-garde art was returning to New York almost thirty years after the 1913 Armory Show, with surrealism heralded as the great successor to Cubism and Dada. As Sidney Janis wrote in the catalog’s opening essay: The period in which Dada and Surrealist art, progressive stages out of Cubism, has flourished has been one torn apart by the devastation of wars and interwar defeatism . . . Even in esthetics, this reorientation has already begun on an allencompassing scale in Cubism and collage. But the Surrealists formulated a concrete program and began systematically to develop it. “Foreword,” in Breton, First Papers 5

The black sheep of the Armory Show, Marcel Duchamp, was returning to New York as co-author of the exhibition together with Breton. The subtitle of the exhibition read as a nice recollection of Duchamp’s love for doubled or transvestite identities: “Hanging by André Breton and his twine Marcel Duchamp.” “His twine” was one of Duchamp’s typical puns: adding a feminine “e”

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to “twin,” it also alluded to the 100 feet of twine that he used for a web-like installation in the center of the exhibition, impeding visitors’ access to the actual works. As Breton and many of the surrealists had trouble in getting their American visas, the “first papers” of the exhibit’s title ironically alluded to their immigration papers. In the same spirit, Duchamp and Breton included “compensation portraits” for the artists in the form of passport-type photos, not actually of the artists but of other people. This was an apt strategy for the surrealists who needed a new identity and to reinvent or rebrand themselves for the New York market in 1942: “not being able to offer an entirely adequate image of each of the principal exhibitors, we have thought it best here to resort to the general scheme of ‘compensation portraits’ (Suggested by Duchamp and Breton).” The creator of Rrose Sélavy chose for himself the portrait of an old woman who resembles him pretty strikingly. Picasso is represented through two superimposed photos of a young man with a hat, his two profiles one on top of the other pointing at the cubist technique. Magritte is a safari explorer and Breton a very sad old man. The most ironic is perhaps de Chirico’s photo, shown as a frowning Roman politician, a witty play on his turn to Fascism. Max Ernst was an old magician. More than a mere play upon the anonymity of art to be created by all (as Tashjian thinks, 216), the surrealists’ “compensation portraits” became surrealist objects in their turn. Though it is Dalí who is famous for his commercialism, Breton too had great charisma and entrepreneurial skills, even if he used them to very different outcomes. There had always been a surrealist group throughout the history of surrealism, one which was, for a long time, kept together through Breton’s efforts. Dalí instead had a charisma that conquered his audience all over the world. For him, the group was the large anonymous crowd that would cheer him as the genius he was. As he declares in his Unspeakable Confessions: “The painter is not the one with inspiration, but the one capable of inspiring others” (85).

VVV versus Vogue At first glance, the opposition between VVV and Vogue appears to reflect the conflict between autonomous and heteronomous market strategies, as Bourdieu would say. On closer inspection, the relationship between surrealism and the market of symbolic and economic goods is much more complex, almost from the very beginning of the movement. In differing degrees, both strategies involve both

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autonomous and heteronomous practices. The relationship between surrealism, commerce, and commercialization has usually been discussed as the opposition between Breton’s orthodox anticommercialism and Dalí’s selling out. For instance, Dickran Tashjian considers that surrealism didn’t conquer the world of fashion but instead was consumed by it (331), a seduction furthered by “the role of massmedia and advertising in the dissemination of avant-garde ideas. Both issues were joined, fittingly enough, in America, where corporate capitalism and the mass media allied to create a consumer society. Artists, constrained to be entrepreneurs in order to survive, were complicit in the process” (2).1 More recent studies have revealed the intimate connection between surrealism and the world of commerce from the very first, when Breton stated that surrealism should pervade our world and change it. The surrealist objects were one such attempt. Easily translatable into everyday objects devoid of their ordinary function and utility, they can become pieces of furniture, jewelry, or mannequins, as the shop window can be looked at as an intermediary space between the world of dreams and of reality. As Lewis Kachur shows, before surrealism infiltrated the shop windows in New York, it first did so in Paris: The ideological exhibition space coincides historically with the rise of the marketing of brand name goods, as well as the spread of the site consecrated to such display, the department store . . . This is notably true of the Surrealists, as witness their mannequins, borrowed from the fashion houses and dressed by the artists along a gauntletlike entry corridor for the 1938 show . . . By the mid–1930s, in Paris or New York, a large surrealist exhibition would set a theme for the season and be immediately reflected in the vitrines of department stores and in the press. Kachur 7–8

Adam Jolles expands Kachur’s approach to the surrealist exhibition space into a whole new understanding of the relationship between surrealism and commerce, as seen in the window displays: “In eliding the differences between art and exhibition, the work of art and the quotidian object, domestic space and the sphere of professional activity, surrealism called into question the way in which artistic agency had previously been defined, thus opening the door for aesthetic encounter 1

Tashjian supposes that the European avant-garde wasn’t interested in economic outcomes as it maintained an art-for-art’s-sake position, and that it was America that forced the artist to be an entrepreneur. This viewpoint comes from basing his research primarily on Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), which has many gaps so far as the history of the avant-garde is concerned, as Matei Calinescu has shown in his Five Faces of Modernity. Like Poggioli, Tashjian confuses the political and the aesthetic avant-garde, and isn’t aware of the early connections between the surrealists and the world of commerce.

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in new and unanticipated arenas” (Jolles 12). As Jolles argues, with the artist also taking the role of dealer, the surrealist object has multiple functions: “these curious works render the dealer largely obsolete by operating simultaneously as a work of art, exhibition venue, and promotional advertising” (101). As Kachur says, well before Dalí brought out the heavy artillery in New York, “the growing commercialization of Surrealism” had already been seen in Paris with Breton’s opening of the Gradiva Gallery in 1937, and by the inclusion of sixteen fashion mannequins styled by surrealist writers and artists including Duchamp, Man Ray, and Dalí in the 1938 surrealist exhibition at the Beaux-Arts (Kachur 27). Thus the relation between surrealism and fashion was mutually productive, an organic growth on surrealism’s side. The 1938 surrealist mannequins “establish the poles of mid-1930s Surrealism: fashion and commercialism, on the one hand, and the artist/writer collaboration, in the form of the surrealist object, on the other” (Kachur 44). Thus Dalí’s mannequin wearing a pink Schiaparelli mask, together with an element from Duchamp’s mannequin—oversized male shoes—immediately made it into a window display in Paris: “This vitrine in the same tiny Right Bank street as the gallery, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, is further evidence (if any were needed) of fashion keeping a watchful eye on developments in the ‘fine’ art avant-garde” (Kachur 58). In light of these recent studies, we can reconsider accounts of a radical polarization of market strategies used by Dalí and Breton on the American market. In “Dalí after 1940: From Surreal Classicism to Sublime Surrealism,” Elliott H. King shows a nuanced perspective on Dalí’s commercialism, and understands his turning to fashion and advertising as a sign of the “Renaissance man” Dalí wanted to become. As Dalí argued, Michelangelo had designed the uniform for the Pope’s Swiss guards, and that commission didn’t make him less of an artist (King 24). The surrealist interest in window displays and advertisements as places where the marvelous can become manifest through chance encounters is first documented in Breton’s Nadja, of all places: a Mazda advertisement that Breton even reproduces next to his text allows him to connect a headlight to a moth’s body—Nadja imagined herself to be a butterfly—while her name becomes superimposed in the poet’s imagination with “Mazda.” A banal advertisement encountered on the street retrospectively becomes a true surrealist object, a prophetic sign of the transformative role Nadja played in his life. With all this in mind, let us turn to the different strategies employed in New York by Breton and Dalí in the pages of the ferocious VVV and the lavish Vogue. Whereas Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and Minotaure had found Breton and Dalí

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fighting on the same Parisian front, after 1936 their strategies diverge, and we find them during World War II fighting from different positions to conquer the New York audience: Dalí from Vogue and Breton from the pages of VVV. Symbolically, the covers of VVV and Vogue are created by the two Spanish painters of the surrealist movement—Roberto Matta and Salvador Dalí—and illustrate in a nutshell the opposed versions of the surrealist object in New York during the war years (see Color Plates 3 and 4). Whereas Matta’s 1944 cover has all the polemical violence of Parisian surrealism in the 1920s, when it meant a liberation of hidden desires and fears, Dalí’s 1939 cover for Vogue plays on symbols recurring in his own paintings prior to his move to New York, and also announces his turning to the fashion industry and his collaboration on the sets of several ballets. Roberto Matta’s painting is in ironic intertextual dialog with medieval and classical art, but also with surrealist paintings. A crisscross between the medieval representation of the jaws of hell and Gustave Courbet’s vaginal “Origin of the World” (1866), Matta’s surrealist object shows a hairy vagina shaped like a mouth opening threateningly to reveal the sharpened feline teeth of the magazine that called itself VVV. The violence and the fierce eroticism of this defamiliarizing object had everything a surrealist object needed in Breton’s vision, with a precedent in René Magritte’s “Le Viol,” which showed an anamorphic face of a woman with a vagina instead of her mouth and breasts for eyes. Far less violent and shocking than Matta’s cover, Dalí’s cover for Vogue shows him starting to recycle the symbols that had made him famous in the 1930s, not only in new paintings but also through different art forms, from ballet to a short (and very poetic) video that he produced for Walt Disney. Dalí’s cover shows a seated mannequin with a bouquet of flowers instead of her head, a woman with a jump rope, and the skeleton of a ship in the background. These images illustrate Dalí’s iterative paranoid image, which he defined in 1930 as a succession of anamorphic images that displace an obsession. The three images may illustrate the passage of time, from the fresh bouquet of flowers to the bare tree-like hair of the second silhouette to the skeletal ship in the distance. The girl with the jump rope had already appeared in a painting by Dalí from 1936 (see Color Plate 5), standing on a desert landscape inspired by the surrealists’ forerunner Giorgio de Chirico—here with the jump rope formed from her own hair—and it would appear later in the short film Destino (see Color Plate 6). This was a collaboration that Dalí and Walt Disney began in 1946, which was finally completed and released only in 2003; it tells the love story between a beautiful brunette and a sculpture of a man, symbolizing time, which comes to life. The

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movie recycles many of Dalí’s recurrent symbols—the melting watches, the telephones with eyelashes and lips, the ruins of ancient Greek sculptures— but chiefly brings to life four paintings, all from the period when Dalí was experimenting with the desert-like landscape of “The Great Masturbator” (1929), “Landscape with Girl Skipping Rope” (1936), “Sentimental Colloquy” (1944), and “Tristan and Isolde” (1944). As in the 1936 painting, the girl in Destino uses her hair as a jump rope, while her silhouette is the metamorphosed shadow of a bell. Dalí’s ship skeleton on the cover of Vogue is a further development of his “Javanese Mannequin” from 1934, which itself combined a minimalist skeleton with a prior image of Dalí’s: the melting buttocks/phallus with crutches from “The Enigma of William Tell” (1933). Quite apt for Dalí to recycle on the cover of Vogue, as the mannequin shown in the center is posing as if for a fashion magazine to advertise accessories: the red scarf, the necklace and the bracelet. Five years later in 1944, the experiment done for the cover of Vogue ended up being transformed into Dalí’s painting “Paranoia” (see Color Plate 7). The mannequin now becomes a pretext for a desert anamorphosis, showing the apparition of the woman’s face in the desert; the girl with the jump rope appears as a thought in the woman’s brain, and right next to it is the skeleton ship as an old memory of death and decay. However, the woman in the 1944 painting does even a better job than the one on the 1939 cover: her necklace sparkles with rubies and emeralds, whereas the woman is posing on a French-style ruby-red sofa with golden frame. Dalí’s objects could be endlessly recycled from painting to glossy illustrations, to cartoons, and back again to painting. Dalí’s connection to the fashion industry literally brought his surrealist objects into daily life, only not into the daily life of the common man as Breton intended, but instead as accoutrements for the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, the only social classes that could afford the haute couture outfits or luxury jewelry. These objects include: Dalí’s soft watch manufactured by Exaequo of Geneva, available at Bloomingdale’s, inspired by Dalí’s 1952 “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory”; Elsa Schiaparelli’s skeleton dress inspired by Dalí’s silhouettes; the lobster dress inspired by Dalí’s 1936 cover for Minotaure showing a woman with a lobster nestled in her stomach; Dalí’s jewels and his pulsating Royal Heart, made with rubies and gold; and the perfume “Salvador Dalí,” inspired by his painting “Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Cnidus in a Landscape.” Through his complex recycling of iconic symbols that had made him famous, Dalí managed to merge prophet and profit. This he accomplished thanks to a distinctive feature of surrealism: it claimed to literally have an impact on daily life through surrealist practice and action. “The new of the avant-garde,” Tashjian explains, “which was

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akin to the marvelous as conceived by the Surrealists, was easily translated as the fashionable so as to enhance the sale of new garments” (70). Dalí’s collaboration with Vogue was simultaneous with his move to New York in 1939, after his final break from the Parisian group, and was certainly no surprise to the American press. The reviewer for Time who had published the account on the 1936 MoMA exhibition emphasized that Dalí’s trademark moustache would sell across the ocean better than Breton’s avant-garde leather jacket, as many photo spreads would confirm. In 1968, under the title “Moustache,” Vogue (August 1, 1968, 152.2: 106–7) published a two-page spread of moustached men and women: the nineteenth-century actress Louisa Fairbrother, Twiggy (Lesley Lawson) photographed by Justin de Villeneuve with turban and plumes, actresses Ludmila Savelyeva and Irina Gobanova in War and Peace photographed by Erich Hartmann, and Salvador Dalí, singer Sonny Bono, and fashion model Penelope Tree, all photographed by Alexis Waldeck. A climax of Dalí’s brand of subject-centered surrealist object was his collaboration with the most renowned designer of haute couture next to Coco Chanel: Elsa Schiaparelli. For Dalí this was the most profitable way to represent the new realities of the 1940s, a very different position-taking than Breton’s antifascist tracts. At Schiaparelli’s Paris establishment, Dalí wrote,“new morphological phenomena occurred; here the essence of things was to be transubstantiated; here the tongues of fire of the Holy Ghost of Dalí were going to descend” (The Secret Life 340). It was precisely this turn to advertising and the commercialization of art that Breton had warned against in 1935 in Prague: “Perhaps the greatest danger threatening Surrealism today is the fact that because of its spread throughout the world, which was very sudden and rapid, the word found favor much faster than the idea and all sorts of more or less questionable creations tend to pin the Surrealist label on themselves” (Breton, Manifestoes 257). Dalí understood differently what the story of the surrealist object meant: it was not Breton’s understanding—an object’s interior life and a spur to revolutionary action—but a means for the subject to entrance and mesmerize his audience, like a magician or like a sophist. And he knew what a marketable value a good story has: “I love getting publicity . . . These [New York] reporters were unquestionably far superior to European reporters. They had an acute sense of non-sense . . . They knew in advance exactly the kinds of things that would give them a ‘story’ ” (The Secret Life 330). Dalí believed that the paranoid, like a sophist in his “delirium of interpretation,” can reach impossible or contradictory but irrefutable conclusions. His conception

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implies the idea of farce, staging, and irony, as well as the imperious defiance of the audience. Dalí was a master of optical illusions; as early as 1930 we can see the structural differences between him and Breton. When he writes that a rotten ass could as well pass for gem stones in the paranoid’s eyes, he’s anticipating what he will later call “Dalí’s prophecies on Jewels,” which announced in Vogue his turn to the jewelry industry: “The Ideal Object is an Object that is useful for absolutely nothing . . . an Object which one is forced simply to wear—a jewel” (“People and Ideas: Dalí’s Dream of Jewels” 32). The former surrealist object can now be converted into Dalí’s mobile jewels, an ironic counterpoint to Breton’s notion of the moving, Heraclitean surrealist object in the beginning of Amour fou. In the same way, an uncredited photo or painting published by Dalí in Minotaure in 1934 (see Figure  10a), showing beautiful military decorations and jewels, arranged anthropomorphically, will actually become the cover of Vogue a decade later and then five years afterward a very expensive necklace, “The Tree of Life” (see Figure  10b). The 1934 artistic arrangement invites the reader to discover the spectral beauty of this surreal object: at the center, we can see the ghost’s eyes symmetrically flanking the sword at the center, the mouth and the beard which will appear in the form of birds arranged to suggest a human face on the cover of Vogue. Adapting the surrealist object for upscale commerce in 1939, Dalí “Prophesies ‘Mobile’ Jewels” in Vogue and produces a theory of the surrealist object adapted to meet the new audience, to whom he could sell his artistic jewels, which ranged from a hair ornament called “Tristan Fou” to a lobster bracelet. Dalí’s “First Prophecy on Jewels” reads: “Even ‘rivers of diamonds’ will take on literal meaning” (“Fashion: Dalí Prophesies” 88). The future of jewelry is to be the mobile jewels, wound up like a watch (see Figure 11). These mechanical creations will transpose Dalí’s paintings onto women’s necks, arms, and hair: you may expect the first mobile jewels for the evening—jewels that breathe, that become convulsed . . . MOBILE JEWELS WILL BE TO IMMOBILE JEWELS JUST WHAT TALKIES ARE TO THE SILENT CINEMA . Dalí’s jewelled bracelet doesn’t, like ordinary bracelets, move only with the arm. This crawls around and around the wrist. Each jewel will be fitted with an adequate mechanism. Before being put on, it will be wound up like a watch, and then its stones will acquire the hypnotic, slow, almost imperceptible movements of living sea-urchins, or the digestive, somnambulistic and patient contractions of carnivorous plants. “Fashion: Dalí Prophesies” 88

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Figure 10a Minotaure 5 (1934): 22.

Figure 10b Surrealist jewels designed by Salvador Dalí. William Grigsby/Vogue © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. Vogue, November 1, 1949: 92.

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Figure 11 “Fashion: Dali Prophesies ‘Mobile’ Jewels.” Salvador Dalí/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, January 1, 1939: 56–7.

By 1941, Dalí had started his collaboration with the Italian jeweler Fulco di Verdura, and Vogue admits that this venture shows that “the leading surrealist painter of both hemispheres has un unfailing formula for publicity” (“People and Ideas: Dalí’s Dream” 32). The strategy, as outlined by the editor, mixes elite and popular practices: “Dalí’s formula seems to be this: to attract public attention, no matter by what means, and then to show the public something worth seeing . . . genuine drama masquerading as a circus” (32). Under the heading “Dalí’s Aphorisms,” Dalí describes his work in terms that recall the paradoxes that Oscar Wilde had popularized for Anglo-American audiences sixty years before: “The difference between the Real Jewel and the False Jewel is that it is always the False Jewel that looks the most real—that is, the most sparkling. Therefore, it is a very tempting idea to make the Real Jewel sophisticated to such a point that it could pass for a false one” (32). Not satisfied with conquering the jewelry industry, Dalí invaded the fashion and advertising industry as well. Vogue closely follows his evolution from painting advertisements for cosmetics and for stockings (see Figure 12a) to his designing dresses, fashion accessories, and jewels. The Dalí bird-in-hand compact (see Figure 12b) influenced the design of compacts, being “as much statement piece as practical necessity,” still remembered by Vogue in the 2000s in a retrospective article on the collaboration between art and the cosmetics industry (Piercy 582). Dalí’s Beating Heart Jewel, made of rubies and with a mechanism that makes it beat 72 times per minute, became the property of the wealthy Catherwood family. His lips brooch was featured in a Vogue article in 1992,“Vogue’s Last Look: The Brooch.” Dalí became one of the key names in the New York highlife in the 1930s, and he was a fixture in the annual star lists published by Vogue. In 1938 they included “the chic Spanish painter of melted gold watches and dead fish” in a cartoon that compared the men en vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, putting Dalí next to Walt

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Figure 12a Salvador Dalí’s ad for Bryans stockings. Vogue, April 15, 1946: 69 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

Figure 12b Salvador Dalí’s “Bird-in-Hand” Compact, Vogue, May 1, 1951: 23 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

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Disney (“Fashion: Our Changing Tastes” 67). The 1944 “Star-Packed Season” list includes Daphne du Maurier, Igor Stravinski, and Dalí, represented like the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, carrying a watch and an umbrella (Talmey, “Star-Packed Season”). Looking back at “That Troublesome Decade . . . The Thirties,” Vogue shows a cartoon entitled “Hall of Fame” that includes Dalí’s bust, shaped like a trophy cup, next to Hitler, Orson Welles, Walt Disney, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (Talmey, “That Troublesome Decade—The Thirties”). Looking back at “Vogue’s Latest Ten Years: 1933–1943,” in between images of Hitler and Mickey Mouse, we find Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with the caption “Surrealism becomes a household word in America” (46).

Where is surrealism? In 1942, Henri Peyre, Sterling Professor of French at Yale, invited Breton to give a talk, which became the influential text “La situation du surréalisme entre les deux guerres.” Breton was able to address the audience in French, but he still had trouble making himself understood, as he used many references unknown even to students of French at Yale. Breton used this American opportunity to renew his excommunication of Dalí from surrealism, accusing Dalí and de Chirico of having betrayed surrealism by selling their art to the enemy of liberty: fascism. He found Dalí guilty of having painted a portrait of Don Juan de Cardenas, who was Franco’s ambassador in Washington (1932–1934) and then his agent in New York. He spoke witheringly of “Avida Dollars’ portrait, dripping with obsequious academism, of the Spanish ambassador, that is to say Franco’s representative, of the one to whom the author of the portrait owes the oppression in his country, not to mention the death of the best friend of his youth, the great poet Garcia Lorca—Franco, about whom we know on what terms he is with life, with the spirit, as with freedom” (Breton, La clé 69). But this news didn’t make the pages of Vogue, where Dalí was one of the magazine’s stars and had become, for most Americans, the standard-bearer of surrealism. Breton was now finding himself in the position of Yvan Goll, whom he had bested in the 1920s when several groups were claiming the ownership of surrealism as a concept and movement. Dalí had won this battle before it started. In his Yale diatribe against Dalí, Breton didn’t so much criticize him for turning to commercial art as for a series of betrayals: of the moral ideal of liberty, of his country, and of his friend. Whereas Dalí was preoccupied by the question

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“Who is surrealism?” Breton tried to find out, throughout the years, “Where is surrealism?” Two manifestations of this interest can be seen in “Le monde au temps des surréalistes” (see Figure  13), in a special issue dedicated to French surrealism by the Brussels magazine Variétés in 1929, and a world map of the surrealists’ translations in Minotaure 10 (1937), “Le surréalisme autour du monde.” The 1929 world map represents the surrealist credo, including their political sympathies, their anticolonial and antinationalist politics, envisioning a world where the peripheries of language and culture can triumph, though not yet a world where the surrealists themselves have a widespread presence. No longer central, a peripheral Europe is swallowed by an expanding Germany and Austro-Hungary; the only centers remain Paris and the gateway to the dreamed Orient, identified as the old Constantinople rather than the modern Istanbul. Islands in the Pacific become central, including Easter Island, home of the monumental, enigmatic statues glorified by the surrealists as models for the surrealist object. The periphery of the English language, the rebellious Joyce’s Dublin, replaces London and even the rest of the British Isles. Like Picasso, Joyce was formally associated with no movement or school, even if he was claimed by several groups including the surrealists, who looked up to him as a model of the revolutionary writer—the Belgian magazine Variétés published accounts on Joyce that praised his work, and the surrealist Philippe Soupault collaborated on the French translation of “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Eight years later, the map of “Le Surréalisme autour du monde” (see Figure 14) shows translations of surrealist works now available in many parts of the world, including England, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Spain, France, Japan, Peru, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. A separate page shows the spread of surrealism in England and America. Even if Breton himself never learned English well and wasn’t very successful in establishing a surrealist school in his New York years, the fact that he gives a separate page for English translations shows his awareness of English becoming a global language. In “Limites non-frontières du surréalisme” from 1937, Breton expressed the hope that England would help surrealism conquer Europe and even the world: “As we are in the course of refining more than ever a European consciousness, not to say a world consciousness [conscience mondiale], it is to England, despite everything, that we surrealists are now turning” (Breton, La clé 23). For Breton, surrealism wasn’t the property of an individual but a practice spread worldwide; this was the strategy he used in New York, when trying to conquer a position for surrealism. His new magazine VVV showcases a hybrid

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Figure 13 “Le Monde au temps des surréalistes” [“The World in the Time of the Surrealists”]. Variétés, June 1929: 26–7. “Le surréalisme en 1929.” Special issue dedicated to French surrealism by the Brussels magazine.

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Figure 14 “Le surréalisme autour du monde” [“Surrealism around the World”]. Minotaure 10 (1937): 62–3.

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group of surrealists: Breton, Benjamin Péret, Max Ernst, and also the new generation of surrealists coming from the colonial periphery (Aimé Césaire), the second generation of surrealism’s friends (Roger Caillois, Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Etiemble), American avant-garde poets (William Carlos Williams), and the Anglo-American group of surrealists (Valentine Penrose, Kurt Seligmann, Leonora Carrington). For the history of the discipline of comparative and world literature, it is symptomatic that the most globally oriented French comparatist of the mid-century, René Etiemble, became associated with the surrealist group in its second age, when it grew into an international movement, anticolonial and antinationalist. Sociologically, this heterogeneous group fit perfectly within Breton’s trajectory. Having found himself in New York, and with no experience in the practice of the field across the ocean, Breton reproduced the strategies that had imposed him as a group leader in the 1920s in Paris. Aided by Duchamp, he assembled a new group that would allow him to act as leader. In the 1920s, he could claim this position thanks to his charisma, his polemical spirit, and his organizational and managerial skills. Now, in the 1940s, he associated himself with people from his past, including Max Ernst; with local American artists who came to be close to the surrealist group during the war, such as the sculptor and photographer David Hare; and finally with artists who were neither totally Parisian, nor totally New Yorkers, but who oscillated between the two centers, such as Marcel Duchamp. By publishing VVV from 1942 through 1944 under Hare’s editorship and with Max Ernst as editorial adviser, and with Duchamp as editorial adviser starting with the double issue 2–3, Breton was very intelligently bringing together the intellectual networks of Paris, those of the American avant-garde artists in New York, and the in-between agents. Just as he’d done in the 1920s, Breton activated the avant-garde networks he could find, rather than the upper-scale social networks that Dalí sought out. David Hare had met the surrealist group through his cousin Kay Sage, who was a painter; he himself was connected with the avant-garde circles in New York that had come from the earlier Dada experience of Duchamp and Man Ray. Breton’s lifelong friend Duchamp provided the necessary link to the European presence on the New York market, of which he had been a part since the Armory Show, and Duchamp restaged Breton’s more elitist vision of the surrealist object through his playful and ironic practice of readymades. Through VVV, Breton returned to the surrealist group practices of playing games, telling dreams, and interacting with the large audience who shared surrealist experiences; he reactivated the

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primitive art object as predecessor of the surrealist object. Natural though it was for him to turn to these strategies, however, to many observers in New York, Breton seemed now a man of the past. Dalí seemed to be the man of the future. The first issue of VVV in 1942 looks very much like a remake of the launch of the surrealist group in Paris, almost twenty years before. Just as he’d done then, Breton published a manifesto in the first issue. The title—“Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not”—works as a double strategy: it links VVV to the history of European surrealism by launching a third manifesto in connection to a new magazine, but it eschews the verbal force of the first manifesto and the strong ethical and political stance of the second. Instead, the new manifesto bears the more tentative title “Prolegomena” and then questions the very status of the text, which could be a manifesto “or not.” If the first two manifestoes had been created on Breton’s initiative because he had important statements to make, the third is constrained by the necessity to regroup the network in New York. Tentative and self-doubting as his manifesto seems, Breton advances his agenda by paradoxically seeming to renounce his authority: surrealism is no longer his own creation or system, and its worldwide success involves his losing control over the activities traveling under the surrealist label. With these claims, Breton sets VVV in opposition to the practice of Dalí and to the political compromises of his friend and former surrealist poet, Louis Aragon. The third manifesto once again takes an avant-garde position, condemning any kind of compromise: The evils that are always the price of favor, of renown, lie in wait even for Surrealism, though it has been in existence for twenty years. The precautions taken to safeguard the inner integrity of this movement—which generally are regarded as being much too severe—have not precluded the raving false witness of an Aragon, nor the picaresque sort of imposture of the Neo-Falangist bedsidetable Avida Dollars. Surrealism is already far from being able to cover everything that is undertaken in its name, openly or not, from the most unfathomable “teas” of Tokyo to the rainstreaked windows of Fifth Avenue, even though Japan and America are at war. Breton, Manifestoes 282, my emphasis

Even as Breton inveighs against Aragon and “Avida Dollars” and claims that surrealism is being misrepresented in Japan, a certain pride can still be perceived between the lines that map surrealism from Tokyo to New York. Without introducing anything new conceptually, the third manifesto reinforces the ideals that had been on the agenda of surrealism since 1924: moral and mental youth, understanding the world through the logic of childhood, the

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belief in chance encounter and in the apparition of the object of desire in the open street. It makes no difference, writes Breton, if these streets are in Paris or New York. The author of Nadja, which mapped Paris as the body of a mysterious woman with streets like the lines in the lover’s palm, now looks for the same object of desire on the streets of New York, though in melancholic tones: it isn’t worth the trouble to speak out, and still less worth the trouble for people to oppose each other, and still less worth the trouble to love without contradicting everything that is not love, and still less worth the trouble of dying and (except in spring, I still dream of youth, of trees in bloom, all this being scandalously disparaged, disparaged that is by old men; I dream of the magnificent workings of chance in the streets, even in New York) still less worth the trouble of living. Manifestoes 283, Breton’s emphasis

The body of the desired woman is the ultimate surrealist object, redefined in the third manifesto through analogy with the primitive art object, of the kind collected by Breton and Paul Eluard that had been included in all the international surrealist exhibitions. The exoticism and eroticism of the surrealist object are now rediscovered by Breton in the primitive art of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa, making in the process an oblique statement against imperialism. Through this kind of argument, Breton returns to a strategy he’d used in the 1920s against French nationalism and Western thought. The myth of a dreamed-of Orient from Breton’s 1924“Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” returns now in New York: there is the marvelous young woman who at this very minute, beneath the shadow of her lashes, is walking round the great ruined chalk boxes of South America, one of whose glances would call into question the very meaning of belligerence; there are the New Guineans, in the front boxes in this war, the New Guineans whose art has always captivated certain of us much more than Egyptian or Roman art—intent on the spectacle offered them in the sky—forgive them, the only thing they had all to themselves was three hundred species of birds of paradise—it appears that they “whoop it up” with barely enough arrows tipped with curare for white men and yellow men. Manifestoes 284

One such surrealist discovery was Aimé Césaire. Breton played an essential role in launching him internationally as a great poet, both because Breton always encouraged young talents, but also because Césaire was the perfect illustration of Breton’s theory that surrealism creates a world without borders that militates for an anticolonial politics. The first issue of VVV published Césaire’s poem

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“Conquête de l’aube,” and Césaire’s name occurs in Breton’s enumeration of the possible sources for a renewed surrealism: “there are new secret societies that attempt to define themselves in repeated secret meetings, at twilight in seaports; there is my friend Aimé Césaire, black and magnetic, who is writing the poems we need today, in Martinique, having made a break with all the catchwords of Eluard and others” (Manifestoes 284). As in the 1924 manifesto, Breton gives a list of predecessors, now more comprehensive than the first one, which testifies to surrealism’s having grown to encompass a line of thought that extends from Heraclitus to Jarry, whose common denominator is the constant fight against any established system: But what if my own line, that admittedly twists and turns, passes through Heraclitus, Abelard, Eckhardt, Retz, Rousseau, Swift, Sade, Lewis, Arnim, Lautréamont, Engels, Jarry, and a few others? From them I have constructed a system of coordinates for my own use, a system that stands up to the test of my own personal experience and therefore appears to me to include some of tomorrow’s chances. Manifestoes 285

The third manifesto also attempts to legitimize the rather eclectic list of people gathered in the pages of VVV. What has brought them together, writes Breton, is the belief in the restoration of mankind through the return of a new social myth: I need only point to the anxious desire that has overcome, one by one, minds which are very dissimilar but nonetheless figure among today’s most lucid and daring—Bataille, Caillois, Duthuit, Masson, Mabille, Leonora Carrington, Ernst, Etiemble, Péret, Calas, Séligman, Hénein—the anxious desire, as I was saying, to furnish a prompt reply to the question: “What should one think of the postulate that ‘there is no society without a social myth’ ”? Manifestoes 287

Breton closes the third manifesto with praise of the eternal avant-garde minority position of the newcomer, writing in an almost elegiac mode: “In 1942 more than ever the opposition must be strengthened at its very base. All ideas that win out hasten to their downfall. . . . I am on the side of this minority that is endlessly renewable and acts like a lever: my greatest ambition would be to allow its theoretical import to be indefinitely transmissible after I am gone” (Manifestoes 289). The manifesto accompanied texts by Césaire, Lévi-Strauss, Roger Caillois, and René Etiemble. Next to Césaire’s poem “Conquête de l’aube” and a review by

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Etiemble of French books and an exile periodical in New York, Breton includes in the magazine articles on dreams narrated by ordinary people who are neither poets nor artists. One such article, “Some Testimonial Drawings of Dream Images,” is by Frederick Kiesler, a researcher at Columbia University who discovered a book called Dreams from 1927, whose author recorded his dreams both verbally and visually. By encouraging this kind of activity, Breton goes back to the strategy that made surrealism renowned in the 1920s in Paris through the Bureau of Surrealist Research, where ordinary people were invited to come and share their dreams and surreal experiences. An important article testifying to the strategy Breton adopted for the surrealist object in the 1930s is “Indian Cosmetics” by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Here, cosmetics are understood as tattoos; in contrast to the cosmetics Dalí was interested in, face painting becomes a variant of the surrealist object. What is notable in LéviStrauss’ description of how the image is executed is the irrational, unguided manner of the design, a variant of the automatic surrealist production: She improvised without model, or sketch, or established points of design. These highly developed compositions, at once unsymmetrical and balanced, are begun in one corner or another, and carried out without hesitation, going over, or erasure, to their conclusion. They evidently spring from an unvarying fundamental theme, in which crosses, tendrils, fretwork, and spirals play an important part. Nevertheless, each one constitutes an original work: the basic motifs are combined with an ingenuity, a richness of imagination, even an audacity, which continually spring afresh. Lévi-Strauss, “Indian Cosmetics” 34

Lévi-Strauss concludes by opposing the exquisite and erotically charged face painting of the Brazilian Indians to our modern cosmetics: “never has the erotic effect of cosmetics been so systematically—and no doubt so consciously— developed. Beside this achievement the gross realism of our powder and rouge seems like a puerile effort” (35). Cornering Dalí’s Vogue and biting it fiercely with the sharp teeth of VVV, Breton appealed to the new generation of students in the Ivy League schools, and even their younger siblings, to reconfirm surrealism as a still viable stake of the game. Breton published two letters in VVV, one sent by a high-school student in San Francisco, and the second from a Harvard undergraduate. Young poet Philip Lamantia, age sixteen, admires surrealism for its revolutionary impact on society and literature, for its emphasis on the collective rather than the individualist spirit. A true follower of Breton, Lamantia deplores the commercialization of surrealist art and the artists’

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compromise with the bourgeoisie (Lamantia 18). Under the Harvard crest, we read the enthusiastic prose of the undergraduate Charles Duits: “Surrealism is truly a new vice . . . We had a surrealist night here at Harvard.” He too mounts an indirect attack on Dalí’s treason: “I know why I initially didn’t trust surrealism. It was because of Dalí . . . whom I thought detestable and sick” (Duits 14). From the late 1920s, Dalí sought to revolutionize the art of the shop window display through his use of the modern object: “Unusable decorated objects, refugees in laughable shop windows, dust nests in which pitiful horrors are exhibited, the product of lost trades” (“Poetry of Standardized Utility,” in Dalí, Oui 45). Dalí’s definition wasn’t very different from Breton’s defining poetry as hidden in the relations between irrationally linked objects, an idea as old as Lautréamont’s encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table, but which Dalí tries to monopolize as being his. “Telephone, pedal-sink, refrigerator white and shining with ripolin, bidet, little phonograph . . . objects of authentic and very pure poetry” (43). Back in 1928, Dalí already showed great interest in advertising as a means of circulation, something that surrealist theory banned as a compromise with bourgeois commerce: “Antiartistic world of advertisements! Magnificent appeal to the senses and to the navigation of unknown objects” (44). In 1928, when he was still trying to conquer the center of Paris through the surrealist headquarters, Dalí waxed enthusiastic about primitive art: We love the Papuan’s magical creations, produced under a reign of fear. A Parak from New Guinea moves us more effectively than long museum halls, the contrast with the light of old American civilizations makes us shiver . . . we witness the birth of all pre-Columbian art—photography again, Vermeer, the Dutch school, Hieronymus Bosch, the anti-artistic world. “Reality and Surreality,” in Dalí, Oui 66

By 1942, however, he was denying that he’d ever associated the conception of the surreal object with primitive art, and in his Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, he openly rejects the African art objects cherished by the surrealists. Mocking the vogue for “savage art”—“accomplished with the aid of Picasso and the surrealists!” (287)— Dalí asserts that “I shall show them how in the tiniest ornamental detail of an object of 1900 there is more mystery, more poetry, more eroticism, more madness, perversity, torment, pathos, grandeur and biological depth than in their innumerable stock of truculently ugly fetishes possessing bodies and souls of a stupidity that is simply and uniquely savage!” (288). For Dalí, this modern surreal object is a naked

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body or our fantasies and dreams laid bare in full daylight, a nakedness that exists beneath the surface of objects and language and draws on Lautréamont’s dépaysement: “And, remembering that the landscape is a ‘state of the soul,’ these people were now able to stroke the naked body of another truth of Catholic essence, which had sprung from my well—that the object is a ‘state of grace’” (313). Dalí writes that surrealist objects came to replace the “boring” narrated dreams of the surrealists simply because they brought more reality to surrealist practice. “People no longer wanted to hear the ‘potential marvelous’ talked about. They wanted to touch the ‘marvelous’ with their hands, see it with their eyes, and have proof of it in reality” (313). Dalí takes this object beyond the purely gratuitous into the commercial reality of fashion, and at the same time presents it as a deathblow to surrealism: “This kind of fantasy, combined with a certain sense of fashion, could also become a rich field for the effective decoration of the up-to-date shops that know their business . . . With the surrealist object I thus killed elementary surrealist painting” (314). Just for good measure, Dalí gave surrealism a further death blow two years after Breton’s death, in an article entitled “Who Is Surrealism?” written at Vogue’s request in April 1968. The photo layout (see Figure 15) shows Dalí on the left, described in the caption as “the magician of surrealism,” and just below the title “Who Is Surrealism?” written in exuberant calligraphy, his own signature appears as the answer to the question. He does include Dalí’s photo collage of Breton, but the only other representation Breton gets is in a group photo by Man Ray on which Dalí has scrawled everyone’s names. Dalí’s caricature-like representation of the group that welcomed him in Paris in the early 1930s looks like the work of a spoiled child who rebels against his parents. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since Dalí wrote that one of the steps in the recipe to success in America was “How to Get Rid of One’s Father” (The Unspeakable Confessions). The article “Who Is Surrealism?” is occasioned by a major retrospective exhibit, “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” at MoMA in 1968, thirty-two years after the exhibition that introduced surrealism to America. Dalí starts his article by quoting Breton, as he used to do when he was a diligent disciple of surrealism in Paris, and shows no remorse in describing him with Yvan Goll’s phrase “Pope of Surrealism.” For himself, he chooses a quote that portrays his method of critical paranoia as the way to produce surrealist objects both in art and in fashion: “Salvador Dalí has given Surrealism a first-class tool with his paranoiac-critical method, which can be applied to painting and to the creation of surrealist objects in fashion and to every other kind of exegesis” (“Who Is Surrealism?” 63).

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Figure 15 Left: “Salvador Dalí, 1968, The magician of surrealism, wearing the cross and sash of the high Spanish order, Isabel la Católica.” Vogue, April 15, 1968: 62 © 2017 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017. Right: Salvador Dalí collage, Part of the first group of Surrealists, all painters and poets, about 1931: Tzara, Man Ray, Dalí, Arp, Eluard, Tanguy, Max Ernst, Breton, and Crevel. Vogue, April 15, 1968: 63 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

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Not content with denying Breton any merit in creating surrealism, Dalí usurps the movement’s birthplace, changing Breton’s cultural center Paris for his Cadaqués, implausibly presented as “the residence of many of the official members of the Surrealist group, beginning with Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Paul Eluard, René Char, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel, and . . . Dalí” (139). In marked contrast to Breton’s dream of perpetual non-establishment, Dalí writes that “if it ever had an authentic existence,” surrealism “is only the precursor of a coming classicism where all the experiences of the great Surrealist revolution will be integrated in order to attain their proper degree of historic legitimacy” (141). The conquest of surrealism, however, was never so complete, and Dalí’s success on the American market shouldn’t lead us to minimize the force and ongoing influence of Breton’s very different approach. In a 1964 interview by Guy Dumur for Le Nouvel Observateur, Breton describes surrealism as a realworld movement that belongs to no one, as it now enjoys translations all over the world, and can cross political borders in a Europe torn between the Western and the Eastern blocs. Thanks to scholars like Anna Balakian, Meyer Schapiro, and Mary Ann Caws, surrealism was being promoted through books and conference papers, but also through the academic system. Anna Balakian told Breton that a third of the young faculty at Yale or Harvard included surrealism in their syllabi in the early 1960s (Breton, Perspective cavalière 231). An exhibition catalog from Hluboka, Czechoslovakia, describes surrealism’s major role in shaping contemporary tendencies in Czech art, and a letter received by Breton from Budapest announces a translation into Hungarian: “here is a letter from Budapest, the city with the most sensitive name right now: it says that the manifesto of surrealism is forthcoming in Hungarian. This means that despite the separation between the two blocs, surrealism makes it both ways” (Breton, Perspective cavalière 231).

The surrealist object: try it on with Breton and Dalí From the beginning, surrealism placed at the center of its theory the attempt to redefine the relation between subject and object, an aspect emphasized from the classic account of Anna Balakian in Surrealism, the Road to the Absolute (1959) to more recent approaches such as Haim Finkelstein’s Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (1972) and Henry Okun’s The Surrealist Object (1981). Balakian

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analyzed the surrealist object mainly as a philosophical and ideological stance. In Surrealism, the Road to the Absolute, Balakian dedicates her chapter “The Surrealist Object” only to the painters associated with surrealism, from Picasso, de Chirico, and Max Ernst to Dalí, Chagall, and Tanguy, often making illuminating comparisons to examples from the surrealists’ poetry and from the poets’ theoretical articles. Yet she doesn’t address the actual surrealist objects that were shown in all the international surrealist exhibitions from the early 1930s onward, but it is with such objects that the surrealist theory comes most fully into practice. Of more direct interest to the example of surrealist object that I propose to analyze here—the shoe as surrealist object—are two studies by Romy Golan and by Janine Mileaf, which are also relevant because they illustrate two major directions in the analysis of the surrealist object: postcolonial and historical. In her 1994 article “Triangulating the Surrealist Fetish,” Golan uses a threefold relation focused on Freud’s sexual fetish, Marx’s commodity fetish, and ethnology’s tribal fetish to show that the surrealist object and the colonial object, even if theoretically opposed, came to overlap on the world market. Golan argues that as a result, surrealism’s anticolonial politics came to be just as colonial as the French State’s (Golan 52). Golan’s view is informed more by Dalí’s understanding of the surrealist object than by the far more political surrealist object theorized by the French, and in this her essay resembles many of the approaches to surrealism by American scholars. Though Golan’s article generously cites articles by both Breton and Dalí, her presentation of the surrealist object as a manifestation of paranoia is Dalí-inherited. Many of the characteristics of paranoia, which she lists to illustrate how the colonial enterprise worked—delirium of interpretation, delusion of grandeur, persecution complex, fusion, doubling, ubiquitous multiplication—may be appropriate for Dalí’s use and abuse of the surrealist object, but are far from Breton’s understanding and practice. Janine Mileaf ’s Please Touch: Dada & Surrealist Objects after the Readymade (2010) gives an historical overview of the surrealist object in terms of the shift from the visual to the tactile: from Duchamp’s readymades, to Man Ray’s objects to be destroyed, and to Breton’s trouvaille. Mileaf looks into the flea market in Saint-Ouen, Breton’s favorite place for finding surrealist objects, as the context for the emergence of la trouvaille. She also discusses Breton’s shoe-spoon from the perspective of Freudian theory, and concludes that both the flea market and the surrealist object represent revolutionary ways to fight back against the

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constraints of bourgeois society: “the flea market find signifies resistance to the normalizing pressures of society. In this way, it becomes a vehicle for individual freedom and a revolutionary construct that acts as a metaphor not only for sexuality but also for the creative life” (Mileaf 109). None of these approaches to the surrealist object, including Haim Finkelstein’s well-informed reading in Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writings: 1927–1942, note that whereas Dalí’s sexual objects are oriented toward the past, Breton’s are futureoriented and visionary, starting with his gnome-book from “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité.” If Dalí developed êtres-objets by fetishizing and objectifying beings, Breton’s movement was a perfectly mirrored one: his objetsêtres bring the object back to life and treat it, as Proust did before him, like a living being. We can explore Dalí’s and Breton’s competing versions of the surrealist object by comparing two examples of how the same real object—a woman’s shoe—is put to very different uses in two works from the 1930s: Breton’s Amour fou (1937) and Dalí’s 1931 Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically (see Color Plate 10). The poetry of the shoe, as shown in advertisements, mesmerizes Dalí as early as 1928: “Shoes occupying entire pages, perfect products, a eurythmic play of curves, an exchange of various qualities, smooth and bumpy surfaces, polished surfaces, studded surfaces, serene, morbid, intellectual surfaces, indicators of explanatory volumes, pure structural metaphors for the physiology of the foot. Marvelous photos of shoes, as poetic as Picasso’s most stirring creations” (“Poetry of Standardized Utility,” Oui 44). Such an erotic description of the shoe’s anatomy fed into the surrealist object that one of Gala’s shoes came to be, initially shown on Dalí’s head in a photo, then in a surrealist object from 1931, then in an advertisement painted for Vogue, and finally on women’s heads in the form of Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe-hat: “delirious objects meant to be circulated, that is intervene, enter frequently and daily in collision with the other objects in real life, in the full light of reality” (Dalí, “Interprétation paranoïaque-critique” 66). From the real object—a shoe of Gala’s set on Dalí’s head—the object moves into the alternate reality of art—Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically—to encompass a sexual meaning through the shoe painted on the lump of sugar disintegrating in milk, while the heel bears a photo of a couple making love. The next step is to bring the shoe back into the full light of reality through the groundbreaking shoe hat designed by Schiaparelli in collaboration with Dalí (Lerman (1974)). And ultimately, Dalí takes the same shoe back again into the art reality when he agrees to paint a series of twelve accessories for Vogue,

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including a walking shoe by Bergdorf Goodman: “accessories of today [are] transplanted into a mythological world” (“New Accessories” 85). The story of how Dalí created the shoe hat or the “slipper hat” appears in his memoirs. The shoe begins in reality as a shoe Dalí stole as a boy from his teacher and that becomes an object of sexual fantasy for him. It is then used in childhood games, then returns as a repressed fantasy in art in the 1936 surrealist object with a symbolic function, only to be revealed as another subconscious connection to Gala, seen years later in a photo as a child, where “crowned by the cupolas of Saint Basil [she] revived my early fantasy of the ‘slipper-hat’ ” (Dalí, The Secret Life plate III ). The final stage of the surrealist object is to invade reality in lasting form, and this is where Dalí distances himself from Breton’s use of the surrealist object: even if both their objects end up in reality, they do so to very different outcomes. For Breton, the result is meeting the love of his life, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, the ultimate materialization of his fantasies, the summa of his trouvailles; for Dalí, it is his collaboration with Schiaparelli. A photo collage shown as Plate III of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí traces the trajectory of the shoe object from childhood to the world of fashion: Dalí as a schoolboy, the 1936 object, Gala’s photo as a child facing Elsa Schiaparelli wearing the shoe hat. “Finally, Madame Schiaparelli launched the famous slipper-hat. Gala wore it first; and Mrs. Reginald Fellowes appeared in it during the summer, at Venice.” Finkelstein believes that Dalí’s symbolic objects add a sexual connotation to the surrealist object, a connotation that Breton criticized and rejected: Dalí’s object, as well as the other objects introduced in this issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, exhibit a certain degree of conscious incorporation of sexual content. It is this aspect of the objet à fonctionnement symbolique that Breton appears to criticize in Les vases communicants. Breton’s reservations are elucidated in relation to his proposal to put into circulation erotically suggestive objects of the kind revealed in dreams. Salvador Dali’s Art and Writing 165–6

Not exactly so; the received idea that Breton entertained a Platonic and idealist conception of love and was squeamish about open sexual descriptions—an idea that Dalí promoted—is contradicted by the way Breton describes the very same shoe in Amour fou as a sexual symbol for the vagina. Unlike Dalí, who developed the shoe as just one surrealist object among many others—the lobster telephone, mobile jewels, painted magazine covers, and advertisements for Vogue—Breton developed his theory of the object of desire

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throughout a lifetime through all his projects—literary magazines, theoretical texts, poems, and autobiographical writings. Whereas Dalí had greater mobility in terms of simultaneously pursuing projects not necessarily related to one another, Breton’s need for structural coherence led him to develop all his writings organically. Taken together as parts of a giant puzzle, his writings themselves function as the ultimate object of desire that Breton’s life was: “The house where I live, my life, what I write: I dream that all that might appear from far off like these cubes of rock salt look close up” (Amour fou 19). It is interesting that Breton repeatedly defined life as a cryptogram or a text of phosphorescent letters waiting for the dreamer to find the key that would unlock its mystery. Considered as a whole, Breton’s life and writings formed a surrealist object with no immediate marketable value, whereas Dalí’s objects were just the opposite. To understand Breton’s use of the shoe-spoon, the pivotal surrealist object found in the flea market of Saint-Ouen, we’d first need to understand the overall theory of the surrealist object as Breton developed it throughout his major autobiographical writings—Nadja (1928), Amour fou (1937), and Arcane 17 (1945), which recycle many of the theoretical articles and literary pieces he published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and Minotaure, in Victoria Ocampo’s Argentinian magazine Sur, and in the world literature magazine Mesures. Inextricably bound to the concept of surreality as the place where all antinomies and contradictions can be solved, Breton’s complex surrealist object should be understood as part of a conceptual network, which includes the chance encounter, the objective hazard, convulsive beauty, dépaysement/ defamiliarization, necessity, and desire. A surrealist object with an indeterminate function in a non-familiar context is a trouvaille or found object, the result of chance encounter, a concept Breton developed in a sexual sense, following Lautréamont’s chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table. Breton interprets the objects he finds at the flea market as dreams that keep the secret of the dreamer’s present preoccupations. “Finding the object functions here just like the dream, in that it liberates man from the paralyzing affective scruples, comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle he thought impossible to overcome is now behind him” (quoted from Les vases communicants, in Amour fou 46). Always associated with the apparition of a woman in Breton’s life—first Nadja, then Suzanne, then Jacqueline, and finally Elisa—the surrealist object or object of desire is endowed with convulsive beauty, whose effect must be shocking through the uncanny combination of images, objects, or context. For the errant

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knight that Breton was, convulsive beauty is “the only kind of beauty that I consider should be served in our time . . . There can be no beauty—convulsive beauty—except at the price of the affirmation of the reciprocal relationship that joins an object in movement to the same object in repose” (Amour fou 15). Convulsive beauty appears when the revelation provoked by the object triggers a “poignant emotion” (21), impossible to reach through the channels of logic. “The images produced by automatic writing have always constituted for me a perfect example of this. Similarly, I once desired to have a very special object constructed, corresponding to some poetic fantasy” (21). This object must be a found object: “I then happened to discover this object already made, unique, no doubt, of its kind” (21). This trouvaille “alone has the power to enlarge the universe, to do away with a part of its opacity, to discover in it for us an extraordinary capacity for receiving stolen goods” (21–2). Objects or words retained involuntarily carry the solution to some difficulty within ourselves: “I am intimately persuaded that all one’s most involuntary perceptions, such, for instance, as that of the words spoken by the prompter in the wings, carry within them the solution, symbolic or otherwise, of some difficulty within oneself ” (22). Breton’s surrealist object is a ghost-like apparition that can be traced back through all his writings: the dreamed woman, sought throughout a lifetime in the different women he’s been involved with, takes the metonymical shape of the iron spoon found at the flea market in Nadja or the shoe-spoon in Amour fou. Tried on by the various women he loved, the surrealist object becomes a Cinderella’s shoe that fits only the chosen one, specifically Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s second wife and with whom he had his only child, Aube (Dawn). Like Cinderella’s shoe, the perfect surrealist object had to be transparent or crystallike, and one of its materializations is the apparition of a mysterious naked woman on the streets of Paris, announcing Nadja’s entrance: “I have always had an incredible wish to encounter at night, in the woods, a beautiful and naked woman . . . Last year, late one afternoon, at the galleries next to the Electric Palace, a naked woman, who could have undressed simply by unbuttoning her raincoat, rambled around, very pale” (Nadja 40–1). Meeting the desired woman is the result of mapping an erotic geography of Paris through a network of objects found in Saint-Ouen that produce irrational pleasure. Hidden between books and photos in the flea market, the sexual spoon appears as a magic object: “our attention was immediately caught by a new copy of Rimbaud’s Complete Works, lost in rather poor offerings of rags,

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yellowed photos from the last century, valueless books and iron spoons” (Nadja 55–6). In Breton’s conception of surreality, the desired woman always held the key to man’s destiny, and Nadja is a prophetess who reveals the future for the man who was to become surrealism’s charismatic leader: “But . . . what about this great idea? I immediately saw it. It’s truly a star, you’re walking toward a star. You will no doubt reach this star. Hearing you speak, I felt that there was nothing that could prevent you from reaching it, not even me . . . You will never be able to see this star like I did. You can’t understand; it’s like the heart of a heartless flower” (70–1). Nadja’s intuition wasn’t far from that of Adrienne Monnier, who saw in Breton the libidinal power of the leader, a man who could see the invisible and lead those around him either to redemption or doom. Even as late as 1945, Breton retraced the magical network of Parisian streets in what was to be his last text, and had a new revelation of his life as surrealist object. It is only in his last autobiographical book, the esoteric Arcane 17, that a chance encounter brings him to see that the itinerary of his ramblings with Nadja in 1928 was unconsciously tracing the steps of the followers of the Knights Templar. Only retrospectively can we read the true meaning of our existence, which initially exists only unconsciously. Now all the feminine characters who have haunted his pages, from ancient Egypt to the Bible and the Tarot, come together to confirm that Breton’s own trajectory in Paris was retracing Gérard de Nerval’s. More than ever, Breton identifies with the strange nineteenth-century writer who had been a model for living like a surrealist: “the Paris itinerary for the avengers of the Templars was identical to the one I had unconsciously taken with Nadja . . . on a purely symbolical level, I had walked with Nerval along the golden folds. Melusine, Esclarmonde de Foix, the Queen of Saba, Isis, the One Who Pours the Morning, the most beautiful of their respective orders and their unity remained the strongest proof ” (Arcane 17 222). Breton’s conception of the surrealist object defines reality as a cryptogram or as a network of trapdoors through which we plunge to arrive in surreality. This surreality is described as a set of boxes in a cabinet of curiosities, where every object is suspended inside a frame that isolates it and allows for its aura to become manifest: Maybe life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram. Secret staircases, scenes with rapidly changing settings which disappear to let in an archangel bearing a sword or those who must always move forward, buttons which we push very obliquely and which make a huge hall move vertically and horizontally and

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change the setting in the blink of an eye: one can conceive the greatest adventure of the spirit like a voyage of this kind in the paradise of traps. Nadja 113

If reality is a cryptogram, then the dreamer must find the key to reading it, and more often than not, phallic key imagery pervades Breton’s reality. Nadja becomes a door opened onto the dreamland made of the best books ever written, which are doors in their turn: “I insist on knowing their names, I only want to find out about those books that one leaves open like a flapping door and for which we don’t need to find the key” (Nadja 18). Nadja’s drawings and especially La Fleur des amants (see Figure 16a) provide a symbolic key: Nadja has invented a marvelous flower for me: “The Lovers’ Flower.” It is during a picnic in the country that this flower appeared to her and that I saw her trying—quite clumsily—to reproduce it. She comes back to it several times, afterwards, to improve the drawing and give each of the two pairs of eyes a different expression. It is essentially under this sign that the time we spent together should be placed, and it remains the graphic symbol which has given Nadja the key to all the rest. Nadja 118

Nadja’s drawings anticipate Breton’s poem-object that will be developed in the 1930s: an association of text, painting, and objects shown in a frame. Already in Nadja Breton pairs photos with text and with Nadja’s drawings that can function as surrealist objects, which form a single narrative together with the shoe-spoon in Amour fou. Nadja is full of images focused on the hand, another phallic object of desire: Nadja’s drawing of a woman’s head coming out of a hand-glove (Figure  16b), de Chirico’s L’angoissant voyage en l’énigme de la fatalité, Max Ernst’s erotic Mais les hommes n’en sauront rien, and a photo by Pablo Voita showing the gloved hands of a woman arranging her garter. In Amour fou, the network of found or oneiric objects that lead to Jacqueline’s apparition in Breton’s life includes a photo arrangement of a black hand reading the Tarot cards, a mysterious woman’s glove that was reproduced in Nadja and is mentioned again, an iron mask, and the shoe-spoon (see Figure 17). But both the phallic imagery of the hand and the feminine sexual metonymy of the shoe come together in Nadja’s most enigmatic drawing: Le salut du Diable (see Figure 18). This drawing works as a good example of what Dalí a few years later will call the “critical paranoiac image” or the surrealist anamorphosis: a grinning face waves his hand while coming out of a woman’s shoe, which looks

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Figure 16a Nadja’s drawing “La fleur des amants” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard, all rights reserved.

Figure 16b Nadja’s drawing “La main” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard, all rights reserved.

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Figure 17 Man Ray, The shoe-spoon © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2017.

Figure 18 Nadja’s drawing “Le salut du diable” reproduced in André Breton, Nadja © Éditions Gallimard, all rights reserved.

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like Aladdin’s lamp, with the devil as genie. Maybe both Dalí’s shoe-hat and Breton’s shoe-spoon could be traced back to Nadja’s mysterious drawing in the 1920s. Then Nadja would no longer be only the symbol of surrealist Paris, but also the genie who created the surrealist object. In Amour fou, finding the object of desire will ultimately mean meeting Jacqueline Lamba, whose apparition is prophesied by several objects occurring in reality. “On an individual level, only friendship and love . . . are capable of stimulating this sudden and radiant combination of phenomena that belong to independent causal series” (Amour fou 51). Chance encounter turns irreversible time into surrealist space, and reveals the meaning of life: “Any perception of time is suspended when it comes to chance—a very small drop of fire provokes or completes like nothing else the meaning of life. It is to the recreation of this particular state of spirit that surrealism always aspired” (38). More powerful than a déja vu experience, the found object has the “attraction du jamais vu” (44), being the result of “a necessity unknown to us” (44). This necessity overlaps with desire, and dreams become reality, when the network of found objects converges in the object of desire, recreating the apparition of Jacqueline. In Amour fou, Breton interprets his 1923 poem “Tournesol” (Sunflower) as an automatic poem that prophesied Jacqueline’s appearance in his life. Like Dante in Vita Nova, Breton analyzes each phrase as prophetic of this necessity. Obscure apparitions in the 1923 poem like “The traveler” (La voyageuse), “the unknown beauty,” and a woman who looks as if she’s swimming retrospectively become prophetic—he meets Jacqueline and walks with her in les Halles, a place mentioned in the opening line of the poem; the woman who seemed to be swimming is read as a reference to Jacqueline, who was working as a water dancer to afford the living that her painting didn’t yet provide her. “This poem always presented itself to me as truly inspired” (81). A letter addressed to his and Jacqueline’s daughter, Aube, closes Amour fou. Entitled “Ecusette de Noireul” (a lovely chiasmic portmanteau phrase: ecureuil = squirrel; noisette = hazelnut), it was translated by Mary Ann Caws as “Hazel of Squirrelnut.” At the beginning of Amour fou, the squirrel was part of the chain of free associations that announced Jacqueline’s apparition. Their daughter’s name appeared mysteriously in Nadja as early as 1928, when Breton hadn’t even met Jacqueline. A woman’s hand pointed to a road sign that read “Les Aubes” (The Dawn): “a marvelous and unbetrayable hand showed me quite a while back a huge blue sky board with these words: THE DAWN . Despite this and all the

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other prolongations, these words help me plant a star at the very heart of the end ” (Amour fou 155). The found object becomes a surrealist object when read through the logic of puns in dreams. The apparition of the shoe-spoon in Breton’s life is announced by a phrase which preoccupied him—le cendrier Cendrillon (the ashtray Cinderella)—and which he asked Giacometti to mold into an object. The object was Cinderella’s shoe, made of grey glass (verre gri), which Breton wanted to use as an ashtray. Brought to Breton’s room, the shoe-spoon gives way to free association: it becomes Cinderella’s shoe, lost as she comes from the ball. This changes the entire perception of the object: the spoon becomes a shoe with a heel in the form of another shoe, which in turn has a heel, etc. Then the spoon changes again into one of the kitchen utensils used by Cinderella before her metamorphosis. And it is then that the ashtray-Cinderella he desired came into being, in a different way than he’d imagined, but having now a perfect organic unity, based on a series of equivalences: “shoe = spoon = the perfect mold of this penis” (Amour fou 53). This surreal shoe symbolizes the apparition of an unknown woman and of their unique sexual encounter, whose reading Breton finds in Perrault’s fairy tale: “The prince saw that her foot fitted in smoothly as if molded in wax” (54). When he meets Jacqueline, he finds out that she and her friend had seen him and Giacometti that day at the flea market. Breton wrote his final autobiographical book, Arcane 17, during the war, when he married his third wife, the Chilean pianist Elisa Caro. In this book above all, Breton reads his life as a cryptogram and as a network of signs leading to the latest object of his desire: Elisa. “I am of course speaking of the love which takes over, which lasts a lifetime, which of course consents to identify its object only in one single being” (Arcane 17 38). However, writing this text while visiting Canada in 1944, exactly ten years after he had written identical words for Jacqueline in Amour fou, Breton also experienced disappointment at the failure of the surrealist project that had sought in the aftermath of World War I to solve all the problems of human existence. However, he didn’t lose faith in his ideals—true, unique love and disinterested literary practice—but instead explained the new world war as a consequence of humanity’s failure to live up to these ideals: “But to be the first to denounce love is to admit that one couldn’t manage to rise to the height of its premises” (Arcane 17 38). Elisa saved him from the ruined world of the year 1944. Jacqueline had left him for David Hare, the editor of VVV, taking their daughter with her, and he was far away from his beloved Paris, in a world which remained foreign to him:

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“When fate brought you to me, I was in the deepest shadow and I can say that it was in me that this window opened. The revelation you brought to me, even before I knew what it was, I knew it was a revelation” (Arcane 17 105). Breton had always waited for a woman to come into his life and make it meaningful, no matter what name she bore: Simone, Nadja, Suzanne, Jacqueline or Elisa. “I won’t say more about her young spirit that came to me so gleaming, so open. Inside me, there were only ruins, when this rose flowered forever. And the ideas, through which man tries to maintain himself in a definite rapport with others, were no longer saved: still ruins, with only the facade standing, the outer wall of the Tower of Babel” (108). In the context of the war, Breton reaffirmed the antinationalist and internationalist character of surrealism against the “national specific” or the national spirit. Arcane 17 finds an unchanged Breton, the eternal rebel and youth and errant knight: “it’s revolt itself, revolt alone, which is creator of light. And this light can be found only through one of these three paths: poetry, freedom, and love, which must inspire the same drive and converge, forming the very cup of eternal youth, on the most hidden and the most illuminable point of the human heart” (174). *

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Breton’s brand of surrealism can be found to this day wherever art is complemented by a revolutionary position. Surrealism resurfaced in Paris during the May 1968 protests, and was often employed elsewhere against dictatorships and neocolonial institutions: the Haitian revolution of 1945–1946, the aesthetic oneirism in the 1970s in Romania, and the Orange Alternative in the 1980s in Poland that painted dwarfs on the streets to point toward the nonsensical reality of communism, are just a few of the movements inspired by surrealism beyond France. Surrealism was the dream that André Breton never ceased to dream in his glass house on Rue Fontaine (see Figure 19), above the two Cabarets Le Ciel and l’Enfer: we continue to advance and to be aware that the mind talks obstinately to us to a future continent, and that everyone is in a position to accompany an ever more beautiful Alice in Wonderland . . . When we were children we had toys that would make us weep with pity and anger today. One day, perhaps, we shall see the toys of our whole life, like those of our childhood, once more . . . We grow up until a certain age, it seems, and our playthings grow up with us. What Is Surrealism? 16, Breton’s emphasis

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Figure 19 The two cabarets Heaven and Hell, above which Breton lived for 44 years, from 1922 until his death in 1966, at 42 Rue Fontaine.

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One day he had a vision of an unknown reader, who would retrace his steps and bring surrealism back to life by reading these words: “He saw before him an illuminated cavern,” says a caption, and I can actually see it too. I see it in a way in which I do not at this moment see you for whom I am writing, yet all the same I am writing so as to be able to see you one day, just as truly as I have lived a second for this Christmas tree, this illuminated cavern or these angels . . . So that it is impossible for me to consider a picture as anything but a window, in which my interest is to know what it looks out on, or, in other words, whether, from where I am, there is a “beautiful view,” for there is nothing I love so much as that which stretches before me and out of sight. Within the frame of an unnamed figure, land- or seascape, I can enjoy an enormous spectacle. What Is Surrealism? 11

Figure 20 André Breton, posing with ironic formality in his bathrobe, in the empire of his surrealist dream objects, circa 1950. André Breton © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet/NU.

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Like their creator, both Humbert Humbert and Lolita were great readers. Humbert covers the whole spectrum of options from elite literature down to popular genres like detective and erotic fiction, but also fashionable magazines like Life and Harper’s Bazaar, and the voracious Lolita leafs through glossy teen magazines while Humbert reaches the golden ecstasy of swimming in Lake Climax simply by having Lolita on his lap. One Sunday morning, though, while her mother is at church, Lolita is very keen on showing Humbert a particular photo in a popular American magazine while she sits on his lap. As Humbert reports: I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus de Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap. The Annotated Lolita 58

Lolita is one of the most often analyzed novels in the history of American literature, but no American critic has ever thought to identify the mysterious surrealist. However, two French critics have recently offered speculations: Maurice Couturier takes a guess at Magritte (Couturier 314–15), while in Lolita ou le tyran confondu (2010), Didier Machu goes farther in a suggestive footnote: It might be worthwhile to try to identify this magazine, this image, this painter, if his identity isn’t a composite . . . one could conjecture that this photo is inspired by the many carefully staged ones that Philippe Halsman made of Dalí over the course of three postwar decades, photographically translating fantasies in which

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the Venus often figured as well. Some of them were published in Life, whose cover Dalí “made” starting in 1936 and which Nabokov judged superior to Look, though not free from vulgarity. A piquant coincidence: in 1968, Halsman would photograph Nabokov, who appreciated Dalí so little as to have judged him, according to Lake, as Norman Rockwell’s long-lost brother. 283, n. 393

Had Machu pursued this hypothesis and looked into the American magazines’ archives, his efforts would have been handsomely rewarded. What gets only a footnote in Machu’s book is in fact the gateway to a whole new world that Lolita incorporated, and that scholars have missed for more than half a century: the erotic world of surrealism. Throughout the 1940s, the decade that separates Lolita‘s inception as the story The Enchanter (1939) from the actual writing of the novel, Nabokov gathered all sorts of possible references for his “monster book,” including erotic photos and puns from magazines and newspapers that he mentioned every now and then to his friend Edmund Wilson, though wisely omitting to tell him about their final destination. In turn, Wilson provided Nabokov with many sexual and erotic references, because he knew his friend delighted in them. One popular magazine that Nabokov read throughout the 1940s and 1950s was Life, which had a column called “Picture of the Week,” giving a full-page photo next to a short explanatory text. Leafing through Life in the 1940s, we don’t find a photo under the title “Picture of the Week” showing a surrealist painter supine, on a beach, with a plaster Venus next to him half-buried in sand, but there is a photo from the issue dated April 7, 1941 showing Salvador Dalí planting a bare-busted mannequin half-buried in a pond on the grounds of Hampton Manor, the Virginia estate of the socialite and art patron Caresse Crosby (see Figure  21). The black-and-white photo shows a mannequin with her head covered with a bridal veil of white lace. She is the dead bride who will be resurrected in spring from the same pond, much like Humbert’s dead bride Annabel will be resurrected as Lolita from a lake, pond, or “princedom by the sea.” The caption published in Life reads as follows: “ ‘Enchanting’ the grounds at Hampton Manor, Dalí plants a bare-busted manikin waist-deep in a frog pond. When spring comes he intends to ‘enchant’ the whole place” (100). The photo was part of an article entitled “Life Calls on Salvador Dalí: Surrealist Artist ‘Enchants’ Virginia Manor,” which showed a series of photos of Dalí and his Russian wife Gala, former wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard until the crazy Catalan swept her off her feet in 1929. He was an enchanter, and that’s how Life

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Figure 21 Salvador Dalí by Eric Schaal, Life, April 7, 1941: 100 © Photographer: Eric Schaal/Getty Images.

introduces him, both through the title and the caption under the photo, which must have been the model for the photo that Lolita wanted Humbert to see. It is interesting to note that the mansion of Clare Quilty—Lolita’s abductor and seducer, who convinces her to act in pornographic movies modeled on Sade’s writings—is called Pavor Manor. The name alludes to pavor nocturnus, as Alfred Appel points out (“Pavor: Latin; panic, terror,” The Annotated Lolita 446), but more specifically, the Webster dictionary that Nabokov liked to consult defines pavor as “night terror: a sudden awakening in dazed terror that occurs in children during slow-wave sleep, is often preceded by a sudden shrill cry uttered in sleep, and is not remembered when the child awakes—usually used in plural; called also pavor nocturnus.” Quilty’s “Pavor Manor” gives a dark twist to Caresse Crosby’s mansion, where Dalí plays the role of the perverse child-like enchanter. At his own Pavor Manor, Quilty is seen by a spying Humbert as if through a dream hallucination, surrounded by whores in an orgy that resembles “ ‘Troubled Teens,’ a story in one of her magazines” (292).

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Dalí’s extravagances were qualified by many as the fantasies of a troubled teenager, and his work at Hampton Manor is no less surreal and hallucinating. As Life puts it: this gracious and venerable estate is currently undergoing a sea change at the hands of Salvador Dalí, the Spanish surrealist painter. Hampton Manor’s first owner, John Hampton de Jarnette, used to sit playfully shooting arrows at visitors as they approached the house. Here today Artist Dalí busies himself from dawn to dusk ‘enchanting’ grounds and gardens with such surrealist fancies as floating pianos, multicolored rabbits and spiders with faces of girls. “Life Calls on Salvador Dalí” 98

In this one paragraph, Nabokov had at hand so much material to rework in key scenes in Lolita: the enchanting hunter, the surrealist painter, the perverse teenager who dreams of women-predators, the child waking up from a nightmare (the “pavor”). Life also shows a photo of one of Dalí’s painting fantasies at the site: the surrealist painter works outside in the snow, painting a surreal contrast of black and white that captures the “Spirit of the Old South,” featuring seven black people, a piano, and two pigs: “Spirit of the Old South captivates Dalí and he interprets it in his own way among the ghosts of Hampton Manor. He calls this composition Effet de Sept Nègres, un Piano Noir, et Deux Cochons Noirs. Artist Dalí, who loathes fresh air, as a rule works snugly indoors. But now snow suggested a black-and-white composition which he found impossible to resist” (“Life Calls on Salvador Dalí” 99). Nabokov too found androgynous black-andwhite authorship impossible to resist when he imagined that Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom collaborate on a play that Humbert and Lolita see staged. We then learn that Quilty, the owner of Pavor Manor, and Vivian are one person, while a twist of the tongue makes Lolita—and us—puzzled about the gender and skin color distribution among the two writers: “ ‘Sometimes,’ said Lo, ‘you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood’ ” (Lolita 221). The same Life article shows another photo of Dalí bringing to Hampton Manor a mannequin to be dismembered, and we see her legs in another photo that shows Dalí painting Gala. On top of the mannequin’s legs lies a tiger skin that seems to turn this surrealist object into a tigress-woman. Next to this photo is one showing Dalí returning from a shopping trip in Richmond, holding the mannequin covered from head to toe in a white sheet, like a statue or the ghostly figure in Böcklin’s painting “The Isle of the Dead” that obsessed Dalí, and to

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which he dedicated several essays published in Minotaure. Under this photo we read,“Soon she will be a ‘sleeping beauty’ in a bush”—or in a pond. (It is interesting to note that among the intertexts identified by Lolita criticism, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney [1999] counts the Sleeping Beauty ballet [“Ballet Attitudes,” in Zunshine, ed. 1999].) The armless mannequin planted in the frog pond was indeed made of plaster and looked like the Venus de Milo. Back in 1936, Dalí had made an initial plaster Venus de Milo, which became one of the most popular surrealist objects, with drawers that would break up the body’s form. The drawer knobs were made from fur suggesting pubic hair and opened six sections of Venus de Milo’s body: her forehead, her breasts, torso, abdomen, and left knee. To encounter Dalí, a sexual exhibitionist who shamelessly exposed any sexual perversion and made it into a work of art, presented in Life as an enchanter, must have been a great find for the author of “The Enchanter,” who was just then hunting for new references that he would interweave with dozens of others spanning the history of art and literature, up to the point of making them nearly impossible to recognize. But not completely. Many times during the writing of Lolita in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nabokov’s close friend Edmond Wilson supplied him with erotic and sexual literature. Beyond replying enthusiastically to Wilson’s proposal from a letter dated April 17, 1950 that he’d send him Jean Genet’s quasi-pornographic fiction, Nabokov never missed the opportunity to make erotic puns. When in a letter dated May 15, 1950, Wilson recommended David Maurer’s The Big Con, an amused Nabokov replied that “For one instant I had the wild hope that the big Con was French” (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 273). Maybe he was thinking of Louis Aragon’s pornographic novel Le con d’Irene—Irene’s Cunt. Nabokov welcomed sexual perversities in fiction, as long as they were smartly introduced and treated aesthetically. After all, wasn’t Humbert the one who described Lolita’s erogenous zones as “the gentle and dreamy regions” that “were the patrimonies of poets” (Lolita 249)? Nabokov criticized Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, a book that presented openly erotic scenes, for the frozen sexuality of what were supposed to be orgiastic scenes: “You have given your ‘I’s copulation-mates such formidable defences—leather and steel, gonorrhea, horse-gums—that the reader (or at least one reader, for I would have been absolutely impotent in your singular little harem) derives no kick from the hero’s love-making. I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis. The result is remarkably chaste, despite the frankness” (March 8, 1946, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 188). Nabokov is left cold also by the overt sexuality of

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Joyce and Proust; he prefers Flaubert’s sexual suggestions and allusions deriving from double entendres: “Neither am I attracted by Marion Bloom’s ‘smellow melons’ or Albertine’s ‘bonnes grosses joues’; but I gladly follow Rodolphe (‘Avançons! Du courage!’) as he leads Emma to her golden doom in the bracken” (letter from March 24, 1946, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 191). Not fearing to refer lustfully and poetically to the female or male genitals as his reply to Wilson testifies, Nabokov must have found delightful a painter like Dalí, who authored both the poem and the painting called The Great Masturbator. In 1941, as the article in Life shows, Dalí was working on his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, where he wouldn’t refrain from open accounts of his sexual obsessions. Published in 1942, the book reached its fourth edition by 1945 and must have been of great interest for a reader with Nabokov’s tastes. Sometimes memory is tricky and makes individual memories overlap and pass for one; Nabokov’s remembering Dalí’s photograph under Life’s “Picture of the Week” is such a composite memory. Another appears in a letter sent on May 13, 1942 to Wilson, in which Nabokov mentions a photo from the April issue of Life showing a famous ballerina riding an elephant’s trunk (Figure  22a). The photo showing the Russian Vera Zorina, Georges Balanchine’s wife, riding an elephant trunk came out in Life as the “Picture of the Week,” but for some reason he misremembers her name: “Did you see in a recent Life a remarkably obscene photograph of the prettiest Russian ballerina (Tumanova, I think) reclining upon the head of an elephant with the elephant’s trunk thrust between her bare thighs from beneath and curving up most phallically?” (Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya 68). Just an innocent slip of the tongue? Freud wouldn’t think so. What Nabokov remembered about Tamara Toumanova was an earlier “Picture of the Week” from the October 20, 1941 issue of Life (Figure 22b). Herself a famous Russian ballerina, Tamara Toumanova was shown there next to a huge rooster—or cock—starring in Dalí’s ballet Labyrinths, based on the Minotaur legend, which had just premiered in New York and was enjoying a massive success. The caption accompanying the “Picture of the Week” reads as follows: “On a rooftop near Rockefeller Center a ballerina named Toumanova and a ballet rooster named Beresoff enact a scene from a surrealist ballet which had its New York premiere” (October 20, 1941, “Picture of the Week: Tamara Toumanova” 37). A devotee of Russian ballet, Nabokov would certainly have recalled this New York production of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, created by Dalí and staged for maximum surreal effect: it played on a West 47th Street rooftop next to the Rockefeller

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Figure 22a Vera Zorina by Herbert Gehr. Life, April 20, 1942: 29 © Photographer: Herbert Gehr/Getty Images.

Figure 22b Philippe Halsman, “Ballerina Toumanova and Dalí’s rooster,” Rockefeller Center. Life, October 20, 1941: 37 © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos.

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Center and symbolized the battle between Classicism and Romanticism through a cockfight. The winning rooster that we see in the photo has its head pointing in one direction and the legs in the other, to imitate the rooster’s leg whose joint points backwards when it walks. The ballet dancer had to dance backwards on the rooftop during the performance. Given the openly sexual nature of this ballet, as well as Dalí’s obsessions, this was an oblique and artistic way to express his anal obsession, which can take the form either of sodomy or just the backwards position. He would have made very good friends with Humbert, who delights in lap scenes with Lolita. Even Humbert’s predecessor, the Enchanter, enchanted his nymphet with his “magic wand” from behind: Then, starting little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand above her body, almost touching the skin, torturing himself with her attraction, her visible proximity, the fantastic confrontation permitted by the slumber of this naked girl, whom he was measuring, as it were, with an enchanted yardstick—until she made a faint motion, and turned her face away with a barely audible, somnolent smack of her lips . . . He felt the flame of her shapely thigh, felt that he could restrain himself no longer, that nothing mattered now, and, as the sweetness came to a boil between his woolly tufts and her hip, how joyously his life was emancipated and reduced to the simplicity of paradise—and having barely had time still to think, “No, I beg you, don’t take it away!” he saw that she was fully awake and looking wild-eyed at his rearing nudity. The Enchanter 91–2

Dalí was a fertile reference for Nabokov for several reasons that go beyond the casual glimpse of a photo in Life magazine. They date back to the Parisian years, when Nabokov and Dalí were in the same cultural capital for three years: Nabokov came to Paris early in 1937 and voyaged to New York with Vera and their young son Dmitri in 1940. But this wasn’t Nabokov’s first trip to Paris. Earlier in the 1930s he traveled several times to Paris to give readings, which were unfortunately in Russian; even if successful, they attracted mainly the Russian community of émigrés familiar with Nabokov’s writings, which Ilya Fondaminsky published extensively in the Parisian journal of the Russian émigrés, Annales Contemporaines (Sovremennye Zapiski). Nabokov knew that Paris, or alternatively London, were the cultural capitals worth conquering. In 1937, he wrote to Vera from Paris how important it was for him to make a living there and not be forced to move to Prague, where his mother was living:

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Is it possible that, after having expended such enormous efforts to establish a vital link with London and Paris, we must suddenly abandon everything to go to the wilds of Czechoslovakia, where (psychologically, geographically, in every sense) I shall again be cut off from every possible source and opportunity of making a living . . . I find it difficult to explain to you how important it is that we not lose contact with the shore to which I have managed to swim—to put it figuratively but accurately—for, after your letter, I really feel like a swimmer who has just reached a rock and is being torn from it by some whim of Neptune. Selected Letters 18–19

A second letter sent to Vera from Paris records the editorial meeting of Mesures from 1937 that was documented by the photographer Gisèle Freund at Adrienne Monnier’s request. This is the only photo showing Nabokov in the Parisian intellectual circles that were connected with the surrealists. Brian Boyd mentions this photo when he identifies three circles in which Nabokov moved in Paris (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years 437): the Russian one of Ilya Fondaminsky; the French one including Jean Paulhan, Jules Supervielle, and Henri Michaux—all connected to the surrealists and to Adrienne Monnier, even if not part of the surrealist group per se; and the American circle of Henry Church and Sylvia Beach. Boyd implies that even in Paris Nabokov was still a Russian—he sees him mingling mostly with the Russian émigré community in London and Paris—and still a Russian writer, despite the fact that in Paris he writes both in French and English. Yet even as he writes to Vera about the lunch at their publisher’s house and the meeting at Monnier’s bookstore, he’s using a phrase in French. The lunch at the villa of Henry Church (the publisher of Mesures, an American millionaire with a splendid boil on his nape, elderly, taciturn, with a literatureaddicted wife of German extraction) turned out remarkably well. The rendezvous was at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore on the Odéon . . . The writers were represented by Michaux. I got on swimmingly with Joyce’s publisher Sylvia Beach, who might help considerably with the publication of Despair in case Gallimard and Albin Michel ne marcheront pas. Selected Letters 22–3

He then adds that “My stock has gone up a lot in France,” and that he’ll have lunch the next day with Jean Paulhan, Cingria, Jules Supervielle, and Henri Michaux in Montmartre (24). Jean Paulhan and the Belgian Henri Michaux shared with the surrealists an interest in Lautréamont and were very close friends

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of Monnier’s. In the pages of Mesures, Nabokov had the chance to read both Breton’s selections from Amour fou before it came out in book form in 1937 and Paul Eluard’s erotic love poetry, and as someone who had access to Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore, he could browse through her collections of Breton’s surrealist magazines. *

*

*

Great writers who voraciously devour everything around them that they can use are often skillful in effacing their artistic debts; Nabokov was no exception. Despite the number of cultural references that he himself served up to the reader in the extensive notes or articles that would accompany his literary texts, and despite the number of references identified by great readers like Alfred Appel, Jr. in his extensive notes for the annotated edition of Lolita, a significant part of the most important and substantial references are obscured by Nabokov. The French dimension of his background in particular has largely escaped the attention of critics who have focused on his Russian upbringing or his later American career. Far more than a mere way-station between Russia and America, Paris was a prime proving-ground and laboratory for a genuinely worldly literature and art, promoted by progressive French writers and émigrés like Picasso, Joyce, and Nabokov who didn’t want to be pigeonholed in the microcommunities of their exiled compatriots. Rather than trying to inscribe Lolita in a given literary tradition connected to a language—French for Machu and Couturier, or English for Alfred Appel and Brian Boyd—it would be more productive to think about it as a novel engaging with multiple senses of belonging to several cultures, languages, and literary traditions through the complex intertexual web it integrates. As Nina Berberova has observed in her moving essay Nabokov et sa Lolita, “we see in Nabokov a writer at the same time Russian and non-Russian, European, a Westerner, ours, who as it happens is writing at this moment in English, even if it had been French the day before yesterday, and tomorrow will be Russian once again” (27). As we’ve seen in Chapter 1, in Paris during the 1930s it was the surrealists who were leading the way toward the creation of a wordly, internationalist art. Like Borges’ Pierre Menard before him, Humbert was not only as French as possible, but he was also distinctly surrealist. The cultural milieu of the late 1930s when Nabokov is in Paris working at Mesures is also the moment when he writes his Parisian short story “The Enchanter” that would be recognized as Lolita’s inception and the setting for Humbert’s youth. The fraught relationship that

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Nabokov had with the Parisian milieu is transposed in the book into the fraught relationship between the authorial figure and the French émigré Humbert. Nabokov loved and rejected French at the same time as he loved but also distanced himself from his dear Humbert. Trying to make himself a name in Paris as a French-language author (notably with the short story “Mademoiselle O” published in 1936 in Mesures and then included with some minor revisions in Speak, Memory), Nabokov failed and had to switch to English. Perhaps he had already arrived too late in Paris, when the French writers of his generation were already established writers, and then because World War II began and Nabokov and his Jewish wife Vera had to take refuge, like many other intellectuals, including Breton and other surrealists, in the United States. But across the Atlantic the situation was different: even if they’d become famous in the New York art world, the surrealists were little known as writers. They weren’t at home in New York as they were in Paris, and many of them thought of their situation only as temporary. Nabokov instead wanted to integrate and settle in, and he somehow enjoyed the privilege of no longer being the émigré arrived in Paris when all the good seats at the head table were taken. In America, all of them were refugees and had more or less an equal chance. He had the further advantage of having been raised speaking excellent English, which wasn’t the case with Breton or most of the other French émigrés. America could do for Nabokov what he had hoped Paris would have done. And it was in America itself that Nabokov made his long-hidden but pivotal use of surrealism. Tracing this lineage gives us new insight into the formation of Nabokov’s novel, and it also gives us a better basis on which to assess Lolita’s deeply disturbing theme. Ever since the book’s improbable success as a bestseller, readers have struggled to decide how to respond to Nabokov’s seductive portrayal of the seducer of a twelve-year-old girl. Is Lolita herself a willing, even powerful participant, a view presented in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film version, or as feminist critics have argued, is Humbert trying to pull the wool over our eyes, and is Nabokov himself aestheticizing rape? These debates took a new turn in the early 2000s with the extensive media coverage of the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church. Between 2001 and 2010, the Holy See revisited up to 3,000 pedophilia cases going back fifty years, with the greatest number in the United States. As early as 1997, when Adrian Lyne released his provocative new film version of Lolita, Norman Podhoretz, chief editor of Commentary, reopened the moral question of reading Lolita for its narrative art or dismissing it as pornography. Though

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Podhoretz had celebrated the superiority of Nabokov’s artistry in the 1960s, he now spoke about Lolita in relation to the Marquis de Sade: If we are willing to place restrictions on the manufacturers of material goods in order to protect ourselves against pollution of the physical environment, why should we not be willing to take measures that would offer protection against pollution of the moral and cultural environment? . . . If we cannot have Lolita without taking Larry Flynt, or for that matter, the Marquis de Sade, maybe we should refuse the whole package deal . . . By helping to make pedophilia thinkable, may not Nabokov have to some indeterminate extent been responsible for the greater toleration that gradually came to be accorded what had previously been regarded as perhaps the most horrible of all crimes? . . . Nabokov’s own fictional pedophile, Humbert Humbert, was not so gently let off by his creator, who arranged for him first to lose Lolita and then to die in prison (of a heart attack). But Nabokov stood at the top of this particular slippery slope, down which he did his part to push us. “Lolita, My Mother-in-Law” 33–5

Podhoretz’s accusation that Lolita “bears at least some share of the blame for the plague of pedophilia that has been raging through this country” (34–5) reopened Pandora’s box, and one of the responses that scholars have provided in the novel’s defense has been to deepen investigation into its intertexts. In 2008, Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment edited the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s “Lolita”. In their introduction they note that “more than fifty years after its publication it still invites editorial pieces with titles such as ‘Why This Loathsome Lolita Must Be Banished’” (xiii). Their collection includes eight essays out of a total of twenty-three that explore intertexts with classical and modern literature or other media, providing ways to teach Lolita by emphasizing the noble filiation that saves the pedophile from Podhoretz’s pyre. But none of the essays discusses Nabokov’s engagement with surrealism, the movement that most searchingly, and often outrageously, probed the relations of art and lust, repression and revolution. Attending to the novel’s surrealist heritage can offer a new way to assess Nabokov’s provocative interweaving of refined aestheticism and raw sexuality.

The spectral beauty of language The Life magazine photo showing Dalí with his Venus de Milo mannequin was based on one of Dalí’s earliest childhood fantasies, manifested artistically at

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around age nine. As he writes in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: “I also made at this period a copy of Venus of Milo in clay; I derived from this my first attempt at sculpture an unmistakable and delightful erotic pleasure” (71). In 1936, Dalí created the Venus with Drawers and fur drawer-knob nipples. Dalí glorified his wife Gala and turned her into a living myth with great commercial value that he used throughout a lifetime; it was Gala who was behind every erotic painting or surrealist object he made from 1929 onwards. His Venus was no exception. But after 1929, he also retrospectively read every erotic thought, vision or artistic object from his earlier past as prophetic of his encounter with Gala. In the same passage in which he speaks of his first erotic sculpture, he mentions a painting dating from the same childhood period, showing Helen of Troy: “In this picture (about which I dreamed a great deal) almost on the edge of the horizon I painted an infinitely high tower with a tiny figure on its summit. It was surely myself ” (71). This Helen, he now decides, was the woman of his dreams: Gala herself. The footnote Dalí inserts for “Helen” reads “Helen was to be the name of my wife” (71 n.1). Dalí’s Venus was a Russian woman named Elena whom he knew in Paris, and through whom he entered and frequented the Russian émigré circles, another network through which Nabokov may have heard of him in the interwar period. The three photos that Nabokov saw in Life—Vera Zorina riding an elephant’s phallic trunk, Tatiana Toumanova on the rooftop of a New York skyscraper in Dalí’s ballet Labyrinths, and Dalí with the armless mannequin—all had in common the elements of eroticism, Russia, and Dalí’s brand of surrealism. For Dalí, these were all epitomized in Gala. For Nabokov, Lolita reworked many different references through the tricky web of memory: Russian ballet dancers in erotic postures were pointing backwards toward the surrealist painter whom Lolita too was pointing at in the magazine. Nabokov found in Dalí and his surrealist objects and writings many elements that could be used in Lolita: glorifying the woman of his dreams through aesthetically staged perversions, glorifying Russia as the symbol of this object of desire, and also the magic of water nymphs. In an article published by Winthrop Sargeant in Life in 1945, “Close-Up: Dalí,” we read that “An excitable Spanish surrealist, now scorned by his fellow surrealists, has succeeded in making deliberate lunacy a paying proposition.” The article includes a detailed account of Dalí’s Venus Pavilion for the 1939 New York World Fair, which seems like a prophetic materialization of Humbert’s fantasies: “For the New York World’s Fair Dalí created a sideshow called ‘The Dream of Venus,’ in which mermaids with

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brassieres swam in a tank designed to represent a ‘prenatal chateau’. In their submarine setting the mermaids milked an underwater cow and played imaginary tunes on piano keys painted on the body of a rubber woman who floated chained to a grand piano” (Sargeant 66). Nabokov’s “Enchanter,” who was conceived in Paris in 1939, would have felt very much at home in Dalí’s pavilion built in the same year. Dalí had brought his Russian Gala to New York and enchanted the audience by signing his paintings from then on “Gala Salvador Dalí.” Nabokov would develop his Lolita over the ensuing decade and a half in the same androgynous fashion, though without Dalí’s flamboyantly public perversity, instead more privately projecting her as his other self with whom he shares his passport: Hazel Brown. Like Dalí’s Gala, Hazel Brown was his Russian self turned English, “The Enchanter” that turned into the novel Lolita. The name “Lolita,” less obviously connected to Nabokov’s Russia, is the Spanish diminutive for “Dolores.” Michael Maar has traced its origin to a short story dating back to 1916 called “Lolita,” by the minor German author Heinz von Lichberg. In 2004, Maar published Lichberg’s short story in The Times Literary Supplement. Maar stressed the German sources that Nabokov interwove in his Lolita; Lichberg was only one of them, along with E.T.A. Hoffmann, on whose grotesque genre Lichberg himself was expanding, even if rather clumsily. The Lolita story certainly has some elements that Nabokov may have picked up later—in addition to the name, the very young age (though Lichberg is rather vague about the actual age, merely recording that “by our Northern standards she was terribly young,” Lichberg 14), the lover who dies, the rather hazy dreamlike atmosphere. Yet the story has little in common with Nabokov’s novel itself. Michael Maar concludes his introduction to the short story by mercilessly and unflatteringly comparing the two: “The ugly duckling and the proud swan—if the image smacks too much of a fairy tale, it can be expressed more technically. Heinz von Lichberg, not ungifted but blatantly immature, busied himself in his Lolita with linen, wood, paper and string. Vladimir Nabokov used similar materials. But what he fashioned out of them was a kite that vanished into the clear blue air of literature” (Maar, “Curse of the first Lolita” 15). Maar writes that among the many things Nabokov read in Berlin, Lichberg’s story may have been one that the avid reader recorded in the back of his mind, from which it surfaced years later, among many other references: “He forgot the tale completely, or thought he had forgotten it. Of this phenomenon too, cryptomnesia, the history of art offers enough examples . . . Such is the grace of inspiration. Like the twofold Biblical blessing, it can come from above, but also float up from the oubliettes of memory” (15).

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Lichberg’s Lolita had its own modest virtues, and Nabokov readily made use of them, but they were secondary in importance for the novel as a whole. In particular, one thing that was missing in Lichberg’s quite sentimental story was the very lewdness and perversity, combined with aesthetic refinement and poetry, that made Humbert stand out in the forest of nymphet lovers. Could there be a more resonant source than Lichberg’s? How about a short story about a surrealist painter who works on a history of surrealist painting, and fantasizes about the woman of his dreams in the guise of a pubescent girl called Dulita, whom he plots to sodomize with the help of her mother, a widow who falls madly in love with him? Not mentioned by Maar (or anyone else who has looked into Lolita’s sources, so far as I know), this story was called “Rêverie.” Its author was Salvador Dalí.

Lolita’s surrealist sister: Dalí’s Dulita Dalí published “Rêverie” in the magazine Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 4 (1931), and returned to it a decade later. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), he explained at length who Dulita was (now spelling her name as “Dullita”1) and he discussed the role she played in the dreamed memories of his childhood, proclaiming that the little Spanish girl was only the chrysalis of his Russian Galuchka, the surrealist object of his desire. He describes his fantasies in terms that are remarkably suggestive of Lolita: In short I want to realize the dream act of sodomy in the stable that I have just identified with the one in the dream. But this time the woman I love is replaced by a young girl of eleven, named Dullita, whom I met five years ago. This girl had the very pale face of an anemic, light-colored eyes that are very sad and vague, making a very violent contrast with a body exceptionally developed for her age, very well shaped; her gait and lazy gestures are extremely voluptuous to me . . . I had to invent several stories which would create the conditions of dream, this similarity being indispensable to the development of my reverie. Here is the one

1

The original spelling in “Rêverie” was “Dulita” [Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 4 (1931)], and this is how Nabokov first saw it. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, and also in the 1998 collection of Dalí’s theoretical writings Oui: The Paranoid–Critical Revolution that includes Yvonne Shafir’s English translation of Dalí’s 1931 “Rêverie,” the spelling is “Dullita.” All quotes from “Rêverie” are from Shafir’s translation; in the following pages, whenever I am not quoting, I am using the original spelling to refer to Dalí’s French text from 1931, and the later spelling to refer to Dulita’s transposition into English across the Ocean in Dalí’s autobiographical book.

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I adopt. Dullita’s mother, a rather beautiful woman, about forty, a widow and always dressed in black, falls madly in love with me and accepts, out of masochism, my fantasy of sodomizing her daughter, even consenting to help me with all her strength, all her devotion. “Rêverie,” in Oui 145

But could Nabokov have read either of these texts? The incestuous plot in the early 1931 “Rêverie” is obscured in the fictional autobiography, where Dullita becomes the main character in a personal mythology, so it seems that Nabokov must have read both. As a friend of Adrienne Monnier’s, Nabokov could have read Dalí’s “Rêverie” in La Maison des Amis des Livres, which had Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution among its holdings, and his recollection of the tale would have been stimulated by Dalí’s retelling in his Secret Life. It is striking that Dalí scholars do little with the Dullita character, other than noting in passing its appeareance in Dalí’s personal mythology, but not really discussing it other than through the obvious connections with Gala and Jensens’ character Gradiva. Thus, in The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification, and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí’s Autobiographical Writings, David Vilaseca limits himself to a brief reference to Dullita as a double: “Dalí’s idealized objects of love (Galuchka, Dullita, and Dullita ‘Rediviva’) are described at different points as what he himself is, as his narcissistic doubles” (196). Finkelstein too only mentions the initial text “Rêverie” as an example of Dalí’s anal obsession (“The fantasy unravels, for instance, a pronounced anal-sadistic streak in his psychological makeup, but it does not go beyond that,” Salvador Dali’s Art and Writing 255), but he doesn’t discuss the pages that follow, where Dalí outlines the plot of what will be Nabokov’s Lolita. In the phrase “Dullita Rediviva” from Dalí’s Secret Life, Finkelstein doesn’t read more than a revival of Jensens’ character, whereas she is also a revival of Dalí’s 1931 character (259). Maybe the opening pages of “Rêverie,” describing Dalí’s playing with a bread crumb on his penis, were so off-putting that no one got beyond them to read the actual protoLolita plot? For intriguing reviews of Dalí’s autobiography, Nabokov wouldn’t have had to look farther than the pages of America’s leading literary magazine. In 1943 The New Yorker published not one but two reviews of Dalí’s Secret Life, followed in 1944 by Edmond Wilson’s review of Dalí’s novel Hidden Faces. Himself working on the autobiographical essays that would appear in the same The New Yorker and then be published as Speak, Memory, Nabokov must have been interested in the outrageous artist-émigré’s best-selling autobiography.

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The two reviews published in The New Yorker were written by Clifton Fadiman (“Reports from England and the Subconscious,” Jan. 2, 1943) and, rather surprisingly, by the humorist and cartoonist James Thurber (“The Secret Life of James Thurber,” Feb. 27, 1943). Both Wilson and Nabokov detested the middlebrow Fadiman, so they were unlikely to agree with his rave review of Dalí’s Secret Life, which spoke about “a book whose originality you cannot deny” (“Reports from England” 50). Fadiman feels that it is his duty to “warn off queasy-stomached readers” (51), but he did have a point when writing that “His book is approximately equally divided between Galamania and Megalomania” (51), and Humbert might have learned a thing or two from it for his own Lolitamania. The conclusion of Fadiman’s review almost sounds like Humbert’s plea for understanding his deviance as something in human nature itself: “these deviations, in a mild form, are latent in most of us. This is why I do not think you can toss this book aside as exhibitionistic trash. It is a true human document and will remain so as long as paranoia is human” (52). More likely to have caught Nabokov’s eye was James Thurber’s ironic review, whose title implied that Dalí had plagiarized the title of Thurber’s own most famous story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” published in 1939 and then published as a chapter in My World and Welcome to It. Thurber’s autobiographical collection had become a best-seller like Dalí’s, yet Thurber comically bemoans the fact that Dalí’s book sells for more than three times the price of his own. Dalí’s vivid imagination is catchy even for a skeptic like Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dalí as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts” (Thurber 15). At the same time, he suggests that Dalí’s sales have been stimulated by prurient interest in his childhood sexual fantasies involving young girls: “Señor Dalí’s memoirs have set me to thinking. I find myself muttering as I shave, and on two occasions I have swung my crutch at a little neighbor girl on my way to the post office. Señor Dalí’s book sells for six dollars. My own published personal history (Harper & Bros., 1933) sold for $1.75 . . . the price-fixing principle in the field of literature is not global, but personal” (15). Even as he mocks Dalí’s surrealist childhood that beats even the lives of “Willie Faulkner” and “Herbie Hoover” (15), Thurber portrays himself as a home-grown surrealist in his own right. He describes himself as a child being told that his sister was “crying her heart out” one day; taking this metaphor literally, he searched his sister’s bed for her heart. After recounting this moment, he ends his essay in triumph, “Ah there, Salvador!” (17). But the most important thing for present purposes about Thurber’s review is that

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it points specifically at the complex feminine character Galuchka-Dullita, the latter name falling as the first word on a new page: “he knew, or imagined he knew, little girls named Galuchka and Dullita” (15–16). Lolita’s surreal predecessor was now baptized by The New Yorker. A year later, in 1944, Edmund Wilson reviews Dalí’s novel Hidden Faces, which he dismisses as old-fashioned and badly written, with “orgies of loosesquandered verbiage” (“Salvador Dalí as a Novelist” 65), although not totally devoid of interest. Wilson did admire Dalí as a painter but not as a novelist: “All this is not, of course, to say that the painter of ‘Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone’ is not a very clever fellow, or that his novel may not afford entertainment” (62). Dalí published the novel with Dial Press, founded as an annex to the modernist journal The Dial, to which Wilson himself had contributed in the 1930s. If Wilson was interested in reading Dalí’s Hidden Faces to begin with it must have been both due to his reviewing other books issued by Dial and also to the great success of The Secret Life, which Dial had brought out two years before. Wilson’s interest lay in the sociological and the psychological value of literature, and a few years later he included his review of Dalí’s novel in his collection aptly named Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. In an interview from Spring 1963 published in The New York Review of Books, “Every Man His Own Eckermann,” Wilson spoke about the tensions between autonomous and commercial practices, citing Nabokov and the painter Pavel Chelishchev on the one hand, versus Dalí and the surrealists on the other. Wilson examines the reasons why the former weren’t as successful as the latter at traveling globally. Among the factors that made surrealism so successful internationally, Wilson appreciates the organized group strategy that was Breton’s main concern: Those prestidigitating paintings of Chelishchev that seem to be trees or portraits but turn out to conceal other things have a kinship with the novels of Nabokov, who loves to perform the same kind of tricks and to juxtapose gemmy colors, as both are very much in the tradition of the precious mechanical peacock that Catherine the Great gave Potyomkin and those very fancy Easter eggs manufactured for the Russians by Fabergé . . . It may well be that Pavel Chelishchev was actually, as he seemed to believe, the greatest Russian painter since the ikon-makers . . . Chelishchev, like George Grosz, came to the United States, and neither of them has ever attained to the same international currency as the members of the organized Surrealist group, all of whom it seems

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to me—except perhaps Dalí—were very much inferior to them. But they did not belong to a group and they were never the darlings of the dealers. The Bit between My Teeth 588–9

But Dalí and Nabokov shared more than an oppositional relation. They were connected in a way that would seem surreal if it weren’t true. *

*

*

Between Dalí’s 1931 Dulita and her more complex sister Galuchka-Dullita eleven years had passed. For Nabokov too, a decade passed from the time he wrote “The Enchanter” until he began reworking its theme in Lolita. By then Nabokov had exchanged Russian, the language in which he wrote the first exploration of the magic of nymphets in Paris, for English, the language in which Lolita was born across the Atlantic. It was one of the ironies of reality that the anonymous nymphet of “The Enchanter” was French, and when she crossed the ocean she became American, only to be introduced to the world in Paris by the Olympia Press, but still as a work in English. As she crossed the ocean and the decade, the once nameless nymphet took fresh inspiration from Dalí’s Dullita. The substantial changes Nabokov made in the plot of “The Enchanter” were pretty much the same changes Dalí made in the plot of his “Rêverie,” when he retold the tale in his Secret Life in the chapters “False Childhood Memories” and “True Childhood Memories.” According to this later account, behind the fictional Dulita of “Rêverie” there was a real-life Dullita, met in early childhood, and behind her lay the first dreamed image of Gala, his future wife, whom he calls Galuchka in the early years of their parallel childhoods, his in Spain and hers in Russia. Similarly, “The Enchanter” features no vanished predecessor to the tale’s nymphet, but a decade later, when Nabokov is developing his early story into a novel, an earlier love, the dead Annabel Leigh, becomes the secret inception of Humbert’s perverse love for nymphets. In 1931, Dalí presented only the rough outline of the tale of his Dulita: a painter, a cultured intellectual who is working on a history of surrealist painting, dreams himself much older and fantasizes sodomizing a twelve-year-old called Dulita. To achieve this goal, he allows her widowed mother to fall in love with him, and with her help and the assistance of an old prostitute named Gallo, they prepare Dulita for her sexual initiation at a fountain or an old, round pond overshadowed by a vault of cypresses. After this initiation, the painter sodomizes her. Similarly in Nabokov, in “The Enchanter” we see only the major lines of the plot of Lolita, namely the central European who falls in love with a French nymphet and marries her widowed mother in

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Figure 23 Salvador Dalí, “Dullita.” Drawing. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dial Press, 1942) © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017.

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order to get close to her daughter. When his wife dies, he tries to rape his stepdaughter; filled with remorse, he throws himself in front of a truck. Dalí’s rewriting of his tale in The Secret Life is much more fictionalized and yet so much more autobiographical, with the autobiographical extending to include memories, daydreams, dreams, and fantasies. His chapters on Dullita become an entire novella about how she was only a link in the chain that leads to the apparition of the real object of desire, Gala. He tells the story of how he first had a surrealist vision of Gala as Galuchka in his early childhood, as he stands next to a fountain where he finds a surrealist object that would become a fetish associated with Gala and then with Dullita: a plane ball, the round fruit of the platane, filled with seeds. Always seen from behind and shaped like a keyhole, in Dalí’s false memories Galuchka precedes her sodomized follower, nine-year-old Dullita. In her turn, this Dullita, who is also seen only from behind, will be replaced by a third and final twelve-year-old Dullita with whom little Dalí engages in sexually symbolic games that mix the sexual with the death instinct. This utterly perverse and lewd—but fantastically written—story serves in Dalí’s book of memoirs to introduce his real Gala as the ultimate and absolute surrealist object of desire. In perfect parallelism, Nabokov too explored in his novel the multiple layers that had gone into the making of his 1939 nymphet. The story is now complicated with a previous beloved who died in early adolescence, and is filled with the sexual fantasies and desires explored at length by the highly cultured Humbert within a complex network of artistic, literary, and cultural references that tend to privilege the less important ones and to downplay or totally elide the more important ones, to such an extent that for five decades, unseen by the host of critics who have written on the novel, Lolita’s most direct predecessor has been hiding in plain sight in the pages of Dalí’s Secret Life and The New Yorker’s reviews. Of special relevance for Lolita were Dalí’s theories of the body as a fragmented, surreal object. In response to Breton’s theory of convulsive beauty, Dalí theorizes the decomposing of the beloved’s body. This generates “spectral beauty,” the beauty that emanates from the object of desire and contaminates the surrounding objects and even the landscape. Such a spectral beauty embodies both the erotic and the death instinct. An example is the Böcklin painting The Isle of the Dead, which Dalí’s dreamer thinks of analyzing in the opening of the Dulita “Rêverie.” Dalí’s “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible, de l’architecture du Modern’ Style” was published in issues 3–4 of Minotaure in 1933, and “Les nouvelles couleurs du sex appeal spectral” discussed Böcklin’s painting in the following issue 5 (1934).

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Not coincidentally, in Despair, Nabokov refers to the same painting as being a very popular print in German houses in the interwar period. Despair was serialized in 1934 in Ilya Fondaminsky’s Paris publication, just in time for Nabokov to leaf through Dalí’s articles in Minotaure. The setting of Böcklin’s painting that Dalí uses to plunge into the reverie of sodomizing Dulita is an island of the dead surrounded by mist, toward which a boat floats (see Figure  24a). This is the very description of the setting for nymphets when Humbert first describes them as nymphic maidens between the ages of nine and fourteen, who bewitch older men: “I would have the reader see ‘nine’ and ‘fourteen’ as the boundaries—the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea” (Lolita 16). The boat in the painting has an oarsman, and we see a standing figure dressed in white, who can be either a man or a woman. Next to the standing figure is something that looks like a coffin that the lover takes on his/her final journey. Dalí’s article “Les nouvelles couleurs du sex appeal spectral” (Minotaure 5, 1934) begins with Böcklin’s painting as a way of exploring the differences between ghost versus specter as related to the surrealist object. Especially striking were the accompanying photos by Man Ray that showed a hooded white figure like the one in Böcklin’s painting (see Figure 24b). In the Minotaure article, Dalí mentions both Böcklin’s spectral storm clouds and the beauty of specters. In the same issue in which Breton wrote that “La beauté convulsive sera érotique voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstantielle ou ne sera pas” (Breton, “La beauté sera convulsive” 16) Dalí wrote that “Le ‘sex appeal’ sera spectral,” and a couple of paragraphs later, “La femme spectrale sera la femme démontable” (“Les nouvelles couleurs” 22). Nabokov learned something from Dalí’s spectral woman, whose beauty comes from pulling her to pieces: the breasts, the buttocks, the bust. Humbert pulls Lolita to pieces after he loses her, decomposing her into the objects she once possessed (hairpins, chewing gum, clothing) as he had done with the ghost of Annabel. Another possible source for the decomposable sexual beauty of a pubescent girl was the work of the artist and photographer Hans Bellmer. Nabokov may have encountered his work during his years in Berlin, where Bellmer was creating his decomposable dolls between 1933 and 1938 as a protest against the ideal bodily beauty promoted by Fascism. In any event, he would have been able to see Bellmer’s uncanny dolls in the pages of Minotaure. Thanks to Paul Eluard, whom Bellmer befriended when visiting Paris in 1935, the German artist had two full pages in issue 6 in which to show his photographs under the title “Variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée”

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Figure 24a Arnold Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead,” 1880.

Figure 24b Photo by Man Ray, Minotaure 5 (1934): 20 © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2017.

(“Variations on a dismembered girl,” Minotaure 6 (1935): 30–31). Understanding Lolita also as a surrealist object, decomposed and fetishized, it is noteworthy that Haim Finkelstein discusses Bellmer’s doll in his chapter “From Symbolic Functioning to ‘Being Objects’ ”: “One of the most striking creations in this genre is Hans Bellmer’s Poupée, which, being manipulated and reassembled in various

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postures and combinations, embodies both total submission and subversion” (Salvador Dali’s Art and Writing 167). Even if he may not have had the chance to see Bellmer’s The Doll (Die Puppe, 1934) in Germany where it was published clandestinely and anonymously, Nabokov still had the chance to encounter Bellmer’s work in the pages of Minotaure, or we might say, Mineuretaure. In Humbert’s transition from Annabel to Lolita, Nabokov plays on Dalí’s distinction between ghosts—veiled in white like the mannequin wrapped in a white sheet that Dalí held in the Life photo—and specters—the decomposable woman whose beauty comes from analyzing each part of her body individually, like the armless Venus buried in a frog pond by Dalí. As the materialization of the ghost of Annabel, Lolita becomes an illuminated and illuminating specter, “a little ghost in natural colors” (Lolita 11). The Dulita reverie begins with Dalí seeing himself considerably older (Humbert in his forties?) with a beard like that of the Count of Monte Cristo: “I see myself as I am now but appreciably older. I have, moreover, let my beard grow just like in the long-buried memory I have of a lithograph of Monte-Cristo” (“Rêverie” 141–2). Incidentally, Humbert too grows a beard in his ultimate stage, when he has lost Lolita and has no more hope (Lolita 283). There are many references in Lolita to Romantic novels, whose plots function as frames and structuring patterns. Of particular interest is the reference to the popular, commercialized romances, a target of Nabokov’s mockery. The reference to Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is one such reference. The Dulita reverie takes place in a castle-farm where the dreamer retreats in order to complete his book on Surrealist Painting throughout the Ages. In his turn, Humbert retreats to a provincial town to complete his history of French literature for English-speaking students. Humbert’s own views on art and literature create a history that reaches a climax in his object of desire—Lolita— and are similar to what Dalí is attempting in his book which he would never publish: “Some friends have let me use their large castle-farm for 10 days where I intend to finish my study on Böcklin, which will constitute a chapter of a very large work that, for the moment, I’m calling Surrealist Painting through the Ages” (Dalí, “Rêverie” 142). Humbert muses on painting the walls at the Enchanted Hunters hotel with scenes that could represent not only the history of painting in a nutshell, but, more specifically, convulsive beauty, in a reverie marked by violence, cruelty, despair, monstrous beauty, and sexual perversity: Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room

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with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower . . . There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx . . . There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. Lolita 134–5

Both in Dalí’s text and in Nabokov’s, the reverie of finding surrealist beauty throughout the ages of painting is followed by the apparition of the real woman of their dreams, Gala and Lolita, respectively. Dalí muses that while she’s away in Berlin, Gala is engaging in more amorous adventures, which only turns him on all the more: “After these ten days [of working on Böcklin], I have to return to Port-Lligat where I will meet up with the woman I love, who presently is in Berlin, busy with amorous adventures, as in an earlier reverie” (Dalí, “Rêverie” 142). Ultimately, we can use Dalí’s words and say that Lolita is Humbert’s “surrealist painting throughout the ages,” with illustrious precursors such as Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. Immediately after the passage on covering the walls of The Enchanted Hunters in erotic and sensual imagery, Humbert explains what this object of desire is for him, this object which he looks for, hunting and haunted, in all the objects around him. “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly” (135). This merging of beastly and beautiful into the object of desire had been Breton’s theory of the surrealist object. The place where Dalí’s reverie takes place is called the Tower Mill, a place visited by the dreamer when he was ten years old. The reverie functions also as self-analysis and psychoanalysis, as the dreamer notes the connections between the place he has been to in reality, his analysis of Böcklin’s painting, and his own reveries. One such example is the erotic pond, an objective reality from Dalí’s childhood, represented in the reverie as ten times bigger and set behind the castle rather than in front of it, surrounded by cypresses: Dalí’s symbolic phallic tree that encircled the magic place on Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. The cypresses are connected through iron rings, forming a cupola under which lies the fountain where the nymphet Dulita will be initiated before the sodomizing fantasy: I notice the well-known presence of the oscillating tops of the cypresses, which in reality form a group separating the courtyard (right after the stable) from the prairie where, in my reverie, my fantasy has placed the vast pond.

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The emotion caused by the cypress tops results from the instantaneous association with another group of cypresses situated in a public place near Figueres, called “Log-Fountain.” This group of very old, busy cypresses surrounded a paved circle at the center of which, amid well-worn stone seats, flows a ferruginous fountain . . . The foliage of the cypresses, starting almost at ground level, and their tops joined together with iron rings, formed a cupola, in such a way that the fountain was enclosed inside the cypresses. “Rêverie” 143

Comparable to Venus’ fountain at the heart of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili where Eros cleans his arrow after he takes out Poliphilo’s heart to insert Polia’s effigy in its place, the cypress fountain is the place where Lolita the nymphet appears. Under different settings, it travels throughout the entire novel, from Annabel’s “princedom by the sea” where she almost makes love to the teenage Humbert, to the (H)our (G)lass Lake in the woods where Humbert goes with Charlotte and Lolita for a swim. But the most striking resemblance with Dalí’s Dulita reverie comes when the Enchanted Hunters setting is brought on stage as a cross between Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead and the cypress lake/pond/fountain: “the travelers became aware of a diamond glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater appeared—and there it was, marvelously and inexorably, under spectral trees, at the top of a graveled drive— the pale palace of The Enchanted Hunters” (Lolita 117). Lolita the nymphet appeared for the first time to the lustful Humbert in a replica of Dalí’s sexual fountain. But as Dalí’s erotic reverie is framed with The Isle of the Dead, so is Lolita framed with the tragic story of Annabel Leigh. The erotic object embraced by death reworks Böcklin’s “isle of the dead” in the “enchanted island” of time: “When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time” (17–18). With the help of Dulita’s mother, Mathilde, and the old prostitute Gallo, Dalí stages the whole scene: he sets up a daily ritual which is meant to make Dulita think him impressive and unapproachable. Both Mathilde and Gallo are forbidden to communicate with him “whether by gesture or writing . . . Dullita must believe me to be deaf and dumb and a great scholar whom the slightest troublesome gesture might seriously disturb” (“Rêverie” 145). The daily ritual includes working all day on his Böcklin study and meeting the three women for dinner. “It is at this time of the evening, in complete silence and meditation, that

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I transmit, through writing, all my decisions regarding the accomplishment of my fantasies, with the most microscopic details and nuances” (145). In a similar way, Humbert tries to master the world around him through the power of words, even if, in the end, it is Lolita who masters him, which is a radical change in Nabokov’s text’s from Dalí’s, where the absolute master is the man and Dulita has no force of her own. But the description of the dreamer’s fantasies in the most minute detail is strikingly similar to Humbert’s minute staging of all his escapades with Lolita, which he details over the course of the novel like a student of criticalparanoia—Dalí’s own theory for analyzing the surrealist image. Like Humbert, Dalí the dreamer stages his sexual possession of the object of desire with the help of a highly romanticized story: Humbert was just pursuing his long-lost love Annabel Leigh in Lolita, fighting against irreversible time and ultimately death: “Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up” (21). Much as Dalí wants Dulita to be given “extremely chaste and edifying readings, surrounded with great gentleness and tenderness as if she were preparing for her first communion” (“Rêverie” 146) the Enchanter wants to feed his nymphet’s imagination only with fairy tales; “she would be entertained only with storybook images (the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its treasure” (Lolita 72). In Lolita, Humbert buys Lolita for her thirteenth birthday a deluxe illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (174). Both Lolita and Dulita are dreamed by their creators in a setting—the hotel or the castle—that is intimately connected with an erotic childhood memory. As a child, Humbert met Annabel in the Hotel Mirana owned by his father. As a child, Dalí visited the castle with some of his parents’ friends. Now, years later, he sees Dulita occupying the same place he did when he first visited the castle. “Like myself at that time, she is in the middle of doing her school homework. In front of her are her books and an open pencil box, where I see an eraser with a lion drawn on it. It is the exact same atmosphere of my first stay at the château . . . Mathilde occupies the place of the wife and knits” (“Rêverie” 148). The sign for Dulita’s going to bed involves an erotic sugar lump: “Finally, I make the daily gesture, the exact copy of the one which the owner [of the castle] made to me [in my childhood]: I dip a sugar cube in the last of my cognac and stretch a hand forward to Dullita. Dullita, head bent over an exercise book, notices my gesture and takes the sugar with her teeth” (148). But the minute Dalí’s fantasy is fulfilled, Dulita becomes again Gala, and this is how the reverie ends: “Mathilde and Gallo have suddenly disappeared and Dullita has turned into the woman I love,

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concluding the reverie with the same images of the memory of the dream” (“Rêverie” 152). For Humbert, when he first sees Lolita it is as if time stands still on his enchanted island and he is thirteen again and has his Annabel. This is why, as for Breton, the object of desire is a recognition; the discovery of a ghost of the past reincarnated: “And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess . . . I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side . . . The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished” (Lolita 39).

Dullita—Galuchka—Lolita As The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí would reveal, Dullita began with the Russian Galuchka, and long before she was prefigured by Annabel, Lolita began with Nabokov’s oldest love affair: with Russian. The Paris-born Dulita, reinvented across the Atlantic as the Spanish–Russian Dullita-Galuchka, provides a very interesting model for Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov’s longing for Russian and Russia in the 1940s would have made him interested in Dalí’s Russian muse Galuchka: “Already, in late October 1941, Nabokov had dreamed up a new English novel. But as he told Aldanov this, he added that he was longing for Russian and Russia. He was still very much a Russian writer and to relinquish his language was agony. In almost all his literary work over the next few years he would either translate from or write about other Russian writers, or write about Russian subjects” (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 39). For Dalí, the magic and fateful way meant that he met Gala before meeting Gala, in several visions that he accounts for as dreamed memories in the chapter entitled “False Childhood Memories.” “It was Señor Traite who revealed to me the first images of Russia and this is how it happened: . . . Señor Traite would seat me on his knees and awkwardly stroke my chin with his fine, glowing skin, grasping it with the forefinger and large thumb which had the lustreless skin, the smell, the color, the temperature and the roughness of a potato wrinkled and warmed by the sun and already a little rotten” (The Secret Life 40). But a footnote appended to the word “knees” opens on a parallel dimension, at the same time, in Russia, the vision of a little Russian girl seated on the lap of one of Nabokov’s masters: “At about the same time in Russia, in the ‘Lighted Glade,’ Tolstoy’s country place, another child, Galuchka, my wife, was seated on the lap of another potato, of another specimen of that kind of earthy, rugged and dreamy old man—Count Leo Tolstoy” (40 n.2). Half a decade later, Nabokov the Russian

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would sit little Lolita on Humbert’s lap and incidentally, what would come to be known as the “lap scene” is the very scene in which Lolita points out to Humbert Dalí’s photo in Life. She was right to do so. Dalí wrote on the imagined simultaneity of his and Gala’s sitting on the lap of an elderly man with all the magic and fateful quality that went into the making of a surrealist story. Working in the long tradition of lovers first seen in dreams that comes from Dante through Shakespeare to Nerval and Breton, Dalí first sees Galuchka among the many haunting images in the mental theater opened to him by Señor Traite’s magic library. Here, the image that penetrates him viscerally and grows in him like a human being is the little Russian girl dressed in white furs descending directly from Russian fairytales. In the passage from his autobiography where he describes the first marvelous apparition of Gala in his childhood, he uses the highly Nabokovian metaphor of a butterfly chrysalis, in a passage that Humbert could have written: It was in this marvelous theatre of Señor Traite that I saw the images which were to stir me most deeply, for the rest of my life; the image of a little Russian girl especially, which I instantly adored, became engraved with the corrosive weight proper to nitric acid in each of the formative moulds of my child’s flesh and soul, in an integral way, from the limpid surface of the crystalline lenses of my pupils and my libido to the most delicate murmur of the “chrysalid caress” sleeping hidden behind the silky protection of the pink and the ridged skin of my tender fingertips. The Russian girl appeared to me swathed in white furs and deeply ensconced in a sled, pursued by wolves with phosphorescent eyes. The Secret Life 41, my emphasis

In the image of the fairytale Russian girl, Dalí discovered his Gala: “This girl would look at me fixedly and her expression, awe-inspiringly proud, oppressed my heart; her little nostrils were as lively as her glance, which gave her something of the wild look of a small forest animal . . . Was it Gala? I am certain it was” (41). So, too, seeing Lolita on her mother’s “piazza,” half naked, half wet, Humbert merges her with his lost first love: “Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared to me, golden and brown, kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda” (Lolita 167). Aged nine when first seen, like Dante’s Beatrice, Gala-Galuchka would be resurrected a few years later in a girl called Dullita: It was a little girl whom I saw one day from behind, walking in front of me the whole length of the street, on my way home from school . . . The one in the middle did not turn around and I knew, though seeing her only from behind,

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walking so proudly, that she was different from all other girls in the world, that she was a queen. The same sentiment of never-extinguished love that I had had for Galuchka was born anew; her name was Dullita, for that is what her two fervent and adoring friends called her ceaselessly and in every tone of tenderness and passion, I returned home without having seen her face and without its having occurred to me to look at it. It was indeed she—Dullita, Dullita! Galuchka “Rediviva!” The Secret Life 75

It is perhaps symbolic that Dullita is always seen in these “true childhood memories” from behind, like Magritte’s paintings of men seen from the back, but also like the ghosts that appeared in Man Ray’s photos shown in Dalí’s article from Minotaure, “Les nouvelles couleurs du sex-appeal spectral.” “I always saw her from behind, with her delicate waist, fall back into the black void, where she would break in two, like a white porcelain egg-cup . . . I then felt the burning pain of the key of torture incrusted with all the force of my weight in the bones of my neck, and I then felt my love for Dullita, for Galuchka Rediviva, once more become localized there, just where I felt the pain” (77). For Humbert, the love for Annabel-Lolita hurts down to the very root of his body, and as he returns later without Lolita to The Enchanted Hunters he muses on a painful memory of his nymph that could be captured only by a painter: “with a spasm of pain I recalled a scene worthy of a great artist: petite nymphe accroupie . . . No—I felt I could not endure the throes of revisiting that lobby” (Lolita 261). Humbert’s mix of idealistic with purely visceral and corporeal love has a precedent in Dalí’s Dullita, whose “real childhood memory” was initially devoid of corporeality and sexuality, only to be turned later into the sodomizing fantasy: “My love for Dullita (whose face I had not yet seen) spread over all things and became a sentiment so general that the idea of her real presence would have horrified and disappointed me; I would adore her, and at the same time remain more alone, more ferociously alone than ever!” (The Secret Life 79). When meeting the real Dullita at age nine, Dalí has the chance to live with her a dreamlike experience at a place that will become the setting of his 1931 “Rêverie”: The Tower Mill of the rich Pitchot family, friends of his parents, who take him to their estate to recover after an illness. It is here that he meets with the history of modern painting on the walls of the mansion. The Pitchot dining room, where little Dalí contemplates Impressionistic paintings every morning, is the place where the Dullita reverie is initially shaped. What he sees in the dining room, like Humbert’s musing on covering the walls at the Enchanted Hunters hotel with

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erotic and perverse paintings, is literally a history of modern painting. Among the images is a “perversely naïve dancer” that the eye of the nine-year-old retains: “I squeezed from these pictures all the literary residue of 1900, the eroticism of which burned deep in my throat like a drop of Armagnac swallowed the wrong way. I remember especially a dancer of the Bal Tabarin dressing. Her face was perversely naïve and she had red hairs under her arms” (The Secret Life 81). The story about Lolita–Dullita is a story of cruelty and romanticism that literally ends up devouring its two protagonists: “the absorbing, cruel and romantic story which is to follow . . . This is necessary moreover to situate precisely, against a chronological, ordered, and clear setting, the vertiginous love scenes which I am about to unfold to you” (The Secret Life 86). The combination of cruelty, consumption, and romanticism is rendered in Lolita’s 1956 “Foreword” as “the claws and wings of a novel,” the monster and the angel. Both Lolita and Humbert are dead when the novel is published. The real Dullita episode from Dalí’s childhood ends with a short text entitled “The Story of the Linden Blossom Picking and the Crutch” that closes with the fulfillment of his fantasy: bringing Dullita to the rooftop of his Tower Mill, where he can embrace her delicate waist with the curved underarm holder of his crutch, a Dullita smelling of linden flowers and death. Dalí’s story about Dullita opens with a paragraph pervaded by visceral and death imagery: “A story filled with burning sun and tempest, a story seething with love and fear, a story full of linden blossoms and a crutch, in which the specter of death does not leave me, so to speak, for a single moment” (The Secret Life 89). The specter of Annabel’s death doesn’t leave Humbert for a moment as he recreates Lolita as Annabel’s “little ghost” (Lolita 11). Nor does it leave Nabokov, until this ghost that haunts him since 1939 is let out: “Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” (312). Before going out to pick linden blossoms, little Dalí discovers in the Tower attic two surreal objects that would haunt him for the rest of his life: one is a laurel crown and the other is a crutch. The laurel crown was a gift offered to Maria Gay at the Moscow Opera after her success as Carmen in Bizet’s opera. The Russian background, Bizet’s cruel and passionate gipsy Carmen, as well as the story—a man deeply in love, hurt by the cruel Carmen, who ends up committing a murder—are all reasons for Nabokov to have found solid material

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in this particular chapter of Dalí’s autobiography. One of Lolita’s recurrent literary intertexts is indeed Bizet’s Carmen, based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen: Lolita plays a record with a popular song about a lover who kills her (“And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,/The gun I am holding now,” 62). Humbert calls Lolita “my Carmencita” shortly before quoting Bizet’s Don José just before he kills Carmen: “Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen?” (243). Like Dalí in this story of the linden blossoms, Humbert too is haunted by the specter of death from the very beginning, with Annabel’s death, through the ending, trying to resurrect her in Lolita. Dalí did that a decade earlier in his autobiography, first by exchanging the nine-year-old Dullita with a second twelve-year-old Dullita of his imagination. It is from here that Nabokov picks her up for his Humbert: There was also a fourth person with one foot on the ground, who stood looking up, her back arched on one of her hips. This was a little girl of twelve, who stood looking up and motioning to her mother, who was precisely the one with the beautiful breasts. This girl had also come to help with the gathering. I fell in love with her instantly, and I think that the view of her from behind, reminding me of Dullita, was very favorable to this first impulse of my heart. Besides, never having seen Dullita face to face, it was extremely easy for me to blend these two beings, just as I had already once done with Galuchka, of my false memories, and Dullita Rediviva! With my crutch I imperceptibly touched the girl’s back. She quickly turned around, and I then said to her, with a sureness and a force of conviction that came close to rage: “You shall be Dullita!” The Secret Life 90

Humbert too falls for his nymph as she turns toward him and stimulates his memories of his lost love: “half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses . . . A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype” (Lolita 39–40). Here, the lover, still pining for his dead bride, decides to resurrect her in Lolita. Like Dalí before him, he could say “You shall be Annabel.” Dalí’s Dullita was the result of three faces overlapping: Galuchka, the first and the second Dullita: The condensed images of Galuchka and of Dullita had just become incorporated and fused by the force of my desire for this new child whose sun-blackened but angelically beautiful face I had just discovered. This face instantly took the place of Dullita’s, which I had never seen, so that the three images of my delirium

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mingled in the indestructible amalgam of a single and unique love-being. My passion charged the enhanced reality of the reincarnated image of my love with a new potential, more irresistible than ever. And my libidinous anxiety, stored up in the course of several years of solitary and anxious waiting, now became crystallized into a kind of precious stone, transparent, homogenous and hard, cut into a tetrahedron, and in whose facets I saw the virginal splendor of my three unassuaged loves sparkling beneath the sun of the most radiant day of the year. The Secret Life 90–91

Humbert too closes the chapter by melding Annabel and Lolita into one, and she is his trouvaille: “All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’ in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them” (Lolita 40). Like Humbert later, Dalí can hardly control his feelings, and more openly here than in Nabokov’s novel, he expresses his tyrannical intentions while she, like a good child, seeks protection from her mother: The exteriorization of my first urge toward her must indeed have betrayed such tyrannical intentions that I understood it would be difficult for me now to regain the child’s confidence. I drew one step nearer to her. But she, dominated by an almost animal-like fear, climbed as if for protection up two rungs of the ladder on which her mother was perched, and did this with such lightness and agility that I did not have time gently to touch her head with the tip of my crutch as I had intended to do to calm her fear, and to prove to her the gentleness of my sentiments. But my beautiful Dullita was quite right in being afraid of me. The Secret Life 91–2

Wanting to prove to Dullita “the gentleness of my feelings,” Dalí wants to touch Dullita’s head with the tip of his crutch, but scares her away. Humbert too shares with the reader his fantasies about Lolita’s “fluffy flowering bush” while trying to convince us that he never committed any overtly criminal act: “I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets—not crime’s prowling ground” (Lolita 131). Sublimating one’s sexual desire for a nymphet is art both for young Dalí and for worn-out Humbert. Dalí’s Dullita is both controlled by him and, in her turn, controls him the minute he feels he can love her. Humbert is the seducer and abductor, and yet he tries to persuade us that it was she, “a cruel negotiator” (184), who held the key to his paradise, even as she

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was walking all over him. Whereas Dalí’s perversity manifests itself in delaying his pleasure, Humbert’s perversity is manifested in the rather masochistic acceptance of anything Lolita allowed him: “despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise” (166). Dalí’s reverie ends with Dullita’s symbolic death only to be resurrected again, as Lolita too dies and then attains a new existence in Humbert’s finally published novel. Ultimately, Dalí’s isolated attempt to sublimate Dullita through art will become for Humbert the lasting solution; the aesthetic realm of art seems to remain the only possible space for his Lolita to be immortal.

A scent of surrealism: Lolita’s Soleil Vert perfume Nabokov openly rejected surrealism, and whenever he got the chance he made fun of the surrealist method and of the movement’s theoretical father, Sigmund Freud. Why would he be so engaged with the work of a surrealist painter, and of all people Dalí, whose craziness and sexual exhibitionism in all forms of perversion—anal obsession, sodomy, sadism, and masochism—should have been rejected by the most fervent critic of Freud and his followers—even if Freud himself openly rejected surrealism and claimed no agency over the movement? Part of the answer would be Nabokov’s attraction for sexual perversity discussed above, as long, of course, as it could also pass for a refined, intellectual, and cultural one. But there are more general cultural reasons for surrealism’s relevance to Nabokov, as Breton, Dalí, and before them Duchamp had been paving the way for his own project to put down avant-garde roots in the strange landscape of postwar America. World War II saw many European intellectuals seek refuge in the United States, and among them were André Breton and Vladimir Nabokov, both departing from France. The first to board was Nabokov, on May 28, 1940. Breton would follow ten months later on March 24, 1941 and both would settle in or around the New York émigré community. Later, in Speak, Memory, mocking the description in his passport—color of eyes: hazel; color of hair: brown—Nabokov writes: “I find ‘April 23’ under ‘birth date’ in my most recent passport, which is also the birth date of Shakespeare, my nephew Vladimir Sikorski, Shirley Temple and Hazel Brown (who, moreover, shares my passport)” (Speak, Memory

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13–14). What is interesting is that Nabokov lists under his name four different identities: two male and two female, a faithful mirror of his androgynous literary identity. Vivian Darkbloom is the mysterious female counterpart of Nabokov’s novels who appears obliquely in Pale Fire and openly in Lolita and Ada, or Ardor. But the only character who is both a child like Shirley Temple and is described constantly as Haze(l) Brown is Lolita herself. The parallelism between Nabokov and Lolita, his mirrored other, extends to changing the color of the eyes. As he immigrated to the US , Nabokov’s eyes literally changed in the official papers from grey (as they are described in all the papers he obtained in Europe) to brown (as they are described in the official documents issued in the US ). Lolita’s eyes are a mysterious grey, but the metamorphosis that her creator would undergo exists also in her last name, Haze(l), most obviously hinted at in the poem written by Humbert in which he describes her to the authorities in his wild search: “Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze/Hair: brown” (Lolita 255). As Nabokov emigrated from France to New York, his eyes changed, literally and symbolically, like Lolita’s eyes change from grey to haze(l). But the secret identity always remained hidden in him just like Lolita remained his secret mirroring of his feminine side. If on the application for an immigration visa to the US filed by Nabokov of January 29, 1940 in Paris he is identified by “color of hair: brown; color of eyes: grey,” on the Petition for Naturalization filed on September 8, 1941, his identification changes to “color of eyes: hazel; color of hair: brown,” and this will appear as such on October 29, 1945 on his Certificate of Naturalization. As Nabokov changed the color of his eyes when he changed countries, he also changed literary identities while obscuring his (literary) past, much as Humbert would do in his own transition from Europe to the US . Surrealism was part of this past, a surrealism that must have been well known to Nabokov, who was connected to the Parisian intellectual circles in the heyday of surrealism and then moved to Paris in 1937 just when surrealism was the absolute stake of the game. Surrealism reached its peak during Nabokov’s three years in Paris: Minotaure was the strongest surrealist magazine yet and perhaps the chicest French art and literary magazine; the international exhibitions were conquering the world, and the surrealists—both poets and fiction writers—were more active than ever. Seeking constantly to make a name for himself in Paris and to break out of purely Russian émigré circles, Nabokov included the surrealists among his targets. Even if not properly listed as a board member of the magazine Mesures,

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he was involved in the editorial board of the magazine at least in 1937, as Freund’s photo shows. By 1937, both Breton and Eluard had published in Mesures. Nabokov engaged intensively with the surrealist legacy in Lolita, though with a characteristic mixture of distancing irony and denial. Why else would he make such a strong point of his open rejection and mockery of everything that in his days was recognized as a surrealist practice: writing dreamily, as in a haze, about mad love (Paul Eluard’s groundbreaking volumes L’amour la poésie and Capitale de la douleur and André Breton’s Nadja and Mad Love); going to mediums or clairvoyants to interpret one’s life; identifying the chance encounters of one’s life; psychoanalyzing one’s own poems or artistic creation? All this, and much more, is what Humbert does in his wild hunt after Lolita in Chapter 25 of Part II , the chapter that includes perhaps the most moving poetic part of the entire novel: the visceral poem written by Humbert during his retreat in the Quebec sanatorium. It is not surprising that most of the references to surrealism are crowded in the poem itself. The chapter opens with a Proustian reference: this part of the tale, Humbert says, could have been titled “Dolorès Disparue” (Lolita 253). Nabokov’s Chapter 25 brims with surrealist practices that literally frame Humbert’s poem: the poem is preceded by Humbert’s dreams and his stay in a sanatorium, where he writes this poem of longing and pain, a true “capitale de la douleur” or we might as well say “capitale de Dolores.” Humbert behaves just like Gérard de Nerval, the poet in fiction whom Breton praised as one of the first who knew how to live like a surrealist (First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924), who wrote his most “surrealist” text Aurélia in Dr. Émile Blanche’s sanatorium as a therapeutic exercise. Humbert’s poem is followed by an ironic self-psychoanalysis, a practice that dates back to the first text of automatic writing, Les Champs magnétiques, and that became the surrealist practice through the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes during the first age of surrealism, between 1924 and 1929 (the period between the two manifestoes). The first sentence that follows Humbert’s poem about mad love both identifies with the surrealist practice and dismisses it: “By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece” (Lolita 257). But Chapter 25 doesn’t contain only a poem about mad love and pain; it also contains a quatrain described ironically as “nonsense verse I used to write to her when she was a child” (254–5) in the vein of Lewis Carroll’s writing oblique love poems to his Alice Liddell, a practice with which Nabokov, the translator of Alice in Wonderland, must have been familiar. Humbert recalls the quatrain just after throwing from his car a stack of “teen-magazines” of which he records only the

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“ads and fads” (254). Leafing through the ads, we find one that reads “Glamourize yourself quickly and inexpensively” next to a more erotic one: “good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache” (254). Reading Humbert’s mad love poem a page later, we find that the glamorized girl, the Lolita of his dreams, uses a French perfume called Soleil Vert, whose name appears significantly in the only stanza of the poem where we find Lolita identified like the European Nabokov by her “grey eyes:” My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair, And never closed when I kissed her. Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert? Are you from Paris, mister?” 256

In the two French phrases of this stanza, Nabokov engages with the legacy of New York–Paris surrealism—André Breton and Marcel Duchamp—playing from the beginning of the poem on the mirrored identity between Nabokov naturalized as a US citizen and Lolita: Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or “starlet.” 255

Nabokov dresses himself up as the young, seductive Lolita for the US audience just like Marcel Duchamp did thirty years earlier for the New York Dada magazine when he appeared for the first time as the seductive woman Rrose Sélavy in a photo by Man Ray, on what would become one of the sexiest readymades done by Duchamp: the bottle of perfume called Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette. Duchamp used a bottle of the most popular perfume produced by the French firm Rigaud, whose name was Un air embaumé, launched in 1912. The ads for Rigaud’s perfume (see Figure 25a/b) drew on the oriental notes of the perfume: top notes: green notes, bitter, sweet; heart notes: floral bouquet, animal musk, warm amber creamy notes, powdered almonds; base notes: cedar, orris, vetiver. The ads hinted at eroticism, sexuality, and seduction—Egyptian girls under a moonlit sky with the round bottle of the perfume instead of the moon and a green halo around it, or in the very popular ad in 1931 showing the bottle of Un air embaumé brought by the sun’s rays on earth filtered through the leaves in a wood. Literally a perfumed soleil vert.

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Figure 25a Rigaud perfume ad, “Un Air Embaumé.” Country Life, October 1920: 96.

Figure 25b Rigaud perfume ad, “Un Air Embaumé.” L’illustration, 25 April 1931.

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Comparing the original with Duchamp’s readymade (see Color Plates 2a and 2b), we are struck by Duchamp’s multiple transpositions, which are picked up obliquely by Nabokov: the greenish-grey bottle used by Duchamp and the round shape of the bottle made by the French sculptor Julien-Henri Viard, showing voluptuous bodies coming out of a haze, become the elegant Soleil vert, a French perfume used by Lolita; and the pun in the name of the perfume. Duchamp turned the French “air embaumé” (perfumed air) into “Belle Haleine” or “Beautiful Breath: Veil Water” alluding to Offenbach’s opera buffe La Belle Hélène, a parody of Paris’ kidnapping Helen of Troy. In Lolita, one of the central scenes, repeated in many variations which are transformed into the curvy waves of the sea, a lake or a fountain, very much like the curvy shapes coming out of the haze on Viard’s perfume bottle. Dolores Haze thus becomes the veiled water or the beautiful Helen kidnapped by Humbert-Paris. The sensuous Parisian scent of the Soleil vert—“Are you from Paris, mister?”— pervades Nabokov’s novel and echoes Humbert’s calling Lolita “fruit vert” (40). The scent Humbert associates with his long-lost teenage love Annabel is musk, which arouses in him phantasms of sirens bathing in curvy waters, and out of the haze of this surrealist object appears the woman who, like Breton’s object of desire, would incarnate everything he ever dreamed of. The passage that closes Chapter 4 reads like the description of a perfume that goes from the base notes through the heart notes, up to the top notes, as he recalls breathing in Annabel’s eau de toilette as they seek to embrace in a garden, describing its scent as: a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim . . . that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. 15, my emphases

The misty ache that remained with him, the airy creature of musk, was to be Dolores Haze. But Marcel Duchamp wasn’t the only surrealist interested in perfumes. In 1946, Salvador Dalí painted Invisible Lovers, the first in a series of paintings executed for Leigh’s “Desert Flower” Perfume that was reproduced in Vogue in February 1947 (see Color Plate 8). The painting shows one of Dalí’s empty spaces, with a pale moon in the background and a delicate yucca flower that grows in arid regions of the Americas. Next to the yucca, we see in the sand a pair of small,

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female footprints and a second pair of larger, masculine footprints approaching them. The text of the ad under Dalí’s painting is worthy of the young Humbert mesmerized with the scent of his lost flower that he pursues now through the American desert that appears in so many scenes of the lovers’ odyssey. The invisible lovers whose footprints we can trace in the sand are very apt for the phantasm-like Lolita who haunts Humbert’s desert travels: “Who finds this mystery blooming here, alone and rare, becomes a temptress . . . Your secret— Desert Flower. A new enchanting perfume by Leigh” (“Desert Flower”). Nabokov’s fascination with desert flowers as symbol of mysterious, desperate love goes from Lolita to Ada, or Ardor, where in a letter from Demon to Marina we can read that “I wished you to see, with me holding you, the daze of desert flowers that the rain had brought out” (Ada 16). As Humbert drives west, his poetic eye perceives the nuances of the desert landscape with the accuracy of a painter interrupted anticlimatically by the disenchanting eye of the critic noting that the desert flowers were only “hideous bits of tissue paper.” As the dun grades into blue, and blue into dream, the image of the desert flower as seen by Humbert seems to become an ironized image of Dalí’s painted ad for the perfume Desert Flower: “patches of what the garage-man called ‘sage brush’ appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of windtortured withered stalks all along the highway” (Lolita 153). Not only does Humbert come to New York during the war to design perfume ads for his uncle, but he’s constantly looking for his lost love, Annabel . . . Leigh. “Desert Flower” is a perfume by Leigh Perfumes, maker of “fine perfume at an American price,” as their ads regularly said in the 1940s. It wasn’t an isolated case that Nabokov was using magazine advertisements to recreate a chronotope for his fictional world. Working on his elaborately annotated translation of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov looked into the magazines of the time so that he could understand the fashions and make his characters more real. “M. H. Abrams once saw him heading home for the weekend with a stack of books up to his chin: 1820s volumes of the Edinburgh Review. ‘Some wonderful articles there,’ remarked Abrams. ‘Articles? I never read the articles! It’s the advertisements I look for!’ Nabokov replied, eager to glean a few more of the fashions and fads of Pushkin’s time” (Boyd, The American Years 290). Nabokov was evidently using Vogue and Life similarly for his Lolita.

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In Chapter  25 we saw Humbert leafing through a series of “ads and fads” hinting at cosmetics and at elderly men with “clipped moustache.” The most famous fashionably clipped moustache in 1940s New York of someone involved in fashion and cosmetic ads for Vogue is Salvador Dalí’s, whose oblique presence is hinted at also through the “Tristram in Movielove” selection that Humbert’s eye catches among the “ads and fads.” Dalí had designed an expensive jewel called “Mad Tristan” (a gothic face with horror-enlarged eyes and a bushy hairstyle) and composed the ballet Mad Tristan that premiered on December 15, 1944 in New York, choreographed by Léonide Massine for the International Ballet. But it is not only the French scent of Soleil vert that takes us back to surrealism, it is also the phrase that rhymes with it: “Her eyes were vair.” Nabokov is playing on the multiple meanings of the French word vair. As an adjective, vair is the color grey, but the French dictionary is very specific about what kind of grey: “gris cendré en parlant de la fourrure de l’écureuil” (i.e. ashy grey, referring to squirrel’s fur). In the poem, Lolita’s eyes change their natural color like her creator changed his eye color in the documents when he emigrated to the United States during the war. His little girl would be called a little squirrel in the Carrollinspired quatrain that precedes Humbert’s mad love poem by a paragraph: I recalled the rather charming nonsense verse I used to write her when she was a child: “nonsense,” she used to say mockingly, “is correct.” The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits Have certain obscure and peculiar habits. 255

We may easily guess what kind of habits Humbert had in mind. Little AliceLolita the Squirrel is echoed in the name that opens the love poem that follows: “Dolores Haze” or “Lolita Haze” appears in almost every stanza, with a variation: “And her name is Haze, Dolores.” Her name is indeed hazy: haze is hazel that has lost the final sound; hazel, the color of the eyes of the American Nabokov. But for the direct association of hazelnut and squirrel, we’ll have to look to another of Nabokov’s surrealist sources.

Humbert’s Amour fou Breton was here before Nabokov. Sixteen years before Nabokov published Lolita with Olympia in Paris, André Breton published his book Amour fou with

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Gallimard in 1937, and as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, he played there on the puns verre, vair, the associations with the ashes, Cinderella, and the female sex as a way to interpret the materialization of his own object of desire, his future wife Jacqueline. Breton was turning an iron mask, a shoe-spoon, and an ashtray into the woman of his dreams almost two decades before Humbert turned a musky perfume into the corporeal Lolita. Nabokov must have been familiar with Breton’s book, as Breton had published the sixth and final chapter of Amour fou in Mesures in the January issue of 1937, while Nabokov was working with the editorial board of Mesures, which had published his own “Mademoiselle O” nine months earlier. However, the pun on the squirrel and the hazelnut doesn’t appear in the sixth chapter, but in a letter that Breton included only in the book version, which means not only that Nabokov read Breton in Mesures but that he actually got the book. Breton addressed the letter, which speaks of mad love as the only reason for living, to his eight-month-old daughter, Aube, whom he addresses as “Chère Écusette de Noireuil.” The term of endearment is made through a transposition of the first syllables of the words écureuil (squirrel) and noisette (hazelnut). Humbert too notes that he calls her “squirrel” in the nonsensical poem written for her when she was still a little girl. Breton ends his letter—one of his most anthologized texts—with an ardent wish for his baby girl: “Je vous souhaite d’être follement aimée” (Amour fou 176). Nabokov picks up the idea of a letter about mad love written to a baby girl and turns the blessing into the curse of mad love that befalls Lolita. This is a perfect parallelism: a love letter written to a young daughter about the imperative of being madly loved. And Nabokov doesn’t disappoint Breton: he creates Humbert who loves little Lolita madly, but the paternal blessing proves to be a curse in the hands of Nabokov, who continues Breton’s letter with his own Lolita up to the point of expanding playfully on Breton’s “Écusette de Noireuil.” But the squirrel appears first in Amour fou associated with Aube’s mother, Jacqueline. When Breton discusses the magic apparition of Jacqueline in his life through the shoe-spoon, he mentions an ashtray made of verre gri (grey glass) that he had asked Giacometti to make for him. Breton’s free association of puns and objects links the cendrier (ashtray) to Cendrillon (Cinderella) and her metonymy, the shoe, but also to verre (glass; Cinderella’s glass shoe) and to vair (ashy grey, squirrel): the choice of gray glass as the material in which the slipper could be conceived was explained by the desire to reconcile the two very distinct substances, “le

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verre,” the glass (proposed by Perrault), and “le vair,” ermine, its homophone, whose substitution for the first word takes account of a meaningful correction (by which the fragile nature of glass is remedied and a supplementary ambiguity is created, favorable to the thesis I am advancing here. It should be noticed, moreover, that ermine fur, when it was only made from squirrels’ backs, took the name grayback, which never fails to remind us that, for her elder sister, Perrault’s heroine was called Cucendron. Mad Love 36

It is then that, as for Humbert later, everything will fall into place and the lost object becomes the found object or the love of his life, Jacqueline: I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that Cinderella’s slipper is just what, in our folklore, takes on the meaning of the lost object, so that taking myself back to the moment when I conceived the wish for its artistic realization and its possession, I can easily understand that it symbolized for me a woman unique and unknown, magnified and dramatized by my loneliness and by my imperious need to abolish certain memories. Mad Love 36–7, his emphases

These themes become magnified in Humbert’s poem, as he himself writes when he’s “psychoanalyzing” it, like Breton was psychoanalyzing his 1923 poem “Tournesol” in Amour fou, a poem he thought was prophetic of his meeting Jacqueline twelve years later. “By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others” (Lolita 257). Like Breton before him and Orhan Pamuk’s Kemal after him, Humbert collects the things that belonged to Lolita, including a crumpled school cap, a shirt, some bluejeans, and a pair of old sneakers, a more sportive and manly representation of the elegantly erotic shoe-spoon that fitted perfectly on Jacqueline’s foot. In Box 23 of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence (see Color Plate 11), we see Füsun’s white sneakers next to her panties, a glass of milk, and a ripe fig from which a drop of white liquid hangs. But unlike Kemal, who will open a museum with these objects, Humbert thinks he’ll go crazy if he continues to adore these objects, so he sends them to an orphanage: “Then, when I understood my mind was cracking, I collected these sundry belongings, added to them what had been

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stored in Beardsley—a box of books, her bicycle, old coats, galoshes—and on her fifteenth birthday mailed everything as an anonymous gift to a home for orphaned girls on a windy lake, on the Canadian border” (Lolita 255). Lolita is a story of an “amour fou” that literally drives the dreamer, as if through a haze, to obey to the end both the sexual and the death instinct, referenced by Breton in the first chapter of Amour fou as being embodied in the surrealist object of desire. When the sexual instinct can no longer be satisfied, the dreamer falls prey to the death instinct; when the grown-up Lolita, pregnant and married, refuses to return to him, the only thing that remains for Humbert to do is kill Quilty and finally, in an oblique way, kill himself. “Les premièrs dans la maison du vent,” the sixth and final chapter of Amour fou, published in Mesures while Nabokov was connected with the magazine’s editorial board, was a story of hunting, neuropathy, denied sexual fulfillment, and murder, all framed in the oneiric atmosphere of a mystery and detective story. On July 20, 1936, Breton and Jacqueline, newly married, visited Breton’s parents in Lorient, and one day they walked to Fort Loch, an enchanted, cursed space. The chapter tells the story of Michel Henriot, who had built a villa on the seashore, called Fort Loch, where he bred silver foxes. Enchanted (Breton claims) by the doomed air of his domain that breathed eroticism and death, Michel Henriot killed his wife. The case remained veiled in mystery, at least for Breton, who wasn’t satisfied with the police investigation’s inconclusive but quite suggestive finding that Henriot had cashed in his wife’s life insurance, having murdered her in revenge for depriving him of sex, including rejecting him on the day he murdered her. Unsatisfied with such banal motives, Breton suggests that a psychoanalytical investigation could have revealed more: Henriot suffered from hereditary neuropathy—a disease of the nervous system—on his mother’s side. In addition to which, Henriot’s mother, who loved shooting, was very indulgent with her son, unlike his indifferent and cold father. And further, Breton writes, Henriot suffered from intellectual mediocrity combined with a taste for the uncanny, which could be seen in his rather late choice of a profession, breeding silver foxes (Amour fou 159). Breton takes these factors on a poetic level, noting the surreal character of those habits we have and cannot rationally explain: “that evening I was too preoccupied by some apparently ‘poetic’ aspects of the question . . . Michel Henriot used to shoot seabirds for pleasure, and I saw myself a few hours earlier putting the same birds to flight by throwing stones at them . . . The silver foxes also set me to wondering: were they numerous, how did they adjust to the

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climate?” (108–9). If the death pleasure is mixed with the erotic pleasure on an instinctual level, then perhaps Henriot mistook his wife for a silver fox. The surrealist dreamland involves cursed or enchanted spaces that have a will of their own. They manifest themselves under the form of an aura that emanates an energy which is the equivalent of the sexual and death instinct that gets hold of the dreamer who visits the place, transforming him into an enchanted hunter. Here, it is the cursed space that makes Michel Henriot feel the need to kill the seabirds and finally his wife. Years later, when Breton and Jacqueline visit Fort Loch in 1936, they feel the same irrational destructive impulse as they walk next to the fort, on the beach, and for some unexplainable reason feel at odds with each other. They walk at a distance from each other, and Breton starts throwing stones at the same seabirds that Henriot loved to shoot at. Lorient, which was also Breton’s childhood space where he returned almost every summer, is an hour’s drive from the mythical forest Brocéliande, or what is known today as the Paimpont Forest, an enchanted place in the Arthurian legends where Merlin the magician dwelled and where a magic fountain of youth and fertility was located. Humbert’s Enchanted Hunters Hotel is located in the town of Briceland, and this is where Humbert has sex for the first time with Lolita, while experiencing the full strength of the attraction of the enchanted, doomed space. It is also the place where he has a dreamlike conversation with Quilty, the man in the dark who, like the subconscious, throws back at him all his deepest, most perverse thoughts. The same Quilty will be shot by Humbert years later, when he discovers that he was the cause of his being deprived of his nymphet’s sexual services—a variation on Breton’s story about Henriot’s murdering his wife for a similar reason. If the atmosphere of the forest, the beach, and the silver-fox-ridden Fort Loch is doomed, then the supposed criminal is blameless, as he is subject to the will of the accursed space: “Should we then admit that the curse fell on this place after the crime or should we sooner see in the crime the fulfillment of this curse?” (109). Humbert would prefer the second version. As he and Lolita enter their room at The Enchanted Hunters, the entire space seems to be a vast and infinitely reflecting mirror—“there was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror” (Lolita 119). An oneiric, surreal mist covers Humbert’s eyes throughout their entire stay. It is this dreamy atmosphere, which makes everything seem underwater, that is to blame for what happens here, not Humbert. Reading his account of this surreal perception, we may hear

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in the back of our minds Breton’s words about the sexual power of attraction of Place Dauphine, “le sexe de Paris” in Nadja: “Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?)” (Lolita 120). Or, if it isn’t the place itself that emanates this energy, it’s the water nymph that seduces him in this enchanted place: I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel . . . Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. 124–5, 132

Literary critics like Ellen Pifer have never seen in this more than Nabokov’s parodic enagagement with the paradigm of romanticism: “Humbert is the enchanted hunter of his own romantic tale” (Pifer in Alexandrov ed., 313), a view that misses a whole new level of engagement with more contemporary writers such as Breton. Breton similarly perceived Henriot’s enchanted/cursed house as if through a dreamy mist: “this house was the one I had perceived in a fog only my own, surrounded by the worst kind of wasteland” (Mad Love 104). If indeed The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, with its Arthurian setting on a magic lake outside Briceland/Brocéliande, toys with those who fall prey to its spell and aura, then “The Enchanter” of Nabokov’s 1939 story has now begun to change roles with his prey. “Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter, that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever” (Lolita 131). Chance encounter and convulsive beauty could manifest themselves when a series of irrationally related objects bring the lovers together within the halo of the enchanted place they fall victim to. Nabokov toyed with the surrealists’ belief in chance encounter, where coincidences are never gratuitous, in his description of the magic networks that made Annabel and Humbert come together by the hand of “McFate” (Lolita 107). Common, parallel dreams before they ever meet,

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strange affinities and simultaneity of gestures, actions, and thoughts even after Annabel dies—the whole surrealist arsenal is set in motion in a single paragraph: “Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries” (14). A second occurrence of chance encounter will unsurprisingly take place at The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, where the room number 342 happens to be, as Lolita notes, also the number of their house: “ ‘Say, it’s our house number,’ said cheerful Lo” (119). The Fort Loch story was itself filled with coincidences that made Breton’s and Jacqueline’s walk on the beach that day ominous, and they were all pointing at the imagery of hunting. Whereas Humbert would dream of painting Lolita on the walls of The Enchanted Hunters as a bird of paradise hunted by a tiger, Henriot’s wife is identified with the silver foxes he breeds, and the identification woman = fox is hinted at prophetically by two books that Breton’s own wife had just borrowed from a friend, and which Breton sees that evening by their bed—La Renarde [The She-Fox] by Mary Webb and a translation of David Garnett’s 1922 novel Lady into Fox. Breton always liked to italicize the important words in his writings, and sometimes he’d just overdo it. Trying to make a point of this series of coincidences connecting the Fort Loch story with his own life, and hinting at the same time at the interpretation he assigned to this strange event, he underlined the following phrases in his text: “renards argentés [silver foxes]” (Amour fou 158), “profil de renard” (158), killing birds “par plaisir” (160); the two books about fox-women lie on bedside tables “de part et d’autre de lit [on one side of the bed and the other]” (162), the books play a “rôle surdéterminant [overdetermined role]” (165), and the fort provokes an emotional state “en totale contradiction” with the lovers’ real feelings (165). The unresolved murder seemed like a detective tale, for which Breton tried to find a rational answer but ultimately failed, ending up by commuting the solution into the realm of surreality. Retrospectively reading the signs of Lolita’s elopement with the help of Clare Quilty in their road odyssey, Humbert remembers that “In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications” (Lolita 211). In the night scene at The Enchanted Hunters, “italics” functions as a metaphor for the signs of the expected wonderland or, better put, of the surreal, using Breton’s manner of pointing it out: “A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and

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now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze” (Lolita 131). When the logic of memory interrelates objects irrationally and superimposes events that are not otherwise connected, it is because a surrealist logic intervenes. Years later, when Humbert drives through Briceland again, now with Rita, the woman who comforts him after the loss of Lolita, the painful memory of the place prevents him from carrying out his intention of revisiting The Enchanted Hunters Hotel. Yet he sings to Rita “a wistful French ballad” which is revealed retrospectively as having been prophetic of the outcome of Humbert’s story: The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query: What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell endorse to make of Picture Lake a very blood bath of trees before the blue hotel? Lolita 263

However, this is not the only occurrence of prophetic poetry. The last line of Humbert’s story that brings together the means of painting with the means of (surrealist) poetry speaks of “prophetic sonnets,” and in the 1940s, when Nabokov was writing Lolita, one needn’t go back as far as Dante and Petrarch to find prophetic poetry. Surrealist poetry, and especially Breton’s prophetic poetry, put to use in fiction, was much closer at hand. It was the very chapters he published in Minotaure—“La beauté sera convulsive” and “La nuit du Tournesol”—and that would become the heart of Amour fou that served as models for reading the past retrospectively as prophetic of the appearance of the beloved woman. Breton writes in the opening of Amour fou that one thinks like a surrealist when one starts looking for irrational connections and illogical superimpositions in the surrounding reality and reads it as a “forest of symbols” (15), a phrase Breton borrows from Baudelaire, the latter more openly discussed as a possible reference for Lolita (see Didier Machu). With his reading of the signs around him after Lolita leaves him, Humbert is no exception. It is the surrealist logic that makes him connect two trips to the enchanted forest at Briceland with the prophetic ballad: “I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection” (Lolita 263). The logic of the forest of symbols worked also when he saw Lolita for the first time as a mermaid surfacing from the depths of adolescence, and in recognizing her, discovering the dead bride

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in her, Humbert has learned from the author of Amour fou, who theorized the embodiment of the surrealist object of desire as the “revealed thing” or the found object/la trouvaille: “Such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths . . . The image, such as it is produced in automatic writing, has always constituted for me a perfect example of this” (Mad Love 13). “It was the same child,” thinks Humbert, recognizing Annabel in Lolita and perfectly superimposing their images as a “fatal consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’” (39–40), while he literally feels the pangs of convulsive beauty in all his limbs that become one with the dreamed landscape of the enchanted beach and the sea: my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and— “That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.” “Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” 40

Busy reading the signs that Quilty plants for him in hotel books, Humbert interprets his not using a fountain pen as the sign of a “repressed undinist” (250). Humbert does use a fountain pen, which makes him an “undinist” or a lover of water spirits or mermaids. But an “undinist” who composes prophetic poems isn’t an original finding of Nabokov. Or rather it was a finding, but one he chanced upon in the same Amour fou. Jacqueline Lamba’s entering Breton’s life had been preceded by two signs: he heard someone calling a woman by the name “Ondine,” and for no apparent reason he kept recalling the 1923 “automatic poem” “Tournesol” that spoke of a mysterious “voyageuse” who had the “air de nager.” Breton’s Amour fou centered on the meeting of the love of his life, Jacqueline Lamba, who had all the attributes to make her tempting for Nabokov to use as a model. She was a water dancer, her coming into Breton’s life had been prophesied by a poem written eleven years before, and it was in her beloved face that all the faces of the previous lovers came together. The photos that Breton used to accompany the two chapters published in Minotaure would make her even more intriguing to Nabokov. “La beauté convulsive” that introduces the ondine pun to prophesy the nymph’s arrival is accompanied by a 1930 photo by Man Ray called “En pleine occultation de Venus” (“Venus in Total Eclipse”). The photo shows a surrealist object that plays on visual anamorphosis, showing a head of a Venus de Milo statue, with a cello scroll suggesting the shoulder line, and almost on the

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same level with the cello scroll, a cylinder with a pear on top, suggesting a huge phallus. Very close to Venus’ beautiful face, it suggests oral sex. “La nuit de Tournesol,” the second chapter from Amour fou published in Minotaure, provided the 1923 poem and its prophetic interpretation in the light of the discovery of Jacqueline as his expected nymph. It features a beautiful photo by Rogi André from 1934 of Jacqueline Lamba dancing nude in an aquarium, a true water spirit, with a caption that reads “l’air de nager,” a phrase from Breton’s 1923 poem “Tournesol” (see Figure 26). This amour fou for Jacqueline the water nymph would be turned into Breton’s 1934 volume of poetry L’air de l’eau. On April 10, 1934, more than two years before the Fort Loch episode, Jacqueline’s entrance in Breton’s life was prefaced by his lunching in a restaurant that was strangely placed next to a cemetery, a restaurant on whose wall he noticed a faceless clock. Then, the dishwasher (in French, plongeur is a pun, meaning both dishwasher and diver) called to the restaurant’s waitress as if calling her name “Ici, l’Ondine” (Here, Ondine!, Amour fou 25) which was only Breton’s mishearing the banal “ici, l’on dîne” (“one dines here,” 19). From that moment on, the scenes that follow have an underwater feeling, as the water dancer appears in Breton’s life and they explore the streets of Paris together, as he once did with Nadja. His nymph coincidentally takes him through the very places that his 1923 poem “Tournesol” happened to mention, and in a fountain next to Notre Dame, Breton reads a virtual prophecy of the poetic substance of Lolita. The poetry of desire, the voluptuousness of the perceiving eye of the narrator that blends the most idealistic love with the most viscerally poetic, is something that Nabokov couldn’t have found in Dalí’s account of Dullita-Galuchka. But he certainly found it in Amour fou: A clear fountain where my desire to take a new being along with me is reflected and comes to slake its thirst, the desire for that which has not yet been possible— to go together down the path lost with the loss of childhood, winding along, perfuming the woman still unmet, the woman to come amid the prairies. Are you, at last, this woman? is it only today you were to come? While, as if in a dream, with still other flowerbeds before us, you lean long over these shadowed flowers enveloped in shadow as if less to breathe in their perfume than to snatch their secret from them, and such a gesture, by itself alone, is the most moving response you could make to the question which I am not asking you. Mad Love 49–51

Dante first saw his Beatrice in a dream vision, brought to him by God dressed as the angel of love, a vision that led to Dante’s first prophetic poem, and here Breton’s

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Figure 26 Rogi André, L’air de nager. Jacqueline Lamba: la nymphe, 1934. BNF © All rights reserved.

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meeting Jacqueline arouses in him the desire to go back and reread his poem “Tournesol.” Amour fou reproduces “Tournesol,” and just like Dante in Vita Nuova, Breton decomposes the poem into its major phrases and goes on to analyze them within the surreal network that takes him to Jacqueline. These major phrases, pulled out of the poem and italicized next to their explanation, are echoed in Lolita, where they become imaginative centers from which Humbert’s fantasies emanate. Among the italicized phrases that Breton singles out when discussing the poem, and that Humbert later transforms, we find la voyageuse marchant sur la pointe des pieds [the traveler walking on tiptoe], le désespoir [desperation], l’air de nager [as if swimming]. Lolita walks on tiptoe in slow motion to the treasure chest in which Humbert has hid his treasures for her at the Enchanted Hunters: “She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support . . . She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream” (Lolita 120). Lolita is no sensual water dancer, but even so her clumsy movements become part of the erotic games she engages in with Humbert: “I also had her dance for me with the promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps of hers were more like those of a football cheerleader than like the languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure” (230). It is Breton’s Jacqueline, with her underwater dance, who lies behind the dancing nymphet: “the music-hall ‘number’ in which the young woman appeared every day was a swimming number. ‘Seemed to swim,’ insofar as it was opposed for me to ‘seemed to dance,’ said of a woman walking, may even have the meaning here of ‘seems to dance under the water,’ a description which my friends who saw her moving about in the pool would accept, as would I” (Mad Love 63). One of Breton’s best poems, “Toujours pour la première fois,” is included in the volume L’air de l’eau from 1934. In the poem, Breton describes his dreaming of a mysterious woman living across the street whom he contemplates every evening in the darkness of her apartment, imagining how she comes to visit him, always as if for the first time. Humbert, too, fantasizes about women seen in the darkness across the street, but pushes Breton’s poetic scene into an anticlimactic ending: the light turns on and instead of the mysterious sexy beauty we see a hairy male arm: Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked

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like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Lolita 20

Breton’s voyeuristic poem provides the first part of Humbert’s musings, minus the Nabokovian anticlimax: Toujours pour la première fois C’est à peine si je te connais de vue Tu rentres à telle heure de la nuit dans une maison oblique à ma fenêtre Maison tout imaginaire C’est là que d’une seconde à l’autre Dans le noir intact Je m’attends à ce que se produise une fois de plus la déchirure fascinante [. . .] Tu fais semblant de ne pas savoir que je t’observe Merveilleusement je ne suis plus sûr que tu le sais Ton désœuvrement m’emplit les yeux de larmes Une nuée d’interprétations entoure chacun de tes gestes [. . .] Qu’à me pencher sue le précipice et de ton absence J’ai trouvé le secret De t’aimer Toujours pour la première fois Caws, The Yale Anthology 140, 142

In the end, this is Humbert’s secret desire, too: to find the secret of eternal youth and stop irreversible, irrevocable time or, in a word, to find the secret of loving Annabel/Lolita always for the first time. In the final, most moving scene of Lolita, when Humbert is trapped by the police, his mind and ear record only the laughter of children playing, a laughter stained by the melancholy of Lolita’s absence from it: Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or

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the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. Lolita 307–8

“And underneath her falling darkening golden hair all the features of the womanchild, of that very special variety that has always entranced the poets because time leaves no trace on her, come together.” This last sentence is not from Lolita, but from Breton’s last autobiographical novel, Arcane 17 (94), which concludes the series of nymph metamorphoses that had started almost twenty years before with Nadja and had continued with Amour fou. In 1945, while living in the United States, Breton published Arcane 17 at Bretano’s in New York, thus providing an interesting esoteric counterpart to Dalí’s glorification of Gala in his 1942 autobiography. Both books were available to Nabokov in New York. The seventeenth card of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck is called “The Star”; it shows a beautiful naked woman kneeling down next to a pool, holding two jugs from which she pours water into the pool and waters the earth while she’s guided by the fateful stars. For Breton, she is Melusine, the goddess who punished her mortal husband for watching her during her weekly bath, when she reveals her true double nature: from the waist down she is a serpent. Dullita, Galuchka, Nadja, Jacqueline, Elisa The Star or Arcane 17—all of them went into the making of Lolita, a creature who owed much more to surrealism than her creator was willing to openly admit. But sometimes books themselves speak better about their literary relations than their writers do. Can we tell for sure who writes the following passage, Humbert-Nabokov or Breton? Before meeting you, I knew intimately unhappiness and desperation . . . You well know that when I first saw you, I recognized you instantly . . . When I saw you, all the mist of an unspeakable species was in your eyes. How can we, and especially, whom can we recognize in the loss of a being, a child who is everything we love, all the more when her death is accidental and when in this child, almost a young girl, all the grace, all the gifts of the spirit, all the thirst of knowing and experiencing which render an enchanting image of life, always in motion, through this brand new, madly complex and delicate game of riddles and prisms, are objectively incarnated? 333–4

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The Ghosts of Surrealism in the World Novel

The imaginary realms dreamed of by Breton in “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” have been reborn and remade in the surreal postmodern worlds invented by a wide range of contemporary writers. In this chapter, we will look in detail at two writers from the periphery of the international literary field, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu, himself a constant contender for the Nobel in recent years, widely translated and with great success on the German language market, where he has won all the major prizes. Two generations removed from the surrealist era, Pamuk and Cărtărescu create their fictional worlds in a kind of second-order surrealism, drawing as much on the surrealists’ modernist contemporaries and on the intervening generation of surrealist-influenced writers, from García Márquez to Calvino, as on the surrealists themselves. Marcel Proust is a central figure in this story. In returning to him in the aftermath of surrealism, Pamuk and Cărtărescu reactivate a connection that was already important for the development of surrealism itself. Proust, the exemplary writer “entre deux siècles” in Antoine Compagnon’s phrase, played a crucial role in the transition from the Romantic subject–object relation to its reconception in surrealism. If romanticism meant the projection of the subject into the object— Keats’ beauty that is in the eye of the beholder—surrealism meant the projection of the object into the subject to reveal its hidden desires and to prophesy its future. Proust devised his object at the threshold between these opposite stances: his madeleine, the steeples of Martinville, and the sound of fire coming through the wall of Robert de Saint-Loup’s “magic chamber” are all gateways to a lost past, but they also hold the promise of future, unknown joys. Proust’s revolutionizing of the subject–object relation is connected to his redefining memory to encompass not only personal memories but also memories from books and from other people’s lives, about which the subject learns second hand, through stories. Objects in Proust have a very personal color and flavor, like the taste of childhood hidden in the madeleine, but they also have an existence of their own, 259

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independent from the subject. Before recounting the madeleine episode, Proust’s narrator cites the Celtic belief that there are ghosts hiding in objects who are just waiting for the right moment to return to life: 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, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. Swann’s Way 59–60

Proust is here paving the way for Breton’s object that comes to life and imposes its will on the subject. This connection escaped Theodor Adorno in his very perceptive reading of an affinity between Proust’s world of objects, surrealism, and childhood. In Notes to Literature, Adorno wrote separately about Proust and surrealism, but he found a point of intersection in the way they both look at the relationship between objects and childhood. “What Surrealism adds to illustrations of the world of objects is the element of childhood we lost” (Adorno, Notes to Literature 1: 88). “These images are not images of something inward” as they are in Proust, he says; “rather, they are fetishes—commodity fetishes—on which something subjective, libido, was once fixated. It is through these fetishes, not through immersion in the self, that the images bring back childhood” (1: 89). So if childhood is nested within the subject in Proust, Adorno seems to say, in surrealism it is nested within objects. But Adorno too thinks that both for Proust and for the surrealists, objects are only oriented toward the past; he fails to see their future orientation, which is the specific way in which both Proust and the surrealists revolutionize the object, even if from different generations and with different instruments. Adorno’s reading of the affinities between Proust and surrealism in terms of temporality would be completely appropriate in a description like that of the Princesse de Guermantes’ grand soirée in Cities of the Plain: But Proust’s mythologizing tendency . . . is surrealist in that it coaxes mythical images out of modernity at the points where it is most modern; in this, it is akin to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Proust’s first great translator. In The Guermantes’ Way, a theater party is described. The auditorium with its elegantly

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dressed audience is transformed into a kind of Ionian seascape and even comes to resemble the underwater realm of maritime nature deities. 1: 178

Adorno reads only history in Proust’s understanding of objects (“In representing history they express history’s bondage to nature,” 1: 179), but this viewpoint misses the amazing oracular force that Proust gives to objects. For Proust, objects are beings with a life of their own that we simply fail to perceive. “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them” (Swann’s Way 5). From here, it was a smooth transition to the surrealists’ strange being-objects, phantom-objects as Dalí conceived them: “The being objects are the strange bodies of space” (“Apparitions aérodynamiques des Êtres-Objets,” 33). A true follower of Proust but also of the surrealists, Gabriel García Márquez opens his Cien años de soledad with Melquíades’ belief in objects as dormant beings: “ ‘Things have a life of their own,’ the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. ‘It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls’ ” (One Hundred Years of Solitude 5). When gathering together all his objects for his Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s hero Kemal feels the souls inside them: “like a shaman who can see the souls of things, I could feel their stories flickering inside me” (The Museum of Innocence 512). If objects have a life of their own, then the writer’s job is that of a midwife, to uncover what already exists in nature. Such was the belief on which Breton grounded automatism and the discovery rather than invention of reality, a belief that Proust shared too: “in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free . . . it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—to discover it” (Time Regained, 276–7). All these weren’t just surreal coincidences. In 1920, when Breton was the director of the magazine Littérature, Gaston Gallimard hired him to read the proofs for Le Côté de Guermantes. He was impressed, as Jacques Rivière, editorin-chief of the NRF wrote to Proust, by the “poetic treasures that he discovered in your work” (Proust, Correspondence 19: 337). Though Proust was dissatisfied with Breton’s work on his proofs, which came out with over 200 mistakes, he appreciated in his turn “le charmant dada” (Correspondence 19: 438), and he admired Breton’s and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques, which the authors had sent him, in a letter to Soupault: “I would have loved to praise you and Mr. Breton

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for your Champs magnétiques. I had the great pleasure of meeting him once. Please tell him that only a physical state not too different from death prevented me from writing him” (Correspondence 19: 446). Among the poetic treasures that Breton found in Proust was the scene with the mysterious noises emanating from the bedroom of the narrator’s intimate friend Robert de Saint-Loup. Most likely in response to Breton’s solicitation, Proust wrote to Soupault that he would love to have it published in their magazine Littérature: “I would be very honored to be published in a magazine where both of you contribute” (Correspondence 19: 474). Though Proust never pursued this idea, as his health was failing, this letter testifies to the elective affinities, to use one of Breton’s favorite concepts, existing between Proust and the surrealists. Looking back at Proust’s pages about the magic chamber, we find a striking coincidence between his poetic spirit and that of Breton. Meditating on what a world without sounds would be, as he thinks about the strange sounds coming out of Saint-Loup’s chamber, the narrator muses on the omnipresence of sounds in space and on the mysterious knocking that he perceives coming out of nowhere: “on the surface of silence spread over our sleep, a shock louder than the rest manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh, unrelated to any other sound, mysterious” (The Guermantes Way 3: 94). In the first manifesto of surrealism, the first surrealist sentence appears in a Proustian moment between dream and reality, knocking on Breton’s window: “a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window” (Manifestoes 21, his emphasis). The mysterious apparition of a man in Saint-Loup’s “chambre magique” must have seemed to Breton a surrealist act: “in the magic chamber, standing inside the closed door, a person who was not there a moment ago will have made his appearance; it is a visitor who has entered unheard, and who merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of those puppet theaters” (In Search of Lost Time 3: 95). Removing the immediate cause and changing the relations between objects, Proust paved the way for the surrealist object and its logic of hasard objectif. The spontaneous life of objects makes them like prehistoric winged monsters: “objects moved soundlessly now seem to be moved without cause; deprived of the quality of sound, they show a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become alight of their own accord [prennent feu d’eux-mêmes]. Of their own accord they vanish in the air like the winged monsters of prehistory” (In Search of Lost Time 3: 95–6). Such a poetic image must have appealed to the young poet Breton, who would speak a few years later of the monstrous as the

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beautiful. And what is convulsive beauty or le sexe de Paris but such a monster, born out of its own fire, as Proust’s narrator puts it? Like dreams, these being-objects are Proust’s way of evading time: “the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions . . . because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when . . . it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist . . . outside time [en dehors du temps]” (Time Regained 262). On Breton’s tombstone, one of his own surrealist linguistic puns is written: je cherche l’or du temps, a play between “l’or du temps” (the gold of time) and “l’hors du temps,” the Proustian “outside time.” Both Proust and Breton criticized “realistic” literature for impoverishing reality, and they offered the same solution: the object that keeps both the past essence of things and also the promise of the future: the kind of literature which contents itself with “describing things” . . . 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 us, 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. Time Regained 284

Breton’s 1924 discourse on the paucity of reality was certainly indebted also to Proust. Even if he was already radically moving away from his masters and finding his way to becoming the father of surrealism, they would meet on the page in so many ways, one of them being in both Pamuk’s and Cărtărescu’s fictional universes.

Strategies for going global: Orhan Pamuk and Mircea Cărtărescu Authors have often liked to see themselves as lone wolves fighting for a dominant position in their national literary field, but this self-image is being challenged today as a result of the rise of a literary world market. More and more, writers today are being brought to a new and disenchanted self-awareness of the available strategies and the pressures of the global market. They have become ever more active agents in the shaping of their own trajectories as a constant negotiation between the national and the international field. This process is of particular

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importance for writers such as Pamuk and Cărtărescu from smaller national markets, whose international readership can become many times larger than their domestic base as their work circulates and is re-created in the complex network of national and international publications, translations, and literary prizes. Pamuk and Cărtărescu entered the international market in the 1990s with a similar literary formula. They each develop a personal mythology of their home cities—Istanbul and Bucharest—indebted more or less obliquely to the imaginary cities and surrealist objects dreamed of by the surrealists as early as 1924, and both employ an oneiric postmodern prose inspired by the surrealists’ predecessors and also the surrealists’ (sometimes reluctant) heirs. Both won their international acclaim first on the French literary market, just as Pascale Casanova would predict. But while Pamuk won several prestigious French prizes, as well as the Nobel in 2006, to date Cărtărescu has only been nominated, though he did win Italy’s Giuseppe Acerbi Prize (2005) and more recently another two important prizes: “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (2012) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2015). Both Pamuk and Cărtărescu were born in the 1950s in the periphery of the literary world: either in an Istanbul torn culturally between the East and West or in Bucharest behind the Iron Curtain. But the class habitus is what differentiates their social trajectory: while Pamuk became a politically active intellectual in the 1980s fighting for human rights and freedom of expression, Cărtărescu remained politically disengaged, a stance that was in itself, back then, a political attitude called “resistance through culture.” These political positions can be correlated with the two writers’ differing social positions. Pamuk comes from the Westernized secularized post-Kemalist haute bourgeoisie in Istanbul. He benefited from both a French and an English literary upbringing: his father’s library contained an extensive set of Gallimard’s publications, and he was also sent for a time to school in Switzerland before receiving an education in English at Istanbul’s elite Robert College. By contrast, Cărtărescu’s parents worked in poorly paid sectors in Communist Romania (light industry and journalism); he has had to build his own cultural capital: a voracious reader, he has a degree in literature and first became a teacher and then a professor of literature while extensively publishing poetry and then fiction, quickly becoming the leading writer of his generation. Both he and Pamuk practice an oneiric and postmodern literature, but only Pamuk’s literary trajectory doubles his social trajectory: from European to American and then world culture, from the modernist realism of his early novels to American postmodernism and world literature (The Black Book, My Name is

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Red, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence). Pamuk spent a few years in the US in the 1980s while he was still looking for a literary and social formula for negotiating his international capital; he wrote his pivotal novel The Black Book while at Columbia University, where his wife was a graduate student. Just as Dalí changed his strategy once he was introduced on the American market in the early 1930s, Pamuk gained a new perspective while at Columbia: “It was then that I understood that the Turkish cultural road and identity should only be a sort of ultra-Occidentalism” (Pamuk, “Video Player”). Pamuk’s social and literary trajectory is informed, like Dalí’s, by a high diplomatic sociability, including the ability to socialize with editors, translators, and other writers, but also a constant awareness of how to play out his political position-takings and turn them into symbolic capital. He could not have anticipated the uproar that ensued in 2005 after he spoke with a Swiss journalist about the Armenian genocide, which led to his being sued by the Turkish State for “offending Turkishness,” but the result heightened the role he had already begun to assume as an explicator of Turkey to the West and a promoter of Western values in Turkey. His trial became an international cause célèbre, and he received strong support from José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who denounced the trial as attacking human rights. The next year Pamuk would receive the Médicis Étranger for his only political novel, Snow, and immediately afterward, the Nobel. Having the capital and prestige of an intellectual at odds with the state’s policy, Pamuk embodies at once literary virtues and also the Western values of democracy and freedom of expression. Though it wasn’t determined by his 2005 political position takings, the Nobel award was no doubt contextualized and conditioned by these. Cărtărescu experienced the United States a decade after Pamuk, in the 1990s— just as Breton would come to New York a decade later than Dalí—but this didn’t necessarily result in a radical reshaping of his literary strategies. Whereas Pamuk turned from a modernist kind of literature inspired by Mann and Faulkner to a much more up-to-date postmodernist type of fiction, Cărtărescu was already practicing such a postmodernism before he went abroad; his generation of writers, known in Romanian literature as the 1980s generation, was primarily inspired by the theorists and writers associated with (American) postmodernism. Cărtărescu’s Western experience resembles Breton’s half a century earlier: he focused more on cultural differences, seen in terms of Western Europe’s perception of a peripheral, little-known Eastern European world, often dismissed

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stereotypically as primitive, savage, and exotic. Cărtărescu didn’t change his perception when he came to France in 2005, brought by the program Les Belles Étrangères funded by the Centre National du Livre. Much as Breton’s New York stay was marked by his isolation and a constantly critical eye cast on American society and sometimes culture. Cărtărescu didn’t use this experience as Pamuk would have done to further his connections and integration in the world literary market. Instead, he described the visit with sharp Romanian irony, as proof that the East had stayed wild in the eyes of the West: on the one hand, we want to show we’re modern, perfectly European, and on the other we say to them that our charm and local specificity lies in the fact that we’ve stayed primitive shepherds, transvestites in Diesel jeans and Tommy Hilfiger shirts, perfumed with Fahrenheit lest our sheepfold scent betray us. . . . I believe that the average Frenchman . . . imagines that before crossing the border, we’re taking off our peasant shirt and trousers . . . and we present ourselves to them freshly shaved, hoping we’ll fool them that we’re human just like they are, and not objects of study for ethnologists and folklorists . . . So how can they believe us that our novels are modern literature like theirs? Frumoasele străine 166

The international distinctions awarded to Pamuk and Cărtărescu are differently situated: whereas Pamuk gains recognition first through the oldest cultural center, Paris, and then through New York, Cărtărescu’s comes from newly emerged cultural centers more open to Central and Eastern European literature, particularly Germany. Whereas Pamuk’s strategies for going global were personal, Cărtărescu’s were collective, repeating in a surreal fashion the difference in strategies employed earlier by Dalí and Breton respectively on the international market. Pamuk began meeting visiting American and Western European writers early in his career. His entry into the French market was facilitated by the established translator Münevver Andaç, who introduced Pamuk to Gallimard in Paris; as Pamuk remembers fondly, “she’s the one who persuaded Gallimard to publish me” (Le Nouvel Observateur, Feb. 3, 2011). She was responsible for the four books translated into French before Pamuk was translated extensively into English, playing for him the role played by Valery Larbaud for Joyce in Paris sixty years earlier. Cărtărescu, on the other hand, benefited from State-sponsored cultural mechanisms developed to protect the autonomy of the literary field against market forces, as Gisèle Sapiro has shown in her article on “The Literary Field between the State and the Market.” He received important support from two

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parallel institutions in France and Romania—the Centre National du Livre under the Ministry of Culture in France and Romania’s National Book Center. The Centre National du Livre introduced Cărtărescu to the French public in 2005 with one of his most commercial books (Why We Love Women), rather than with his more complex Nostalgia or his trilogy Blinding. As part of a collective project to translate twenty Romanian contemporary writers, Romania’s National Book Center funded no fewer than twenty different translations of Cărtărescu’s novels into Swedish, German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Spanish, and English. In Germany, Cărtărescu entered the market through small avant-garde publishing houses with high symbolic capital (Paul Zsolnay in Vienna) and then moved from the periphery to the center: Suhrkamp in 2007. Suhrkamp wasn’t interested in publishing Cărtărescu until the first volume of Blinding, translated by Gerhardt Csejka, had a massive success. Csejka won an important prize for the translation. Both Pamuk and Cărtărescu share the position of lone wolves writing in solitude for their aesthetic pleasure: “My idea of a writer is not that of a social person, a person who expresses himself in society or in a community” (Pamuk, “Video Player”), while Cărtărescu has said that to create “I need a place where I can escape . . . I see no other way, for no solitude, no dazzling light” (Zen 105; italics in English in the original, alluding to his struggle to begin the final volume of his trilogy Blinding). In Pamuk’s case, however, his writerly solitude is paired with an active sociability, helping him to develop a wide network of friends and contacts. By contrast, Cărtărescu presents solitude as a way of life: “every time I see someone I feel even lonelier. What I want is to escape from this feeling of solitude, which comes from inside and is such a burden to me. Solitude isn’t for me the opposite of an active social life, my solitude is just as lonely as I am” (Zen 508). This differential sociability and adaptability translate into the constant dialogue between cultures of the West and East in Pamuk, while Cărtărescu’s instinctive and structural solipsism leads him to refuse to engage with what is fashionable in a global world. This difference is also conditioned by the age at which they were exposed to experiencing the West they had dreamed of. For Pamuk this happened at age thirty, when he was still searching for his narrative formula, only a decade after abandoning painting to make a career as a writer. For Cărtărescu, however, the West is a reality known after 1989, when he was in his late thirties and his narrative art had already been shaped. But beyond these differences in playing out their public persona on the international field, Pamuk and Cărtărescu meet in their similar conception of

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literature as a way to face one’s anxieties and wounds, to analyze and internalize them. A recurrent word in Pamuk’s accounts of his stay in the US and of experiencing the West is “anxiety.” From Cărtărescu’s oneiric novel Nostalgia (1989) through his Proustian-Kafkaesque trilogy Blinding (1996–2006) and on to his most recent novel Solenoid (2015), an obsessively recurrent word is stacojiu, a dark crimson color. This is the color of painted doors that prove to be traps through which one goes beneath the skin of reality into a surréalité or, better put, a sous-réalité. Using the surrealists’ logic of associations of ideas that turn banal words into emotional centers on one’s psychic map, Cărtărescu associates stacojiu with coajă, scab. The crimson doors are scabs on old emotional wounds through which pierces the blinding light of the amazing reality that lies underneath the skin of the everyday banal reality. In the 1924 “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité,” Breton dreamed of mapping imaginary territories and cities through surrealist objects like the gnome-book. Next to the surrealists’ “present and future capitals” mapped on “le peau”—the skin—“de la réalité,” one finds Pamuk’s magic Istanbul wrapped in hüzün, and Cărtărescu’s crimson Bucharest filtered through the blue light of nostalgia.

Surrealist noir: Aragon’s Cahier noir and Pamuk’s Black Book The time that the future Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk spent in the United States in the 1980s was a life-changing event. Before the trip, Pamuk had proved his literary skills through two brilliant novels, which were still very much indebted to the Western modernist tradition: Cevdet Bey and His Sons, modeled on Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and The House of Silence, modeled on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In New York’s Columbia University, Pamuk discovered the Sufi manuscripts that weren’t available back home in Istanbul, starting a line of thought that would culminate in My Name Is Red. New York’s globalized milieu helped him to develop a new literary and market formula. He began to bring together his interest in recovering the Middle Eastern cultural legacy and his engagement with the great writers of the European modernist tradition (with a focus on the French back then) within the marketable genre of detective fiction. The novel that resulted from this trip, The Black Book, launched Pamuk as a world writer. Genre framing proved key in The Black Book’s success: its elements of the noir, mystery, and detective fiction were among the first things that the reviewers

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of the first English translation remarked on in 1994. Faber and Faber framed the second English translation of Pamuk’s Black Book (2006) with quotes describing it as a “detective novel” (Independent on Sunday), a “dark, fantastic invention” (Patrick McGrath), and a “mystery” (the editors). The fourth quote on the 2006 back cover draws comparisons to Eco, Calvino, Borges, and García Márquez (Observer). Pamuk himself mentioned Calvino and Borges in an interview by Horace Engdahl after the Nobel announcement. However, this list could easily be expanded by adding some names that contributed significantly to the development and legitimation of mystery and detective fiction and, in general, to the development of art and literature bordering on dream, reality, and the fantastic: the surrealist group in Paris, from whom Pamuk’s named masters— Borges, Calvino, and García Márquez—had a lot to learn, either filtered through the exported version of Alejo Carpentier’s real maravilloso or directly through the writings and findings of the surrealist group in Paris, imported in Latin America through modernist magazines such as Victoria Ocampo’s Sur. As early as 1929, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution showed an interest not only in the mysteries of life at night in a mysterious Paris mapped like an erotic female body, but also in the creative possibilities of detective fiction. What surrealism had in common with detective fiction was a representation of reality as a texture of objects interrelated through a hidden inner logic that gives reality a whole new meaning. Like a detective, the surrealist artist could solve a puzzle, a mystery, as well as interpreting the whole network of coincidences as chance encounters as coming together in the surrealist object that materialized the subject’s subconscious desire. They might do this not just in art but in reality. One good example is a column dedicated in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution in 1933 to news published in other newspapers, where we can read about a series of leftist writers who became spies for the French secret police. One thing that qualified them for the job was their writer’s logic that can see a hidden pattern of connections between clues. To be sure, Eluard and Péret, who sign the column, sound ironic when they cite another journalist who praises intellectuals who became spies: “ ‘to disentangle the skein of a complicated matter it helps to have this experience of things and people that literature offers and also to use the poet’s intuition,’ writes Mr. Ernest Raynaud, poet and police commissary, in Mercure de France on February 15” [“Revue de la presse,” 26]. Yet the example remains illustrative for the kind of subjects that preoccupied the surrealists. A second good example focuses on a piece of news about a bloody murder: the sisters Léa and Christine Papin, brought up by nuns at the convent in

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Mans, killed their bourgeois employer’s wife and her daughter. Eluard and Péret see this crime as a consequence of the religious education that brings out vice, a pattern in which they saw a continuation of Sade’s moral critique and Maldoror’s symbolic rebellious crimes, with the sisters “emerging from a canto of Maldoror armed to the teeth” (Eluard and Péret, “Revue de la presse” 28). The article is paired with a drawing of a nun who lifts up the hem of her dress to show sexy garters underneath. Already in 1930, the interest in detective fiction is shown through an ironic photo of a man reading the recently founded Détective magazine, under which we read: “A singular evolution: M. Parain, former manager of Détective, is currently writing the book review column in L’Humanité” (Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 2 [1930]). What is interesting to note is that Détective published detective fiction side-by-side with crime news, so in a way, the surrealists were interested in events that would later become the specialty of detective fiction. Minotaure continued and refined all these genres—noir, Gothic, mystery, detective fiction—as well as specific mechanisms associated with these—the surrealist object, the mannequin, the automaton. Criminals like the Papin sisters who violate bourgeois morality had a precedent in Sade, and the surrealists found in his writings elements that overlapped with the noir novel but also elements that anticipated the development of mystery fiction. Young Jacques Lacan dedicated an entire article to the mysterious crime of the Papin sisters: “Motifs du Crime Paranoïaque” in Minotaure 3–4 (1933). But the real opening of the noir novel to the contemporary world comes from Maurice Heine’s “Promenade à travers le roman noir” (Minotaure 5 [1934]), which defines it as a genre open to the circulation of ideas between cultural spaces: “all fiction that is dominated by the joint effects of terror and the surnatural can be termed noir novel . . . such exchanges between the literatures of neighboring countries [England, France, Germany] surprises us less than this general taste of the European audience for the terrifying novel that lasted for half a century” (1). With its variants—the gothic noir, the fantastic noir, the realist noir, the burlesque or satiric noir—noir fiction was already developing under surrealism’s influence toward a transnational genre. Maurice Heine believed that this genre could develop still further: “today even the storyteller delves . . . into a region of terror and grandeur where it meets poetry; shouldn’t we explore this climate of mystery and violence from which so many new seasons can be born?” (3). Orhan Pamuk’s Black Book would certainly not have disappointed him.

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Louis Aragon and La Défense de l’infini: a novel for posterity Pamuk’s Black Book was not the first tale to bear this title. In 1926, Louis Aragon, one of the leading surrealist poets, the most well-read of the group and the first translator of The Hunting of the Snark into French, published in La Revue européene a text called “Le cahier noir,” a first-person narrative about a love triangle between a narrator who changes identities (Firmin, Ledoux), the woman he loves called Blanche, and her lover Gérard. In the larger novel that grew out of this story—La Défense de l’infini—the love triangle appears in two different variants: either Firmin is married to Blanche, who leaves him for Gérard, or she’s married to Gérard and Firmin is gnawed by jealousy. The story features a quest for identity through a black book, two mysterious lovers who seem to be the projections of an insomniac’s mind, and love as a journey to death: all strikingly similar to Pamuk’s own Black Book, which tells the story of Galip who sets out to find his wife Rüya after she mysteriously disappears with her step-brother, the journalist Celâl. Galip finds himself in a world where he himself is Celâl and Rüya (whose name means “Dream”) is the oneiric world that he seeks. As in Aragon’s story, Galip’s search for his loved wife ends with death: both Rüya and Celâl are found dead. Already as a child, Pamuk was reading the NRF collection brought out by Gallimard that his father purchased from Paris in the 1950s. This became one of the future novelist’s greatest sources of modern literature: “It is thus that I discovered Gallimard at the age of five. My father explained to us the importance of this publishing house, with its white books softly yellowed which fifty years later I was to show to Antoine Gallimard during his visit to Istanbul” (Le Nouvel Observateur, Feb. 3, 2011). As an adult, Pamuk acquired books in the series himself. It was in the same NRF collection that Aragon’s “Le Cahier noir” was republished in 1986 by Edouard Ruiz as part of Aragon’s unfinished novel, La Défense de l’infini, and Pamuk read this volume when it came out. The timing was good: in 1986, he was starting to work on The Black Book, which came out in 1990. The story of how Aragon’s “Le Cahier noir” was produced and circulated is a mystery novel in itself. It involves stories of doubles, changed identities, spying, and fiction mixed with reality. Having abandoned his medical studies and joined Breton on the barricades of surrealism, Aragon lost his family’s support and was in dire financial need. Poetry didn’t pay, but it was a contradiction in terms to write novels and be a surrealist: Breton had deemed the genre to be the epitome

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of bourgeois commercialism. In 1926, Aragon announced that he was writing a 1,500-page novel to be published by Gallimard in six volumes, but it remained just a dream. Devoted to Breton and the surrealist cause, in 1927 Aragon burned almost 1,300 pages of his projected novel. To make money, he pseudonymously published pornographic novels (Le con d’Irene) or sold parts of his unfinished novel that his lover had saved from being destroyed. In 1929, he sold a manuscript called Le Mauvais plaisant to the American publisher Edward Titus, who owned a bookshop in Montparnasse. The manuscript was the original, and Aragon didn’t make a copy. Le Mauvais plaisant was a story in three parts: the first was a first-person narrative of an insomniac dreamer who rambles through the underground of the Parisian metro at night to discover a whole secret world of crimes and unleashed sexual fantasies; the second was a Gogolian story modeled on “The Nose” that told the adventures of a huge and elegantly dressed penis strolling on the streets of Paris; the third part was “Le Cahier noir,” framed as a story within a story about a discovered black book from which several pages are torn and that someone left behind in a brothel. The first part of Le Mauvais plaisant was the result of a pact Aragon made in 1923 with the clothing designer Jacques Doucet: for 600 francs a month, Aragon would act as Doucet’s double in the nightlife of Paris and would provide his patron with pages that told of his real night adventures that spanned the gamut from cafés and brothels to the literary séances at Breton’s place at 42 rue Fontaine. In a similar way, Galip acts as Celâl’s spy on the streets of Istanbul, moving between ghostly streets, secret newspaper archives, and mysterious stories of predestined lovers. Doucet was too old and too respectable to lead this kind of life in person, so he wanted to enjoy it as a voyeur; Aragon and his adventurous life were just the thing to put in a black book about the ghostly night places in Paris. Aragon’s wandering destiny proved to be the manuscript’s too. Edward Titus disappeared from the Parisian stage together with Aragon’s manuscript, moving back to the United States. Years later, in the 1960s, when Aragon was already a reputed poet, he wanted to find the Titus manuscript and recuperate his identity as a surrealist novelist, but reality seemed to be against him: Helena Rubinstein, who had been married to Titus back in the 1920s, had divorced him; the last thing she knew about him was that he had married a much younger woman, moved to somewhere in the Midwest, and was already dead. Even more mysterious was the fact that the young and not very cultured widow had sold her husband’s archives before disappearing herself. The manuscript seemed forever

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lost, until Edouard Ruiz found it in a private collection and brought it to light in 1986 at Gallimard. What Breton thought wouldn’t work in the 1920s proved, paradoxically, to push the surrealist legacy forward in the 1980s, when a future world writer like Orhan Pamuk could consider Le Cahier noir and Le Mauvais plaisant worthy to engage with. “Le Cahier noir” and The Black Book are constructed symmetrically: both explore the ghostly side of a city—Paris or Istanbul—and its secret nightlife, both are centered on the problem of the double. Both use epigraphs in an ironic relationship with the text itself, and both draw on their own local/cosmopolitan legacy: whereas Aragon’s epigraphs are taken mainly from French writers but also other names associated with surrealism as proto-surrealists, Pamuk cites Islamic and Sufi thinkers next to his own character’s creations, but also his European masters. There are some authors cited by both Aragon and Pamuk, such as Lewis Carroll, and put to similar use: Pamuk cites “Must a name mean something?” and turns the name of the heroine, Rüya—dream—into the very atmosphere of the book, equating fiction to dream. Aragon too plays on the name Blanche and turns it into the illuminating light of the authorial eye that writes the black book, the light in the night: A whiteness [blancheur] makes me reticent. The radiance of this woman is comparable to a cornea . . . The real and the fictional marry like the foliage on the tree where a strange flower blooms. If I see Blanche today, it’s because she’s the girl I saw yesterday in my mind’s eye; and Gérard didn’t speak to me as an accomplice, as if he knew I might have witnessed what passed between the two of them. He doesn’t understand that I’m the one who’s directing him for everything that I imagine diminishes him in the eyes of the Blanche in my mind’s eye. La Défense 218, 225–6

Other writers are also cited by Pamuk, though only obliquely: Part I of the Titus manuscript cited Baudelaire calling Poe a farceur, while Pamuk’s final metatextual chapter “But I who write” is prefaced by Poe’s “Shadow—A parable.” Poe the farceur is also Poe the creator of the diabolic double William Wilson, whereas Rimbaud’s Je est un autre [I is someone else] structures both Black Books: “to be someone else” is the problem of both Firmin/Ledoux and Galip, but it is only “Le Cahier noir” that gives an epigraph from Rimbaud. Gérard, like Celâl, doesn’t have a material presence himself, and disappears when he approaches Blanche, reappearing like her shadow whenever he leaves: “This kind of shadow of hers, Gérard, returns the moment I leave . . . This

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distances me and makes me return to her, only to see Gérard stepping back, who was smelling her” (La Défense 218–19). This leads to the only plausible conclusion: Gérard is Ledoux’s double, just as Celâl is Galip’s double: “I allow myself to love another man’s woman with all the force of this other, multiplied in my crossed arms” (La Défense 219). It is in this love for the nocturnal, in the desire to penetrate others’ dreams, that Ledoux will be a good model for Galip: “The nights are not as short as one thinks. The pulse of curiosity is painful. I am soothing it with the cruel milk of imagination . . . Nights, nights, nights. We’re playing cards [Manille]. I penetrate into the intimacy of each of them. White [Blanche] . . .” (223). Coming closer to Aragon’s framing of “Le Cahier noir”, the final pages of Pamuk’s novel are the memories of a sleepwalker. As in Aragon’s case, the blackness of the notebook stands for silence—the silence of memory—and this is perhaps the most important point where we can analyze “Le Cahier noir” as one of the structuring sources of The Black Book. The black pages of a found manuscript are framed by Aragon with a third-person narrator distanced presumably both in time and in space from the first person narrator of “Le Cahier noir.” Thus the frame opens with the silence that these pages invite us into: The man who was speaking, the man who crossed this world, fell silent. A sort of mist enveloped the time. What time is it? But above all, what year? It seemed as if great upheavals had taken place everywhere: but maybe they are insignificant. It’s always the one who wasted his life following the city’s movements who had to abandon these streets, these crossroads where he dedicated himself to a task impossible to understand today. He hated this bastard universe, this monster that lives only to devour itself. La Défense 193

With Pamuk, the third-person framing takes the shape of a second I, someone who is a head above our Galip, and who takes the same distance from his hero who, like Aragon’s hero, is fed up with rambling on the endless Istanbul streets, in a city that devours itself: Reader, dear reader, throughout the writing of this book I have tried . . . to keep its narrator separate from his hero . . . That, dear reader, is why I would prefer to leave you alone on this page—alone, that is, with your memories . . . This would do justice to the black dream that descends upon us at this point in the story—to the silence in my mind, as I wander like a sleepwalker through the hidden world. For the pages that follow—the black pages that follow—are the memoirs of a sleepwalker, nothing more and nothing less. The Black Book 442–3

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Galip’s greatest dilemma, which runs throughout the 460 pages of the novel, is whether he can become someone else. The narrator of Aragon’s “Le Cahier noir” faced the same dilemma: “Could it be that all of a sudden he accepted to define himself as being this one and not the other one? Very unlikely. However, it is what he wanted us to think of him in this small black book which has no title and in which everything is told as if his name were Ledoux. Absurd will of fiction” (La Défense 193). As in Pamuk’s Black Book, this cahier noir is connected to the problem of memory and oblivion, which is at the heart of Galip’s/Pamuk’s writing: for Aragon’s narrator, the black pages we read are what the narrator wanted to forget, to leave behind him in a brothel: “The dreadful country prostitutes, whom we see in the brothel of a big market town. They are three, two are snoring, and the third one is the oldest. That’s enough. The man left. The only thing he forgot is [the story that] follows” (La Défense 194). Ruiz’s 1986 version of La Défense—the “phantom-novel” as Aragon called it— closes with a final paragraph that “Le Cahier noir” gives between parentheses. The final image is one of flying sheets of paper that have been torn from the black book, leaving open the question about where the real text of the Black Book is—in the text we’ve just read or in the invisible text that was removed by the man who disappeared when our fiction started: (The manuscript stops here. It should have contained a few more pages, as the torn-out ten pages testify. The one who forgot it, did he want to destroy these ten pages or did he want to save only those and destroy what was before? Very likely he himself has no idea, being as we could see one of those men who believe that nothing can ever be destroyed, even if the desire isn’t lacking, but who know that at least we can always break it into pieces). La Défense 232, Aragon’s emphasis

Celâl’s unfinished text, broken into his daily columns, is just as fragmented and open-ended as “le cahier noir”; we’ll never know where the real Celâl was, in these columns or in those written by Galip. Celâl’s and Galip’s favorite activities—and the surrealists’—include graphological analysis, palm reading, dream interpretation, and reading riddles in faces. The title of Pamuk’s twenty-fourth chapter, “Riddles in Faces,” had a precedent in the surrealists’ practice of anamorphosis. This could identify a secret message in an image as a second and even a third hidden image. In Mad Love, Breton speaks of riddle-images as the product of the “paranoiac faculty” that reveals our secret

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desire: “Real objects do not exist just as they are: looking at the lines that make up the most common among them, you see . . . a remarkable riddle-image [imagedevinette] which is identical with it and which speaks to us, without any possible mistake, on the only real object, the actual one of our desire” (author’s emphasis, 87–8). In 1939, in the surrealist magazine Minotaure, Georges Hugnet published under the title “Devinettes/Riddles” a series of anamorphic images that functioned as objects that would liberate the ghosts hidden inside them. No longer only retrospective, their memory would also become prophetic of what these objects could become if read correctly with a dreamer’s eye, like Hamlet’s: The geographies of clouds and old walls, the flying floras of marble rocks and agates, the tenacious hallucinations of childhood, the effects of hazard, allow for new visions nested into one another through memory. The objects that suddenly liberate their phantoms, those things that are seen and read differently, that are animated at the same time by something familiar and yet never seen before speak of a secret life which pains us that we cannot feel it beating in the palm of our hand. Hugnet 34

Pamuk’s “Riddles in Faces” chapter has an epigraph from Through the LookingGlass—“The face is what one goes by, generally”—though it could have just as well been what Humpty Dumpty tells Alice about the riddle of her name: “you might be any shape” (Alice’s Adventures 182). Infinite metamorphosis enabled by the paranoiac faculty enables reading riddles in faces, as Galip and Celâl do: the latter collects images of faces for thirty years and inscribes on them all sorts of letters and messages, connecting them to documents, whereas the former is so tempted by this labyrinth of signs that he’s afraid of losing his mind: “he was furious at his own mind for seeking clues in everything Celâl wrote . . . there was no room in this world for signs, clues, second and third meanings, secrets, or mysteries; they were nothing more than figments of his imagination” (The Black Book 282). But what one reads in faces is one’s own desire and dreams, and the same sensibility animated Georges Hugnet’s riddle images: “Riddles are intentional dreams” (Hugnet 34). These images do contain revelations, as Galip too will thus discover the mystery behind his wife’s disappearance by reading Celâl’s collection of photos. Like a genuine surrealist object, they reveal the secret and oracular message of reality: “The spirit of riddles, their dangerous technique that touches on a special kind of humor, their revelatory enigmas, their unexpected solutions that go all the way to the response read through transparency always touch on the marvelous” (Hugnet 35).

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One of Hugnet’s riddles is entitled “The Sultan and His Favorite”: when turned upside down, what seemed to be a sultan’s portrait turns out to be the portrait of a beautiful veiled beauty. Galip too reads in a map the superimposed images of all the sultans that merge into one single face, presumably Celâl’s as it vanishes in the blink of an eye, just like the two secret lovers: “Like a child dreaming of a distant land that he has only seen on film, Galip looked down at the map spread out on the desk and tried to convince himself that he was already there. For a moment he could almost see the wrinkled forehead of an old man, and then the faces of all the sultans, all merged into one, and then, perhaps, the face of a prince, but no sooner had they suggested themselves than they vanished” (The Black Book 282). Even better, in Hugnet’s image, the sultan’s coiffure camouflages two lovers kissing. Just as Pamuk superimposes the image of the two mysterious lovers Rüya and Celâl on Galip’s face, if we were to turn Pamuk’s own portrait in The Black Book upside down we might find his favorite: Louis Aragon’s secret self-portrait in “Le Cahier noir.”

From transparent objects to innocent objects Shifting from the capitalist commodity to the affective value of old, worn-out, useless objects found at the flea market was a surrealist act. Orhan Pamuk took this idea a significant step further when he developed in tandem a novel and a physical Museum of Innocence in which economically insignificant objects could be exhibited for the emotional value bestowed on them by a love story. He had behind him a well-established tradition, going back to Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia and to Breton’s trouvailles at the flea market, which played such a major part in creating the magical Paris in Nadja: “I went one Sunday to the Saint-Ouen flea-market (I go there often, searching for objects that can be found nowhere else: old-fashioned, broken, [fragmented], useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse—at least in the sense I give to the word and which I prefer)” (Nadja 52). Pamuk has readily admitted the influence of Joseph Cornell’s boxes on the displays in his Museum of Innocence, and he thereby obliquely acknowledges his debt to surrealism. Cornell started in the 1930s as an important American collaborator of the surrealists, owing a lot to Duchamp’s readymades and to the surrealist objects and poem-objects of Breton, Dalí, Eluard, and Valentine Hugo. To see one of the sources of inspiration that Joseph Cornell may have used, it is enough to call to mind Breton’s 1932 collage “L’Oeuf de l’Église ou le serpent,” which

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shows a woman in an erotic pose reclining on her back next to a suggestive papal staff with the head of a serpent and a woman’s egg-shaped face—like Brâncui’s Mademoiselle Pogany—wearing a papal miter, seen against a midnight background. This can be compared to Cornell’s 1940 collage done for the Russian ballerina Tamara Toumanova. Toumanova is wearing a pointed shell on her head as she comes out of a fan-shaped shell on a background that looks simultaneously like the sea and the starry sky. In the 1930s, Cornell associated himself with surrealism and produced 120 collages using surrealist topics, the most striking one illustrating Lautréamont’s notion of the beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table. When Julien Levy organized the largest surrealist exhibit to date at his avant-garde gallery in New York in January 1932, it was Joseph Cornell whom he approached to design the announcement. Later in 1932, Julien Levy organized the first solo exhibition of Cornell’s objects and collages; the exhibit was significantly called “Objects by Joseph Cornell: Minutiae, Glass Bells, Shadow Boxes, Coups d’Oeil, Jouets Surréalistes.” But in addition to Cornell, Pamuk had a role model in the surrealists’ predecessor Nerval, the poet who owned a lobster pet, and who, according to Breton, lived like a surrealist. Nerval was one of the few French writers who explored the Middle East who was sensitive to cultural differences. Suffering from several mental breakdowns diagnosed as “demonomania,” he loved to devise multiple personas for himself; he explored Cairo dressed as a Turk and Constantinople dressed as a Persian, before writing his Aurélia in Doctor Émile Blanche’s Passy clinic as a therapeutic text. Part of Les filles du feu, Aurélia is the story of Nerval’s love for the actress Jenny Colon, whose name Pamuk would use for the fake bag bought by his hero Kemal in the shop where his beloved cousin Füsun worked. Aurélia tells the story of a beloved sought through different women, modeled on Dante’s Beatrice in La Vita Nuova, a model used by Pamuk as well, in both The Museum of Innocence and The New Life. Aurélia dies and the narrator searches for her in the Middle East, where he fills a box with objects that remind him of her. Before Pamuk’s Kemal, who would turn all the objects collected after he loses Füsun into a museum whose vitrines correspond to each chapter in the book, it was Nerval who thought of decomposing a lover’s body into the objects that went into the making of the ultimate object of desire. In his story, these objects are oriented less toward the past than toward the future, as Nerval believed in a future reunion with his dead lover. In a single paragraph of Aurélia, Nerval concentrates what Pamuk will expand over 600 pages:

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I had surrounded myself with bizarre superstitions. In a small box that had belonged to her, I kept her last letter. I must even confess that I turned this box into a kind of reliquary in which I stored the souvenirs of those long journeys on which her memory had accompanied me: a rose plucked in the garden on Schoubrah, a strip of mummy-cloth brought back from Egypt, laurel leaves gathered by the river of Beirut, two tiny crystals, bits of mosaic from Saint Sophia, a rosary bead, various other items . . . and finally, the piece of paper that had been given to me the day they laid her in her grave. Aurélia in Selected Writings 294

Mapping an emotional landscape of the Orient through objects that would recall the dead body of a lover was to be a fruitful precedent for Pamuk’s Kemal, who transforms Nerval’s narrator’s box into an actual museum. Like Kemal later, Nerval’s narrator seeks refuge after his lover’s death in a house where he was once happy and which contains memories of a lost childhood love that might be related in a mysterious way to his love for Aurélia: I left for a small town on the outskirts of Paris where I had spent happy times in my youth at the home of some elderly relatives, since deceased. I had often enjoyed visiting them to watch the sunsets near their house. There was a terrace there, shaded by lime-trees, which brought back memories of the young girls— kissing cousins—I had grown up with. One of these girls . . . But had it even crossed my mind to contrast this vague childhood infatuation with the love that had devoured my youth? Aurélia in Selected Writings 294

Kemal and Füsun are cousins too, and play together as children, reuniting years later as lovers. Once Kemal loses her, he starts visiting her parents’ house to try to relive his lost happiness. Pamuk engages intertextually with Nerval’s narrator in a chiastic relation: whereas Nerval’s narrator is a Parisian who collects Oriental objects during his visits to Cairo and Constantinople, only to return to Paris and write his lost love into a proto-surreal book, Kemal visits Paris only to return home to Istanbul and open his museum, whose exhibits culminate on the top floor in his bedroom. Upon his return from the Orient, Nerval’s narrator describes the objects with which he surrounds himself in the room that he occupies in Doctor Blanche’s Passy clinic a little before his death and before writing Aurélia. Above my bed I have hung my Arab outfits, the two cashmere shawls which have gone through so many mendings and re-mendings, a pilgrim’s gourd, a hunter’s

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game-bag. A huge map of Cairo stretches above the bookcase; a bamboo bedside table holds a lacquered Indian platter where I can arrange my toilet articles. I was delighted to find myself back among these humble relics of my changing fortune over the years; a lifetime of memories was associated with them. Aurélia in Selected Writings 329

In the same mood, Kemal returns from Paris and his trip around the world to occupy a room in what would become his own museum, surrounded by Oriental objects embodying a lifetime of memories: “I felt such consolation . . . as I wandered idly around museums. I do not mean the Louvre or the Beaubourg . . . I am speaking now of the many empty museums I found in Paris . . . a museum where I could display my life . . . where I could tell my story through the things that Füsun had left behind” (The Museum of Innocence 495). An important display element that Nerval arranges in his room in the clinic is, of course, a collection of books; it is symbolic that he describes them as his true paradise, thus anticipating Borges’ “Library of Babel”: I was surrounded by virtually all my remaining possessions. My books, a farrago of the wisdom of the ages, histories, travel accounts, religious treatises, cabbala, astrology . . . the library of Babel in two hundred volumes . . . I come across letters from Arabia, relics of Cairo and Stamboul. Oh joy! Oh mortal sorrow! This yellowed handwriting, these faded first drafts, these half-crumpled letters are the treasures of my only love. Aurélia in Selected Writings 329

In a postmodern reworking of Nerval’s bedroom library, the attic bedroom in the Museum of Innocence has a textual display covering the wall across from Kemal’s bed: a set of pages from the manuscript of The Museum of Innocence itself. Following Nerval’s project, Breton spoke of creating a space where useless or found objects could bring together people from all over the world. This would be Breton’s Gradiva Gallery, opened at 31 rue de Seine on the Left Bank in 1937, the year he published Amour fou and when the practice of the surrealist object reached a climax. Taking the name of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, on which Freud wrote his 1907 study Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s “Gradiva”, Breton projected the gallery as a space that would be simultaneously a gallery, a museum, and a bookshop. Jensen’s Gradiva herself was a surreal object: found by a literary character, the archeologist Norbert Hanold, she was a woman in a Roman bas-relief whom later Norbert is not sure whether he meets in reality or

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in a dream. Gradiva, “she who advances,” would become the name Dalí gives to Gala, referring to her as Gala Gradiva. In the text accompanying the opening of Gradiva, Breton distinguished between the opaque objects of adulthood, seen through a “river of sand,” and the transparent objects of childhood (La clé 26); transparency would be the landmark of the window display of the gallery. This transparency of childhood objects would be suggested by Pamuk through the word “Innocence” in his museum, and embodied in the glass cases in which the objects are shown. Breton designed the Gradiva Gallery as a surreal space where both manmade and natural objects could be found in a defamiliarizing relation to other objects. These objects would act for the viewer as “revelatory of his own desire” (La clé 26). Kemal too counts on his visitors’ resonating with his love story by comparing it to their own memories: “When visitors to our museum view these objects, they should feel respect for my love and compare it with memories of their own” (The Museum 524). Breton lists ten types of object to be found in the mysterious Gradiva: natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, perturbed objects, found objects (trouvailles), interpreted found objects, savage objects, mathematical objects, lunatics’ objects, readymade objects, and surrealist objects (La clé 27). Modeled on Lautréamont’s maxim about the poetry made by all—“Just as poetry must be made by all, these objects must be of service to all” (La clé 27)—such a space would be a “defamiliarizing shop” [magasin dépaysant], a place where you can find objects of desire, all the more as Breton had asked Duchamp to design the entrance door, which he made out of a sheet of glass, carved into the embraced silhouettes of two lovers. The entrance into Breton’s gallery/shop was through the embraced lovers, and it opened into a true surrealist paradise made of paintings, objects, and books, certainly prefiguring the realm into which years later Pamuk too hoped to introduce the visitors of his Museum through a love story: “this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul” (The Museum 525). Pamuk’s museum also has a shop, where visitors can purchase objects such as Füsun’s butterfly earrings, Kemal’s broken heart, and Pamuk’s own novels in many translations: truly a Bretonian “magasin dépaysant.” Building on Nerval’s room in the Passy clinic furnished with his last possessions, Breton imagines—four years earlier than Borges—this surreal space as a paradise of books based on a linguistic homonymy, typical for the dream mechanism: the shelves (rayons) would be literally made of sunbeams (rayons de soleïl). Only those books worth reading would be found here, Breton writes,

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books that can anticipate our future rather than plunging us into the past: “These books must fulfill one condition: they must all be worth reading, as from them and them only the phosphorous substance of what we still need to learn, love, of what makes us advance, not move backwards, is made: From the illustrated books for children to the poets’ books of images: GRADIVA . . . On the borders of utopia and truth, that is at the heart of life” (La clé 28, Breton’s emphasis). Breton hoped that such a gallery/shop could change our retrospective view of art into a prospective one. No longer strictly determined by an individual past, the surrealist object prophesies the future: this is Gradiva, celle qui avance. This change is what differentiates the surrealist object from Proust’s object of memory: one shouldn’t look at the surrealist object as belonging to the past, but rather as a moving object, open to what it may become for the viewer. “It is desirable that the hallucinatory power of certain images, that the true evocative power that certain men possess independently of the faculty of remembrance, will no longer be a secret” (“Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité,” Point du jour 29). An extreme variant of the surrealist object was Dalí’s complicated installation of a gold and ruby heart, part of the Catherwood Collection. Dalí’s Royal Heart with running red liquid based on an electric installation opens the way for the broken porcelain heart shown in Box 53 in Pamuk’s museum (see Color Plate 9). In the museum catalog, The Innocence of Objects, the text accompanying this exhibit is called “The Magic of Objects” (195), and their magic is intended to affect visitors to the museum as much as Kemal himself. The porcelain heart is displayed on a crimson velvet cushion, viewed by an audience of moviegoers shown in the background. As Kemal says in the catalog, “Because so many languages describe the condition I was in as ‘heartbreak,’ let the broken porcelain heart I display here suffice to convey my plight at that moment to all who visit my museum” (The Innocence of Objects 196). Pamuk took a piece of a red-ribbon key chain from Box 6 and ran it through the crack in the porcelain heart, much as Dedalus ran a silk thread through the labyrinth of a shell with the help of an ant: “After the porcelain heart was ready, I took a piece of the red-ribbon key chain from Box 6 and personally threaded it in the fissure running through the heart” (196). However, whereas Breton’s trouvaille is future-oriented, becoming prophetic of the next woman he’ll meet, Kemal’s is more past-oriented, closer to Proust’s Celtic belief in the dead souls held captive by the objects around us until our affective memory, through the senses, chances upon them and brings them back to life. Breton’s network of found objects converges on the appearance in reality

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of the woman of his dreams, materialized as the ultimate object of desire, but Kemal’s network of found, stolen, or bought objects works magically backwards to recreate a lost past. Kemal thus symmetrically follows Breton’s traces backwards: from the real woman of his dreams, Füsun, to decomposing rather than converging her body into the objects that made up their love story. “Is it possible that by looking at objects we might see our memories as if they were a film? The Museum of Innocence has been made by those who think that this is possible, by those who believe in the magic of objects” (The Innocence of Objects 195). Yet when we look at Pamuk’s story of collecting the objects for his museum before or during the writing of his novel, rather than at Kemal’s story of collecting the objects after Füsun leaves him, Pamuk no longer seems so different from Breton. The Istanbul versions of Breton’s Saint-Ouen marché aux puces are the Çukurcuma flea markets where Pamuk collects most of his “found” objects. Like Breton, Pamuk finds objects that have no known past of their own and weaves them into a new network of signifiers in his story, only to discover afterwards, just like Proust’s narrator, that objects do have a past and a story of their own, inscribed underneath their utilitarian surface: What I found most enthralling was the way in which objects removed from kitchens, bedrooms, and dinner tables where they had once been utilized would come together to form a new texture, an unintentionally striking web of relationships . . . [The objects’] ending up in this place after being uprooted from the places they used to belong to and separated from the people whose lives they were once part of—their loneliness, in a word—aroused in me the shamanic belief that objects too have spirits. . . . Sometimes I would buy something simply because I found it pretty, interesting, or unusual. Then I would place it on my desk, believing optimistically that its role in Kemal and Füsun’s story would simply come to me unbidden. The Innocence of Objects 51–2

The phrase “would simply come to me unbidden” reminds us of Lewis Carroll’s composition of “The Hunting of the Snark,” built upon a line that imposes itself on him, coming out of nowhere: “suddenly there came into my head one line of verse— one solitary, incomprehensible line—‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’ I knew not what it meant” (“‘Alice’ on the Stage,” 295). Equally, we may think of the first surrealist sentence that knocks on Breton’s window as he’s about to fall asleep: “There is a man cut in two by the window.” What Pamuk shares both with his acknowledged source Lewis Carroll and with Breton, whose influence he denies, is the imposition of such revelatory moments that come uncontrolled “out of nowhere.”

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Strikingly, such a revelatory moment coming out of nowhere appeared in a footnote in Breton’s Nadja that anticipates Füsun’s death in Pamuk’s novel. In a car with Breton driving from Versailles back to Paris, Nadja wants to cover his eyes and force the car to accelerate until the lovers crash into a tree: one evening, when I was driving a car along the road from Versailles to Paris, the woman sitting beside me (who was Nadja, but who might have been anyone else, after all, someone else) pressed her foot down on mine on the accelerator, tried to cover my eyes with her hands in the oblivion of an interminable kiss, desiring to extinguish us, doubtless forever, save to each other, so that we should collide at full speed with the splendid trees along the road. Nadja 152–3, footnote

In The Museum of Innocence, Füsun dies by driving her car into a tree—the tragedy that inspires Kemal to keep her dress, her driving license, and the rusting wreck of the Chevrolet, and then to create his museum. It is at the least a resonant surreal coincidence that Breton spoke of Nadja’s fantasy as the supreme proof of the blind trust lovers have in each other, in a paragraph that narrates what would become the pivotal event in Pamuk’s novel. As Kemal says, “Truly I knew then, in the depths of my soul, that we had come to the end of our allotted portion of happiness, that our time had come to leave this beautiful realm, by way of racing toward the plane tree. Füsun had locked onto it, as onto a target” (The Museum 488). Reading Nadja’s gesture as the ultimate proof of extreme defiance, Breton dreamed often of what such a gesture could lead to: “In imagination at least, I often find myself, eyes blindfolded, back at the wheel of that wild car” (Nadja 153, footnote). Almost eighty years later, Pamuk would entitle his corresponding chapter “Journey to Another World.” Pamuk’s practice of the surrealist object—more Breton’s than Dalí’s—doesn’t end with crashed Chevrolets or broken porcelain hearts. Breton’s beloved shoespoon travels all the way from the marché aux puces in Saint-Ouen to Istanbul, where a series of shoes in Pamuk’s museum keep the same complex of surreal connections and chance encounters as Breton’s shoe-spoon. In conversation, Pamuk has acknowledged that Man Ray’s photo of the shoe-spoon (first included in Amour fou), and Dalí’s “Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically” were direct inspiration for his shoe-objects, the latter one having influenced, as Pamuk admitted, the novel The Museum of Innocence itself.1 There are four boxes in 1

Conversation with Orhan Pamuk, New York City, November 12, 2016.

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Pamuk’s museum that contain shoes: Boxes 2, “The Şanzelize Boutique” (Füsun’s yellow high-heeled shoes); 23, “Silence” (Füsun’s dirty white sneakers); 36, “To Entertain a Small Hope That Might Allay my Heartache” (Kemal’s slippers); and 51, “Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All” (Kemal’s father’s shoe). Their display forms a chiasmus: boxes 2 and 51 show elegant shoes belonging to a woman and a man; boxes 23 and 36 show everyday shoes, or the indoor shoes belonging to a woman and a man. Shown next to her panties, Füsun’s “childish” socks and dirty sneakers (a Lolita fantasy?) are accompanied by a glass of milk. Symmetrically, Kemal’s slippers are placed next to a glass of milk, against a background formed by card reading and the Horoscope (a clip of an Aries horoscope appears in full view). The association between the sexual shoe and the glass of milk certainly reminds us of Dalí’s “Surrealist Object with Symbolic Function,” showing Gala’s shoe in which a glass of milk has been put, with a sugar cube about to be dissolved into it (Color Plate 10). The sugar cube has some hairs on it and also a painted shoe that will dissolve into the milk. Another surrealist pairing is in Box 51, where next to the elegant man’s shoe there is a tin spoon “that Füsun toyed with in her mouth” (The Innocence of Objects 190); the phallic symbol and the female genital symbol are brought together in Box 51. About Box 2, where we see Füsun’s elegant yellow shoe next to the fake Jenny Colon handbag and a belt, Pamuk writes that this was the box that made him take years to complete the museum, because this is where he came across the idea of the order of displays—which had to be different than those in the book to function as individual objects in themselves, endowed with an aura just like the surrealist object. “I worked on making the ‘fake’ Jenny Colon bag—named after the Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval’s lover . . . The boxes had to have a special structure and an aura; they each had to have a particular soul” (The Innocence of Objects 61). Perhaps the most erotic is Box 23, called “Silence” (see Color Plate 11). “Here I display Füsun’s white panties with her childish white socks and her dirty white sneakers to evoke our spells of silence” (The Innocence of Objects 124). Behind these spells lies also a very erotic reading of a box that contains a glass of milk and the dirty sexual shoes, resonant of Dalí’s own obsession with the hairs and the dirty underwear that outraged Breton enough to think of excommunicating him. But the most striking sexual symbol is suspended from the upper side of the box, and is its center of gravity: a fig dripping with juice. Next to the glass of milk, there can be little doubt about its symbolism. Kemal asked the narrator just

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this: “make sure that you can see the juice dripping from the fig!” (The Innocence of Objects 125). For Kemal, the fig is supposed to be a metaphor for kissing Füsun, as he is so uncomfortable talking directly about lovemaking. But kissing itself can be a metaphor for lovemaking: “He also said that kissing made him think of a seagull gently holding a fig in its beak” (The Innocence of Objects 125). Tearing a lover’s body to pieces and fetishizing them was no striking discovery of Kemal’s. One of the seminal articles theorizing the surrealist object or the object-being (être-objet) was Dalí’s “Les nouvelles couleurs du sex-appeal spectral,” published in Minotaure 5 (1934). There, Dalí spoke about the erotic spectrality or decomposability of a woman’s body: “I announce today that the entire sexual attraction of women will come from their potential use of their spectral capacities and resources, that is from their possible dissociation, decomposition of their carnal radiances . . . The spectral woman will be the dismantled woman” (22). If Kemal’s museum is a portrait of Füsun and of their love, then the plan of the museum can recompose her portrait. Kemal believes that future revelations may lie in the relations that can be established between the boxes. Thus, his object isn’t totally past-oriented, but also, like Breton’s Gradiva, future-oriented as well: “My museum comprises the life I shared with Füsun . . . even I cannot know how much I have understood it as a whole. We can leave that job to future scholars . . . Let them be the ones to establish the structural relations between Füsun’s barrettes and brushes and the deceased canary Lemon” (The Museum 525). To establish new relations between the objects composing a woman’s body or a lover’s face, and to read them both as a map and as an oracle, was a surrealist activity. In Minotaure 3–4 (1933), the surrealists published two photos under the title “Le secret des signes,” showing a woman’s face with numbers marking the possible positions of beauty spots that would point at other “secret signs” on a woman’s body. Her entire body could be read on her face, and this is one lesson that Kemal’s love story may have learned from the surrealists. As Kemal found his future written on his beloved’s face, he was repeating a credo of Breton, who believed that “The portrait of a beloved must not be only an image at which we smile, but also an oracle that we interrogate” (Minotaure 5 [1934], text by Breton accompanying Man Ray’s album Photographies de Man Ray 1920–1934 published by Albert Skira). Years before The Museum of Innocence, in The Black Book Pamuk had explored the riddles in the faces collected by Celâl for thirty years and deciphered by Galip in search of the woman of his dreams, Rüya, riddles that “might offer him glimpses of this other realm to which he longed to escape” (282).

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Both in The Black Book and in The Museum of Innocence, deciphering a lover’s body or the riddles in faces opens into deciphering the magic of Istanbul. To explore a city as a woman’s body, or a city haunted by a woman’s presence, was a path that had been opened earlier by Nerval in a series of articles on cities or sites bearing a feminine name: “Diorama,” a theater founded by Daguerre in 1822 in Paris as a visual experience anticipating the future cinema; “Pandora” or Vienna as an androgynous, surrealist object; and “Octavia” or Naples, “the city of the dead.” Grouped under the apt title “Unreal Cities” by the translator Richard Sieburth, they open the path for Proust’s place-names that endow cities with a mysterious feminine presence, like Florence or Venice, the city of Venus, cities that the narrator dreams of before actually visiting them. Breton’s Nadja became a synonym of mysterious, surrealist Paris, and Italo Calvino would then develop the entire volume of Invisible Cities as dreamed spaces, furnished with female names and filled with surrealist objects. An object of desire in the form of a feminine city would be endowed with the entire nostalgia of a lost past, but also with the promise of the desire’s future fulfillment. Nerval’s travels to discover the Orient he had dreamed of in Paris make him the mirrored double of Pamuk discovering the lost past of his dreamed Istanbul. And Pamuk, who dreamed as a child of “another Orhan” shadowing his life, as he tells us in Istanbul, would appreciate Nerval’s sense of being his own Middle Eastern double: “It was this Cairo of my dreams that I now and then reconstructed, finding myself in a deserted quarter or near a crumbling mosque; it seemed to me that I was following on the footsteps of my earlier travels. I would walk about, saying to myself, ‘When I turn this corner, when I pass through this gate, I shall see such and such’—and the thing would be there, in ruin, yet real” (“To My Friend Théophile Gautier,” in Selected Writings 195). Replace “Cairo” with “Istanbul” and you can see Pamuk’s reading of the riddle in his predecessor’s face.

Beyond Tlön: Cărtărescu’s Bucharest The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of many Communist regimes marked a turning point both for the European and world literary maps. Confronted with a newly reopened world, literary scholars had to begin to redefine their notion of Europe, which up to then had largely meant Western Europe or the literatures of a few dominant powers. The year 1989 was a threshold

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for many Central and Eastern European writers, who came out into a world where they had to rethink their geopolitical and literary identity as well as their audience. Aptly and almost prophetically, an entry from January 3, 1990 in Mircea Cărtărescu’s diary tells of a dream in which a door opens in a blinding wall: “Here’s a dream I never told (it’s old): I was in front of an immense wall, the slanting façade of a building like those in the Valley of the Kings. White wall, blinding, slightly inclined on the upper part, like a pyramid. All of a sudden, a gate opened in it, and through it I entered a library as big as a warehouse” (Diary 1:6). What he enters, as in Kafka’s dream of the multiple gates opening in the Great Wall of China, is the space of world literature, resonant with Borges’ Library of Babel. At the time he recounts this dream, Cărtărescu is rereading Kafka’s diary and also the Divine Comedy, “the only book one can stand to read after a revolution” (7). For the members of the 1980s generation in Romania, the West meant a cultural dream and an escape from political turmoil through reading and writing. Cărtărescu started as the leading poet of his generation, which paradoxically brought to Romanian literature a postmodernism in the absence of postmodernity, against the dystopian reality of what became the darkest decade of the Communist regime. From his poetic beginnings Cărtărescu developed a specific literary formula, his hallmark today: dream literature that challenges the boundaries of genre, creating a new type of fiction. The trilogy Blinding is the fruit of a decade of writing that reworks his two major pre-1989 books: the poetic prose in the novel Nostalgia and the rhymed verse of his epic Levantul (The Levant), a rewriting of the history of Romanian poetry in all its major poetic forms. Levantul’s ambitious play on languages and dialects and its playful intertextual rewriting matches Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Going beyond both Nostalgia and Levantul, Blinding challenges all genre boundaries. It appears as a monstrous Dantesque fiction with a poetic core: “The novella—the novel— an expanded poem. . . . The sonnet-novel” (Diary 1:10, 18). “The Borges of European literature” (as the French magazine Lire has called him) is closer to Kafka than to Dante in his total rejection of the political and the social and in his visceral need to write. This makes him something of an odd man out in the post-Communist literary landscape, where intellectuals coming from the former Communist countries have often been expected to play a militant role in speaking in the name of Western political values. Cărtărescu’s answer to this imperative is a return to the world of dreams, of inner psychic life: as he wrote in December 1990, “When all will turn to the social, the political and

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the historic, I will stick to the psychic ‘che muove il sol e l’altre astre’” (in Italian in the original, though with the archaic and poetic Romanian astre in place of Dante’s stelle; Diary 1: 74). Cărtărescu has published more than two dozen books, and as of this writing has been translated into seventeen languages, mainly as a fiction writer. With Blinding, Cărtărescu proves that poetry can travel through oneiric narrative, a new genre which owes a lot to surrealism’s bringing poetry’s logic into the heart of fiction. Equally important for Cărtărescu is the practice of the surrealist object as it was filtered through Borges’ Ficciones and the work of Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez—in Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid (2015), the narrator imagines the Day of Judgment, when writers will come to show God how they used their time. “At Judgment Day . . . one will come and say ‘Behold, My Lord, One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ Nothing better was ever written” (278). Building on and against his precursors, Cărtărescu redefines poetry as nostalgia unfolds within the dream structure of narrative, as found in the postmodern novel, which is “the poetry of our times” (Diary 1: 120). Cărtărescu is known in English through the poetry collection Be-bop Baby (1999), his novel Nostalgia (2005), and his bestselling essay collection Why We Love Women (2012). Blinding has been translated into ten languages to date, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Hebrew, and the first volume appeared in English in 2013 in Sean Cotter’s translation published by New York’s Archipelago Books, known for their impressive catalog of literature from small literary markets. Aptly, the first country that Cărtărescu visited in 1990 after the fall of Ceauescu was the United States, and it is here that he began thinking of a new life through translation as he started to shape his trilogy: “to enter that fabulous world, like a barbarian in the Roman Empire, is more than I could ever wish for” (Diary 1: 55). As his work starts to be translated into world languages, Cărtărescu no longer belongs just to a national literature or a geographical area—the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe—but rather thinks of himself as citizen of Europe or of the world at large. Back home, he reflects: “I miss America, Paris. . . I am no longer from here completely, I jumped onto another whorl, I already feel a citizen of the world. In twenty years, maybe I’ll become one” (Diary 1: 103). Read today, this diary entry from 1991 holds true; he has become a world author. English has had a special role for Cărtărescu since 1989: “I wish we could live there [in English] forever” (Diary 1: 125), “I have begun to read in English like in my own native language” (1: 28), “I am preparing to become, either here or there [the United States], a

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nowhere man”—a phrase he gives in English in the original, interestingly quoting the Beatles, whose global success took off with their own American tour (Diary 1: 129). In “Europe Has the Shape of My Brain,” a talk delivered in Hamburg in 2003 on what it means to be European, Cărtărescu argued, much like Borges in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” that for a writer being European means reading the great names of world literature and not being confined by the national or the local. Against the market pressure to retail local Eastern European color, Cărtărescu proposes a Europe that becomes an imaginary homeland where the ideal community of writers is embodied in a library organized in shifting networks of affinity. A Europe having the shape of his brain. Mircea Cărtărescu has always engaged in ambitious projects, be they in poetry or fiction, renewing the literary form of the epic in rhymed verse in his epic Levantul or the structure of the novel, crossing the genre borders between autobiography, short story, and novel. Nostalgia comprises five stories that communicate through subterranean pipes like dreams from different nights that make up a single, totalizing story, mapping an oneiric childhood Bucharest that explores monstrous beauty through “fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant,” all devices for revealing the marvelous cited in Breton’s first manifesto (Nostalgia 16). Children who carry prophetic messages (the character Mentardy), adolescents who exchange bodies through lovemaking (Andrei and Gina), or the Alice-modeled twelve-year-old Nana becoming a woman while playing surreal games at the threshold of dream and reality, are all instances of what Breton called “convulsive beauty,” mixing the marvelous with the monstrous and the uncanny. Levantul and Blinding tell two parts of Romania’s history: in the epic, the birth of the nation-state through the liberation from the Ottoman Empire; in the trilogy, the birth of a country free from Soviet dominion in a newly globalized world. In Blinding, the central character moves a step beyond the poet of the epic: the narrator, Mircea, is an inveterate dreamer and poet who enlarges his own memory to encompass the memory of his ancestors, both “real” and imagined, in poetry and fiction, plotting these memories on a global map. Today, after Cărtărescu’s works have traveled throughout the world, we could easily substitute “the world” for “Europe” in his 2003 Hamburg essay, and the passage would read as following: “There are many worlds in time and space, in dreams and memories, in reality and in the imagination. I lay my claim only on one, my World, easily recognizable because it has the shape of my brain. And it has this

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shape because it modeled itself like this, from the very beginning, in its own image. On its surface there are folds and deep slopes . . . areas for speech and areas for understanding. But nowhere are there concrete walls, iron curtains, frontiers” (“Europe Has the Shape of My Brain,” www.observatorcultural.ro/ articol/europa-are-forma-creierului-meu/).

Being-objects in “Gemini”: books and playing cards2 “Gemini” tells the story of two adolescents, Andrei and Gina. Andrei is a solitary adolescent with the soul of a poet, a great reader of the surrealists’ predecessors Hoffmann, Novalis, Rimbaud, Nerval, and Proust and of the surrealist poet Eluard. He falls in love with his frivolous but mysterious classmate Gina. The two literally exchange bodies after making love for the first time in Gina’s secret room in the Antipa Museum. A crimson door in her room leads through labyrinths that open up a surreal, underground world under the visible Bucharest. Through her, Andrei enters a surreal world where mirrors cease to reflect reality and become prophetic objects. In the mirror in Gina’s room, Andrei sees reflected his coming metamorphosis, a monstrous and fantastic transformation that hybridizes Kafka’s Metamorphosis with Woolf ’s Orlando, but like a surreal object, the mirror also stands for the text of “Gemini” itself. Like Nerval, who wrote his Aurélia in the Passy clinic as therapy, our narrator— whether a boy or a woman—writes the story from a clinic for the mentally ill. It is Andrei writing from Gina’s body, yet we can’t tell who writes whom, as his landscape of memories is invaded by hers: “Lost in the landscape of her brain . . . along the obscure forest of her prosencephalon”—a phrase that anachronistically blends Dante’s selva oscura with modern medical terminology—“mirroring myself in the waters of her epiphysis (but looking at whom?), crossing above the memory bolgias . . . I stare at my thin fingers, my new fingers . . . It is with them that I have been holding my ballpoint pen. Therefore—who is the writer?” (Nostalgia 137).

2

I will refer to Cărtărescu’s story “Gemenii” from Nostalgia as “Gemini” rather than “Twins,” the title given by Julian Semilian when he translated Nostalgia for New Directions in 2005. Semilian’s translation is generally excellent, though in this particular case I think “Gemini” is preferable as it captures the double meaning of the Romanian word, which refers both to twins and the zodiac sign. One of the ways Cărtărescu suggests the symmetry between the two main characters, Andrei and Gina, is the fact that they are both born under this sign, as was Cărtărescu himself.

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The answer to this question comes from the key scene that epitomizes the entire stakes of the story, in an object that functions as a surrealist object: a playing card. In the clinic, a woman named Elisabeta reads the cards. One day, she decides to read them for our androgynous narrator: she spread the cards out like fans, then arranged in rows and pictures, and just as she was about to point to one with her finger and say, “This is you,” she suddenly froze. I stared at the card that Elisabeta continued to point at with gaping eyes. It was a jack, but the lower side of the card was not the same jack turned upside down, but a superb queen of clubs, with a jasmine flower between her fingers. I quickly shuffled the cards, but Elisabeta went into convulsions. After the crisis was over, we quickly went together over every single card in the pack but couldn’t find the ambiguous image. 115

The disappearing playing card sums up the past encounters between Gina and Andrei, but also dreams, dreamed memories, and unclassifiable moments in time. In Romanian, carte de joc means both playing card and book for playing. This untranslatable pun makes the card/book behave like a surrealist object, opened to the past but also prophesying the future. It brings together a series of past moments in the love story while announcing the terrible ending of both Andrei and Gina, who commit suicide—or is it a crime against the loved one, in whose body they are prisoners?—and then disappear symmetrically: “Gemini” opens with Gina in Andrei’s body putting on makeup and dressing up as a woman before taking a fatal dose of sleeping pills, and closes with Andrei in Gina’s body, in her room, wearing her dress, and setting himself/herself on fire. The story thus comes full circle and disappears as if it had never existed, like Elisabeta’s playing card, which has become the book of life and death, the book/ card that kills. To play games seriously and to play with books is a behavior that resonates with Alice’s games, but also with the surrealists, for whom Alice was a model—and also a figure in the Tarot of Marseille. No doubt Cărtărescu partly owes the idea of a playing card that appears only to disappear as if it never was, to Borges, whose “Book of Sand”“has no beginning or an end” (Collected Fictions 481). Borges’ book has apparently random page numbers, and mysterious illustrations that appear only once before disappearing forever: It also bore a small illustration, like those one sees in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by the unskilled hand of a child.

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It was at that point that the stranger spoke again. “Look at it well. You will never see it again.” 481

But the homonymy between the book behaving like a being-object and a prophetic playing card with a will of its own also connects Cărtărescu to Proust and Breton. In the mysterious magic bedchamber of Saint-Loup, Proust’s narrator muses on the activity of reading, in a passage that plays on the double meaning of feuille, both the page of a book and a leaf. In a passage that anticipates both the surrealists’ book-objects and Borges’ book of sand, Proust’s narrator writes how the unseen hand of a god was turning the pages of the book he read, as a breeze shuffles dead leaves on a road and like a deck of playing cards could spread themselves out under their own volition. Independent of the subject, they are no longer cards/books we play with, but, as in “Gemini,” cards/books that play with us: Then, if the sick man reads, the pages will turn silently as though fingered by a god [feuilletées par un dieu] . . . hammer-blows . . . like the murmur of leaves [feuillages] playing by the roadside with the passing breeze. We play games of patience with the cards which we do not hear [des cartes qu’on n’entend pas], so much that we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun to play with us. In Search of Lost Time 5: 93

Breton, in turn, built on Proust’s image of sentient playing cards through his constant reading of cards, either as a surrealist activity or in the game of the Tarot of Marseille. Nadja’s “books left ajar, like doors” (Nadja 18) return in the form of the card reading that Breton describes in Amour fou preceding Jacqueline’s entering his life. This reading resonates oddly with Cărtărescu’s disappearing card, as Breton also accompanies the text with a photo by Man Ray entitled “Moi, Elle” (“Myself and her”), showing a mannequin’s black hand laying a queen of hearts at the center of the cards spread out in the shape of a cross, a type of spread that aptly shows both the past and the future, like Elisabeta’s card and the surrealist object. At the center of the cross we see an ambiguous young androgyne figure that Breton used in card readings read according to his own rules; he saw in it a manifestation of his own desire and an anticipation of the woman who was about to enter his life:

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I preferred [to] . . . place the cards in a cross, placing in the center what I am asking about: myself and her, love, danger, death, mystery . . . to interpose, rapidly and within the figure, some central object, highly personalized, such as a letter or a snapshot . . . the statuette, in raw rubber, of some strange young person [un jeune être bizarre] listening, bleeding as I observed, at the slightest scratch, with an unstoppable dark sap. Mad Love 16

To match this object, the two cards facing up in Man Ray’s photo show the mirrored pair of the queen and king of hearts standing for the lovers. Like Borges’ book of sand, Breton’s androgynous being-object is a mirror of the self ’s most central moment in life; it has no beginning and no ending: “a being who particularly touches me insofar as I know neither its origins, nor its ends . . . this last object, mediated by my cards, has never told me about anything other than myself, bringing me back always to the living center of my life” (16). The mysterious card in “Gemini” is indeed the double portrait of our androgynous narrator, who is split literally into the two lovers, Andrei and Gina, whose names put together echo the Romanian word androgin (androgyne). When Elisabeta points doubtfully at the card, she’s only repeating a gesture we’ve earlier seen Gina making in her room, prior to the moment of the metamorphosis, but prophesying it retrospectively. To point without words is to point at the unnamable: lovemaking, birth, and death are such unnamable experiences, as they precede or follow language. Years later, in Blinding, Cărtărescu would include a moving poem about playing a game of cards with his mother, using a surreal deck of cards: together we would play an eternal game of cards with two sides: life, death. 23

Like Breton’s rubber androgynous being-object, the monstrous metamorphosis lies at the center of Andrei’s life, book, or card spread: “[Kafka’s] ‘Metamorphosis’— the story which I have thought about relating here . . . that insect is me . . . I will write not to construct a story, but to exorcise an obsession, to protect my soul from a monster, a monster terrifying not through hideousness but beauty” (Nostalgia 69–70). Like the surrealist object of desire that sums up past experiences in the chrysalis that will open into a butterfly—the beloved of one’s dreams—the playing card sums up a series of past scenes between Andrei and Gina that have

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in common a symmetry of mirrors or mirrored names, bodies, images. A pair of such scenes frames the key scene of looking into the mirror in Gina’s room, when the mirror doesn’t reflect but prophesies a future reality. As she and Andrei are looking into the mirror, Gina points at their reflected image, but the image in the mirror doesn’t repeat her gesture. In a reworking of the myth of the Androgyne in Plato’s Symposium, her finger divides their faces in half, stopping on their chest to point at their heart, before her open hand on the surface of the mirror brings together the two halves of each of their faces, in a gesture that anticipates their metamorphosis. Immediately afterward, when Gina lies on the bed, sleeping with open eyes, Andrei looks into her pupils that mirror the future in a dream: “I leaned over Gina and stared in her eyes, their pupils enormously dilated . . . But instead of seeing my face in her obscured pupils, I saw hers!” (114, author’s emphasis). This mirror scene is framed by two other pairings. Before they enter Gina’s room, we see her and Andrei walking through the snow back to her place. Then after the terrible revelation Andrei has seeing the future in Gina’s dreaming pupils, he walks back home through the same snow and runs into a couple that looks oddly familiar: “We stared for an instance into each other’s eyes before they went on, toward Gina’s street; the young man was I” (118). A second set of symmetrical scenes—one that happens in reality, a second one in a dream—takes the surreal playing card to a structural level, as Cărtărescu rewrites the scene in Woolf ’s Orlando when Orlando and the Russian princess Sasha meet on the frozen Thames, a scene which is pervaded by the uncertainty of a mysterious skater’s sex and which anticipates Orlando’s metamorphosis into a woman. Left by Gina, Andrei meets a strange, mysterious woman on a frozen lake on New Year’s Eve. “She was a woman, and she seemed monstrous, a harbinger of death . . . She stared into my eyes. She was concentrating, as though she wanted to pierce my brain and leave there her terrible message” (123–4). A few pages later, this scene returns in Andrei’s dreams, anticipating the apparition of the mysterious playing card: Sitting on a crust of ice that reflected the stars, I made my way on the surface of an infinite mirror, on the world’s glass edge . . . A silhouette tore itself from the fog and began advancing toward me, stepping on the mirror’s sheen with naked soles. It was a woman, but her image in the mirror below was a man . . . She looked deep into my eyes, as though her life depended on what she had to tell me. I was trying to help her, to understand her, I emptied my brain to make room for her to get inside. 134

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The abominable mirrors from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the “monstrous book” from “The Book of Sand” have found a new metamorphosis in “Gemini,” but at the same time the story moves backward toward the Parisian surrealists’ understanding of the logic of the object. The assertion by one of the heresiarchs in Tlön that “Mirrors and copulation are abominable” (Borges, Collected Fictions 68) is rewritten in “Gemini”: “It is not mirrors and copulation which are abominable, it is beauty” (Nostalgia 75). Associating beauty with the terrible, the terrifying, and the monstrous, Cărtărescu is echoing Breton’s convulsive beauty that allows only the marvelous to be beautiful, irrespective of whether it is produced by fear, desire, or the uncanny. Thus the surreal card comes full circle, as the book opens and ends with the terrible experience of death in someone else’s body. Like the book of sand, Elisabeta’s card brings together all the surreal moments of doubleness that preceded it, but also closes with the strange prophecy of the actual book. Made androgynously from realistic diary inserts that belong to the masculine side of the narrator, mixed with the fantastic dreams of its feminine side, this bookplaying card, this being-object, closes upon itself like a trap door from The Thousand and One Nights and disappears as if it never existed.

Messages hidden in maps: the cryptogram world of Blinding In the period preceding his work on Blinding, a recurrent dream appears in different variants in Cărtărescu’s diary: an adolescent looking through the window of his parents’ communist-era apartment at the Bucharest of his dreams, imagining colossal subterranean buildings, until the great wall of another communist apartment block deprives him of his infinite oneiric space. This scene becomes the opening of the trilogy, and serves a structuring symbol of the narrative: the symbol of Communism which destroys interwar Bucharest; the symbol of Romania’s political isolation in the Eastern bloc; the symbol of all barriers imposed on a creative individuality; a local version of the Berlin Wall, and last but not least, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Blinding is “a diary enormously dilated” (Diary 1: 212), where dream and memory totally overlap. Poetry takes on a very personal meaning for Cărtărescu in the book: it means dreams, memory, childhood, nostalgia and melancholy, and the way to redemption. This is the opposite of maturity: “I am still refusing maturity. I fight it with poetry. One way or another, I will return to poetry” (Diary

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1: 223). The history covered by Blinding spans a century and a half, starting with the mythical tale of his mother’s Bulgarian ancestors in the mid-nineteenth century, continuing with the years of World War II when his mother moves from the country to work in a Bucharest factory, and leading up to the Communist years and the 1989 revolution. Sean Cotter’s translation of the first volume captures the distinct voice of each of the novel’s three narrative levels. There is a first-person narrative by someone named Mircea writing in the last years of the 1980s, diving into his childhood and adolescence, a Proustian voice of melancholy and nostalgia, a voice resonant of the adult narrator’s voice in Nostalgia; there is a third-person narrative describing Mircea’s childhood and the years before his birth, his mother’s and his ancestors’ distant past, resonant of García Márquez’s visionary Macondo; finally, there is a third-person narrative in essay-like pages, reminiscent of Pynchon and of Borges’ dream of an encyclopedia as world. A strong religious and encyclopedic drive organizes the trilogy. Structurally, both the Divine Comedy and Finnegans Wake are brought together to shape the trilogy: with an ending of each part playing on the word in the title, mirroring Dante’s stelle (i.e., the blinding Empyrean light), the trilogy results in what we could call an abookalypse that proves to be a new, literary genesis, just as Finnegans Wake’s ending is, in fact, the beginning of the novel. Many central and Eastern European writers explore questions of identity, memory, and the past, a natural outcome of their isolation behind the Iron Curtain, but also an effect of local political histories that need to be rewritten after the fall of the Communist regimes. But in Cărtărescu’s writings, these questions are explored with different instruments and to a different outcome than in work by figures such as Péter Nádas or Péter Esterházy. For Cărtărescu, history is no longer social and political history, nor a family chronicle with its parallel stories and interwoven structures, but rather a means to redefine human beings as creators as much as creations of their past. Dreams, fictions, myths, and memory unfold as the universal memory Akasia that encompasses both the unknown past and the future. This collective memory behaves likes a surrealist object accessible through a Dantesque journey through the brain. The fetus in the womb is connected to his mother’s neural system, so he can dream her dreams, and in turn, through her, can have access to the entire past his mother lived before his birth. And so on farther back in time, it is enough for Mircea to sleep next to his grandfather to gain access to this lost memory: “I rested my head beside Tataie’s and dreamed his dreams . . . I clearly saw—blue, separate, fluttering—a halo of

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pure light around his spiky head” (Blinding 48). Such a halo of blue light always surrounded the apparition of the marvelous in Cien años de soledad, whether in the form of the ice brought by the gypsies or when cited from one of Eluard’s major poems from L’amour la poésie—“La terre est bleue comme une orange” (“The earth is blue like an orange”)—misquoted by José Arcadio as “the earth is round like an orange” (One Hundred Years of Solitude 8). In “Gemini” and again in Solenoid, a surreal blue sphere appears out of nowhere in front of the narrator’s eyes and disappears without a trace, like the signs in the book of sand. For Cărtărescu, blue is the color of dreams that function like Melquíades’ parchments to access the unknown past: “the neuron bells opened like wonders, like sea urchins on their peduncles, rocking and undulating in the solar wind of my Tataie’s halo. I then descended into a delirious Scythia” (Blinding 48). Expanding an individual memory to precede the birth of the individual and to include things that have not yet come to pass was a path opened by Nerval’s and Proust’s representation of memory as an interior journey through the brain. In Aurélia, Nerval writes: “I was sinking into an abyss which cut through the globe. I felt myself being buoyed along by a current of molten metal; a thousand similar streams whose hues varied with their chemical composition were crisscrossing the earth like the vessels or veins that wind through the lobes of the brain” (272). Before recounting Swann’s love story that took place before his birth, Proust’s narrator introduces a similar image of collective memory, as a rock made of different geological strata brought together in one mind: All these memories . . . I could not discern between them—between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or “perfume,” and finally those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand—if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation. Swann’s Way 262–3

As we follow Mircea through his mother’s and grandfather’s dreams in Blinding, a secret past opens that tells the story of his mother’s ancestors and their moving from Bulgaria to Romania after an apocalyptic mass orgy, brought upon the village by poppy seeds given to them by gypsies. As in García Márquez’s novel, gypsies are the source of the marvelous; they are replaced in Blinding by circus people who travel the world to carry a secret message that is revealed by the pattern of their travels throughout the world when traced on a map. The secret message is the trilogy itself that tells of the birth of a messiah, who is none

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other than the narrator. To the trained eye, reality is a cryptogram that carries a secret message: Two years later, the officer still could see before his eyes an enormous, illegible, hazy newspaper article with a headline two fingers tall that he tried in vain to read, an article printed around a map of Eastern Europe, the socialist camp, over which, in a large arc . . . a word was written, in enormous type: BLINDING The lieutenant knew that he was holding a document of historic proportions. The letters showed nothing other than the path of the travelling caravans, which cut through fields, crossed watercourses, went brazenly up mountains and sank into sulfurous swamps to draw (for whose eyes?) with invisible traces a word across the curvature of the planet. He alone, Securitate officer Stănilă Ion, through his exceptional abilities, had unmasked . . . [a] conspiracy against the state powers of the Warsaw Pact. 395–6

As Cărtărescu wrote in his diary, he borrowed the idea of a world conspiracy from Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Diary 1: 390–91), which portrays a hidden surreality collectively invented according to a larger plan. Also in play is Borges’ Library of Babel, with its volumes bearing surreal titles such as The Plaster Cramp and Combed Thunder: “these phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to cryptographic or allegorical ‘reading’ ” (Blinding 117). The pattern traced on the map by the caravans traveling around Europe, spelling out the title “BLINDING ,” can be compared to García Márquez’s gypsies’ cyclical return each March as a sign of rejuvenation, and to Melquíades’ writing the entire world of Macondo into a book. More than a world conspiracy of “Those Who Know,” “Blinding” is a cryptogram for the apocalypse and the birth of a new world that coincides, like the ending of Cien años, with the ending of the first volume and the birth of the messiah, our narrator. The second time we hear this word, we’re in the middle of an apocalyptic marriage of heaven and hell that carves its way through the body of the book to seek the way out through the birth that closes the first part of the trilogy: and evil will rise through good so that its darkness increases, and at their meeting, and above them, where they will arch out of themselves and come together, they will become identical, light and dark, in a single, ecstatic word: BLINDING . “Blinding!” the crowd shouted. 450

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But before Borges and García Márquez, reality as a cryptogram was one of the major ideas that Breton put forth in Nadja: “Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram” (112). And again in Amour fou: A person will know how to proceed when, like the painter, he consents to reproduce, without any charge, what an appropriate grid tells him in advance of his own acts. This grid exists. Every life contains these homogenous patterns of facts, whose surface is cracked or cloudy. Each person has only to stare at them fixedly in order to read his own future . . . Everything humans might want to know is written upon this grid in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire. 129, Breton’s emphasis

A second exploration of the deeper meaning hidden underneath the habitual skin of objects is found in Breton’s predecessor Proust, who uses a type of imagery closely related to the surrealists’: objects as hieroglyphs whose meaning we need to learn: I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters [caractères hiéroglyphes] which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. Time Regained 273

With such a rich legacy, Cărtărescu’s bringing the dream forth as a cryptogram is an oblique tribute to surrealism’s world view: “The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfares, making constellations and engrams that someone, from a great height, could read like a multicolored tattoo” (Blinding 40). “What does it say on my skin, I wonder,” muses the narrator in Solenoid too (523–4), much as Aureliano Babilonia Buendía wondered all his life, until at the end he finally deciphers Melquíades’ Sanskrit parchments—another type of skin—to discover his family’s past and his own life and death, which, as in Cărtărescu’s book, coincides with the end of the book itself. Needless to say, Melquíades’ manuscripts, though written in Sanskrit, are further coded in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the Lacedemonian military code (One Hundred Years of Solitude 414). The birth of the last Buendía is accompanied by the yellow butterflies that announced his father Mauricio Babilonia’s entering the story, and the same fluttering of wings comes out of Melquíades’ parchments as Aureliano deciphers them. The parchments function partly as Borges’ book of sand, as they disappear the moment

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the book ends, but also as a surrealist object that extends beyond the subject’s memory grasp: “he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror” (415). Taken on a structural level, the yellow butterflies stand for the appearance of the marvelous (as Mauricio Babilonia has the dark melancholy eyes of the gypsies), but also for birth and death. The Securitate officer in Blinding has the revelation of a world conspiracy as he attends a circus performance where a strange butterfly appears: “Now he knew: the contact had been made! The butterfly was the message!” (394, author’s emphasis). A symbol of death and rebirth, the butterfly also provides the very structure of Cărtărescu’s trilogy, made of The Left Wing, The Body, and The Right Wing. An intermediary and a hieroglyph, the butterfly is a surrealist object that carries a hidden message. Breton’s Nadja likes to call herself a butterfly, after telling Breton that she’s the intermediary spirit that sees the star toward which he’s heading. A true surrealist object, her butterfly would have the body made of a Mazda brand lightbulb, with which her name had a strange euphonic resonance: “She enjoyed imagining herself as a butterfly whose body consisted of a Mazda (Nadja) bulb toward which rose a charmed snake” (Breton, Nadja 129). But the magic blue light of the marvelous and the apparition of the yellow butterflies aren’t the only things that related García Márquez to the world of surrealism and that Cărtărescu builds on. Just as we’re approaching the end of everything in Macondo, a whirlwind arises—perhaps born from the gentle fluttering of the yellow butterflies’ wings? It pulls off Aureliano’s house and lifts it into the air, an impossible object that defies gravity: “He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations” (One Hundred Years of Solitude 415). Years later, in Solenoid, a giant magnetic solenoid coil, made of six different coils arranged in the shape of a flower on the map of Bucharest, will make the whole city rise to the skies, uprooting its foundations: “Bucharest, the most melancholic city in the world” (Solenoid 713).

The paradise of crimson traps: Solenoid Published in 2015, Solenoid unfolds an alternative history to the one described in Blinding: a “what if ” history of how the narrator’s life would have been if he hadn’t become the leading poet of his generation. With the same prophetic drive

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and eschatological taste that became Cărtărescu’s hallmark in Blinding, Solenoid imagines a Bucharest made of trapdoors that lead, like Alice’s rabbit hole, to a marvelous underground reality explored through dreams. There we encounter the objects from his past, which the narrator collects not so much in a Proustian or Pamuk-like way, but rather because they prophetically hold the promise of an escape from the body’s prison. These objects include his pigtails from his early childhood, when his mother dressed him up as a girl, his baby teeth (“milk teeth” in Romanian), some pieces from the thread used to tie his umbilical cord. Such trapdoors are the six solenoids located in key energetic places in the anatomy of Bucharest, with the central one under the city morgue. Based on magnetic principles, they are a development of Melquíades’ magnets, and have the effect of his parchments deciphered at the end of Cien años: they raise Bucharest to the sky. If Blinding showed a narrator attuned to Gregor Samsa’s solitude, Solenoid moves closer to the Kafka of his diary and personal papers. In his own diary written between Nostalgia and The Left Wing, Cărtărescu constantly refers to the story Kafka records in his diary about Hans and Amalia, the brother and sister who are lured into an enigmatic warehouse by a stranger. Cărtărescu describes this as his favorite part of the diary next to Kafka’s dream of the blinding light coming through the cracks in the Great Wall of China. In Solenoid, we actually step into the darkness of Kafka’s warehouse, now through a crimson door; it turns out to be the room where the Alice-like Nana meets her creator, the author Mircea Cărtărescu dramatized in another of Nostalgia’s stories, “REM .” Inside the room, as in the narrator’s diary, terrifying dreams—having his teeth fall out, being tossed around his room by an invisible force, being visited or watched by strange people in white—function like the imperceptible cracks in the pitch darkness to let the blinding light in. A fragment from Kafka’s unpublished papers comes back periodically in Solenoid, and it could be the poetic epitome of Cărtărescu’s novel: “The Dream Lord, great Isachar, sat in front of the mirror, his back close to the surface, his head bent far back and sunk deep in the mirror. Hermana, the Lord of Dusk entered and dived into Isachar’s chest until he disappeared.” Kafka has replaced the second “n” of Hermann (his father’s name) with the feminine “a,” but still refers to Hermana as “Herr” (“Lord”) of the Dusk. This dual-gendered prophetic image becomes a touchstone for the oneiric metamorphoses throughout Solenoid, as the narrator transcribes dozens of dreams from his diary over the course of the novel. To transcribe dreams and find in them cryptogrammic

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messages of the reality underneath the skin of objects was a favorite activity of the surrealists, who found in Kafka a kindred spirit. In Minotaure 10 (1937), Breton published a note on Kafka in which he described him as an inveterate dreamer in the tradition of Nerval, with an incredible power to leave his body and animate the “virtual objects” of his dreams: by abandoning the sleeping human body for them, he can ultimately enjoy their interiority. “I” am thus identifying with everything I am separated from when awake. No one managed as Kafka did to imbue inanimate things with his own sensibility, no one was more brilliant than he in following Nerval’s teaching from The Golden Verses . . . in Kafka, man stews in the tenebrous broth of anxiety, but humor makes the lid shake and traces in the air the steamy blue letters of kabalistic formulas. “Têtes d’orage,” 7

Cărtărescu colors Hermana, the Lord/Lady of the Dusk, in the surreal crimson of his wound-trapdoors that lead into a distant, dreamlike past, even as they open prophetically onto a much richer version of our impoverished notion of reality. The most ordinary objects can engender this vision, as for example teeth, which migrate from Nerval to Blinding to Solenoid. In Nerval’s poem “Delfica,” teeth function as remembered objects in which one can read the future: “Do you recognize the TEMPLE with its immense peristyle, / and the bitter lemons that bore the imprint of your teeth?/ . . . the earth has shuddered with a prophetic breath” (Selected Writings 397). In Blinding, memory-bearing teeth reappear, at once ironically reduced and grotesquely enhanced, in the form of dentures. The narrator experiences a disturbing vision of Bucharest as he walks through the city with his mother’s dentures in his pocket: “Maybe under the skin of the city, like under a wound, there really were caves . . . Now the city’s gums crumbled like plaster. Soon, that side of the street looked like a mouth of ruined teeth” (Blinding 16). The crimson door that covers old wounds in Nostalgia—like the pain of losing one’s childhood or one’s own body into another’s—is replaced in Blinding by the set of dentures, an irrational disturbing object: It was their color. There was something in particular about that tinge that reminded me of something I had seen before, something I had once known, but could not bring back to mind. For a few days, I carried my mother’s gums and teeth in my pocket everywhere I walked . . . I was waiting . . . for the moment when the twilight would turn exactly the same color as my mother’s gums, and suddenly it did. 29

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Much as Kafka’s Lord of Dusk Hermana disappears into the mirror of dreams, the mother’s teeth melt into the falling dusk: “I raised the dentures over my head, and the teeth began to glitter, yellow like a salt flame, while the gums disappeared, melting into the matching color of the evening” (30). The surrealist object-being comes to life as a relic of the past, and metamorphoses into the prophetic image at the heart of Blinding, a virgin mother carrying her son, the writerly messiah who will save the world of our text: I stared at the dentures for a few more minutes in the darkening light, until the dusk turned as scarlet as blood in veins, and the dental appliance began to glow with an interior light, as though a gentle fluorescent gas had filled the curved rubber gums. And then my mother formed, like a phantom, around her dentures . . . Together, in the descending darkness, we formed an enigmatic statue, holding still for no one. I came back to myself with the dentures in my hand and a sense of frustration, the feeling that I had been very close to something important and serious. 30

The relic that holds the painful memory of death and the promise of renewal is another object-being that develops from the pages of Cien años, where a dying Melquíades rejuvenates instantly as he puts a set of new teeth in his mouth. When his time comes to die, he removes the dentures and puts them in a glass of water, where yellow flowers grow, the same yellow of Mauricio Babilonia’s butterflies that bring both death and life. In Solenoid, the dentures are replaced by the narrator’s baby teeth, which arrange themselves in cryptogrammic constellations in the air as he falls asleep after turning on the solenoid under his house: “And my little teeth spread slowly above my head, in an arch, forming strange constellations in the darkness of the room. I fell asleep with my clothes on, under the glimmering light of my old milk teeth, like lights coming out from the depths of my temporal body” (257). Even as he engages with the practice of the surrealist object, Cărtărescu finds in Lautréamont’s proto-Borgesian poetics of plagiarism a key to understanding the continuum dream-fiction-reality in which he has lived since childhood: “The first book I read had been anonymous, without a title, and without the opening chapters, as any book should in fact be” (Solenoid 214). Building on Breton’s definition of surreality as based in objects that merge the seemingly opposed states of dream and reality, the narrator finds a coin that has the letters A, O, R on one side, and M and U on the other. As he starts flipping the coin, he sees that the word AMOUR is formed, and thus he concludes that we can decipher the secret

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message of our reality by bringing the two sides of our life together: “I feel that I’ve always been like this: the unanimous, boring, and tangible world on one side of the coin, and the secret, intimate, phantasm-like world, my mind’s world of dreams, on the other. Neither is complete or true without the other” (Solenoid 92). This parallel image isn’t just a passing coincidence. Solenoid’s ideological structure and inner logic seem to have been prophesied in Breton’s first manifesto, which emphasized the necessity of going back to the logic of childhood if we want to be complete: The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the stage of waiting for this kind of spider . . . But the faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant are all devices which we can always call upon without fear of deception. There are fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue. Manifestoes 16

So too in Solenoid, “during the dream, you have access to your childhood brain as if to an enchanted castle at the center of your mind” (258). A recurrent parable in Solenoid describes dreams and books as escape plans (637). This parable tells of a prisoner who starts to hear noises coming through the wall of his cell, and takes them as a code through which some other prisoner is giving him a plan of escape. He does indeed escape following this plan, yet he discovers that no such prisoner existed; his wall was the outside wall of the prison. Hearing noises in magic rooms made by no one was an element that Breton liked in Proust’s passage on the strange noises he hears outside SaintLoup’s bedroom: “I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I could hear movement—something stirring, something being dropped. I felt the room was not empty, that there was somebody there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn” (In Search of Lost Time 3:91). One reason for Breton’s preference for this scene is that it resonates with his own notion of the marvelous potential of everyday reality. Years later, Cărtărescu includes a similar parable in Solenoid that will become one of the poetic metaphors of his book. The house in Solenoid is strangely fluid, with a variable number of doors and corridors that sometimes appear only once: “Sometimes I feel like I am standing still and the house rotates around me: the windows are moving closer, the corridors slowly absorb me, doors open in front of me . . . Perspectives change continuously” (84). In Nadja, a strikingly similar vision appears:

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From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature

Secret staircases, frames from which the paintings quickly slip aside and vanish (giving way to an archangel bearing a sword or to those who must forever advance), buttons which must be indirectly pressed to make an entire room move sideways vertically, or immediately change all its furnishings; we may imagine the mind’s greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls [le paradis des pièges]. 112

In a décor borrowed almost directly from Breton’s Nadja, Cărtărescu makes us travel in his paradise of traps, opened by secret buttons like the one in his room that makes us levitate with him every night, as he dreams his Kafkaesque dreams. In Amour fou, Breton saw Hamlet’s reading of images in the clouds—a camel, a weasel, a whale—as another way to interrogate our subconscious: “looking at a cloud from the earth is really the best way to interrogate one’s own desire” (85). In Solenoid, the cryptogrammic readings of the clouds point toward a world governed by Lautréamont’s chance encounter and the surrealists’ objective hazard: “you find in the grass a cow’s white skull with wavy teeth . . . and all of a sudden you lift your eyes to the endless covered sky and you see a cloud with the exact shape of the skull you’re holding in your hands . . . Life is like a game” (490). Playing serious games, either by reading their own Tarot deck or by collaboratively drawing or writing exquisite corpses, taking dreams to be trapdoors and escape plans from the immobility of habitual reality, bringing the poetic logic of dreams into their daily lives, and aiming above everything to enrich our impoverished notion of reality, the surrealists had a remarkable legacy in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and beyond. With Orhan Pamuk and Mircea Cărtărescu, as with Borges and Nabokov, Lautréamont’s dream of an anonymous literature made by all, joined with Breton’s invisible networks of elective affinities that bring together the most diverse minds, has triumphed in the most surreal way.

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320

Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 291 (magazine) 131 Abstract Expressionism 161 Adorno, Theodor 260–1 affective friendship 25–6 Afro-Caribbean writers and artists 11–12 Agha, Mehmet 147 Alice (Lewis Carroll character) 2, 17, 18, 19, 21, 36–8, 64, 66, 164, 240, 276 Allard, Roger 117 Amour fou (Breton) 20, 22, 39, 42, 60, 66, 69, 73, 92, 96–9, 192–7, 200–1, 240, 245–54, 256–8, 275–6, 294, 300, 306 analogy 40–6 anamorphosis 52–3, 54, 61, 172 anticolonialism 47 Apollinaire 24, 32, 40, 85 “Apparitions Aérodynamiques des ‘ÊtresObjets’ ” (Dalí) 64 Appel, Alfred 207, 214 Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile 12 Aragon, Louis 5–6, 23–6, 32, 71, 88–9, 167, 183 La Défense de l’infini 271–5 “Le Cahier noir” 271, 273–5 Le Mauvais plaisant 272–3 Arcane 17 (Breton) 29, 42, 196, 201–2, 258 Archimboldo, Giuseppe 52 Armenian genocide 267 Armory Show, New York, 1913 127–31, 135–6 arseholes, Dalí on 58 art dealers, artists as 135, 170 Art et liberté 12 “Ascendant Sign” (Breton) 39–41 ascendant sign, the 39–41, 46 Ashbery, John 9

Augustín, Kevin Perromat 80 Aurélia (Nerval) 278–81, 291 Au Sans Pareil 27–8, 89, 100, 103, 110 Austin, Chick 140–2 automatic writing 28, 43, 49, 61, 100–1, 124 components 42 failure to practice 46 origins 31–5 political position-taking 46 practice 34–9 predecessors 35–6, 46 automatism 4–5, 261 automatons 119, 270 Balakian, Anna 25, 35, 38–9, 42, 58, 160, 164, 190–1 Balderston, Daniel 77n, 113 Bandier, Norbert 6, 10, 30–1, 33 Barish, Evelyn 77–8 Barr, Alfred H. 9, 133–4, 141–8 Basho, Matsuo 41–2 Bataille, Georges 70, 92 Baudelaire, Charles 33, 40, 99, 107 Beach, Sylvia 6, 22–3, 31, 213 beauty 63–4, 66–7, 98, 122, 194–5, 216–19, 225–32, 250 Be-bop Baby (Cărtărescu) 289 being-object 261–3, 293–6 Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette 131, 132, 133 Bellmer, Hans 7, 226–8 Benayoun, Robert 12 Berberova, Nina 214 Berlin Wall, fall of 287, 296 Bizet, Georges, Carmen 236 Black Book, The (Pamuk) 6, 267–71 “Riddles in Faces” 275–7, 286–7 structure 273–5 Blanchot, Maurice 80

321

322 Blinding trilogy (Cărtărescu) 267–301 passim Böcklin, Arnold, The Isle of the Dead 208–9, 225–6, 227, 229–30 “Bohemia Crystal Vase” (Breton) 21 “Book of Sand” (Borges) 292–3 Borges, Jorge Luis 3, 13, 269, 289, 290, 306 The Book of Sand 118, 124, 292–3, 296 and Breton 4–5 “The Circular Ruins” 119–22 El Jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) 87 “L’Approche du caché” 87, 92 Lautréamont as a model for Pierre Menard 99–103, 105–6, 107 “The Library of Babel” 116, 280, 299 “The Mirror and the Mask” 118–19 “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” 6, 75–87, 119 and plagiarism 4–5, 108–11 rejection of surrealism 78 scholarship 78–80 and Sur 82 surrealist connection 5 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” 108–9, 296, 299 “Undr” 119 see also Menard, Pierre (Borges character) Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 20, 28 Boyd, Brian 214 Brauner, Victor 17 Breton, André 2, 11, 173, 204 1924 manifesto 47 Amour fou 20, 22, 39, 42, 60, 66, 69, 73, 92, 96–9, 192–201, 240, 245–58, 275–6, 294, 300, 306 and analogy 40–6 anticommercialism 169 Arcane 17 29, 42, 196, 201–2, 258 art and manuscript collection 9 as art dealer 135 “Ascendant Sign” 39–41 automatic writing 34–9, 42–3, 100 automatism 261 and automatons 119 on beauty 66–7

Index “Bohemia Crystal Vase” 21 Borges and 4–5 break with Dalí 4, 58–60 break with Monnier 26–7 break with Valéry 78 Clair de terre 39 Communicating Vessels 62 and Dalí 53, 57–60, 68 on Dalí 72 definition of surrealism 32–3, 121 diatribes against Paul Valéry 117–18 Dictionnaire abregé du surréalisme 82 and dreams 121 Entretiens 20–8, 70–1, 157 finances 26 first manifesto of surrealism 32–4, 49, 157, 262, 305 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition 161–8 and Freud 53, 55 and friendship 25–6 glass house 19–20 Gradiva art gallery 20, 170, 280–3 and Hilsum 28 internationalization of surrealism 68–74 “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” 7, 259 and Kafka 67 “La beauté sera convulsive” 66 and La Maison des Amis des Livres 23–4 “La situation du surréalisme entre les deux guerres” lecture 75 L’air de l’eau 254, 256–7 Lautréamont dossier 84 and Lautréamont’s poetry 105 “Le Corset Mystère” 43–6 Le Figaro littéraire statue suggestions 2 “Le merveilleux contre le mystère. À propos du symbolisme” 86, 112, 113 “Le message automatique” 66 Les Champs magnétiques 28, 32, 38–9, 42, 89, 100–1, 261–2 Les Vases communicants 39 and Littérature 85, 88–9, 113–14 “L’Oeuf de l’Église ou le serpent,” 277–8

Index in Menard’s bibliography 112–13, 117–18 and Minotaure 91–2 Monnier on 28–9 Nadja 20, 22, 39, 42, 67, 170, 195–7, 198, 199, 200, 240, 250, 277, 284, 293, 300–1, 305–6 New York exile 159–68, 238, 267–8 and Ocampo 82–4 and Pierre Menard 122–4 poem-objects 13–14, 52, 69, 118 poetry 42–6, 52, 164–5, 252–7 and Proust 261–3 second manifesto of surrealism 39, 49–51, 56, 83 shoe-spoon 191–2, 194–5, 199, 201 “Situation surréaliste de l’objet” 69, 72 and Sur 82 “Sur la route de San Romano” 40 and the surrealist object 7–9, 60–70, 93, 96–9, 118, 174, 183–97 passim, 198, 199, 200–2, 277, 282–3 surrealist theory and practice 10, 34, 179, 182–5 theory of the surrealist object 69–70 third manifesto of surrealism 183–6 “Toujours pour la première fois” 256–7 Valéry mentorship 126 VVV 6, 160, 179, 182–6 What is Surrealism? 19, 71–2, 202, 204 Yale diatribe against Dalí 178–9 Brussosa, Myriam Mallart 76 Bucharest 5, 296, 302 Buendía, Aureliano 14 Bulletin international du surréalisme 72 Buñuel, Luis 47, 49, 56 Bureau of Surrealist Research 39, 186 Cabanne, Paul 115, 116 Caillois, Roger 70 Calinescu, Matei 129, 146 Calvino, Italo 259, 269, 287 Camus, Albert 126 Canary Islands 73 cannibalism 64, 94–5, 100 Cannibalism of Objects (Dalí) 64, 65 Canto, Estela 79

323

capital cultural 4, 56–8, 76, 85 social 25 symbolic 56, 68 Caro, Elisa 201 Carpentier, Alejo 269 Carroll, Lewis 2, 17, 19, 21, 35–8, 42, 46, 64, 66, 276, 283 Cărtărescu, Mircea 3, 5, 13, 259, 264, 265–8, 287–91 Be-bop Baby 289 Blinding trilogy 267–8, 288–304 passim “Europe Has the Shape of My Brain” 290–1 “Gemini” 291–6, 298 Levantul 288, 290 Nostalgia 288–303 passim Solenoid 289, 298, 300, 301–6 Why We Love Women 289 Cartel des Gauches 46 Casanova, Pascale 3, 4 Cassou, Jean 101 Catholic symbolism 164 Caws, Mary Ann 25, 41, 161–2, 164, 190, 200 Centre National du Livre 266, 267 Césaire, Aimé 12, 184–5 chance encounter 51, 69–70, 96–7, 194, 200, 250–1 Chanel, Coco 173 Chants de Maldoror (Lautréamont) 75–6, 88, 102–7, 113, 117 Char, René 49, 56 Chazal, Malcom de 40–1 chess 114–16 chiasmus 46 Church, Henry 92, 213 “The Circular Ruins” (Borges) 119, 121–2 Clair de terre (Breton) 39 Colle, Pierre 137–8, 151 Colon, Jenny 278, 285 commercialization 168–70 commodity fetishes 260 Communicating Vessels (Breton) 62 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 50 Communist Party 46–7 Compagnon, Antoine 80 convulsive beauty 66–7, 98, 122, 194–5, 225, 250

324 Cornell, Joseph 277–8 Cortázar, Julio 289 cosmetics 176, 186 cosmopolitanism 30–1 Cotter, Sean 297 Courbet, Gustave 171 Couturier, Maurice 205, 214 Cravan, Arthur 130, 130, 134 Crosby, Caresse 141 cryptogram 11, 194–201 passim, 296–306 Cubism 94 cultural capital 4, 56–8, 76, 85 Czechoslovakia 11, 72, 190 Dada 1, 9, 21–5, 32, 39, 46, 78, 86, 90, 90, 93–4, 127–31, 144–5 “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” exhibition 188 DADA soulève TOUT 90, 90, 107 Dalí, Salvador 2, 49 “Apparitions Aérodynamiques des ‘Êtres-Objets’ ” 64 on beauty 63–4 and Breton 4, 53, 57–60, 68, 72 Breton’s Yale diatribe against 178–9 Cannibalism of Objects 64, 65 collaboration with Disney 145, 171 commercialization 169, 170 conquest of New York 151–7, 162 coprophilic images 58 cultural capital 57–8 “Declaration of the independence of the imagination and the rights of man to his own madness” 156–7 definition of surrealism 187 Destino 171–2 Dulita 7, 15, 219–23, 224, 225–38, 258 erotic pond 229–30 first American exhibition 137–8 fragrance 133 girl with the jump rope 171–2 Grand Masturbateur 62 Hallucinogenic Toreador 53 Hidden Faces 220–3 The Image Disappears 53, 54 Invisible Lovers 243–4 jewelry 174, 175, 176, 176 Labyrinths 210, 212

Index L’Age d’or 47, 56 Levy discovers 137 Levy on 140 Levy’s gallery exhibition 151–3 lobster telephone 151 Mae West “luscious lips” sofa 151 mannequins 152–3, 170–2, 206–7, 207, 208–9, 216–17, 228 Minotaure articles 63–6 moustache 173 in New York 20, 137–8, 141, 147–8, 150–1 New York World’s Fair pavilion 153–7, 217–18 “Objets psycho-atmosphériquesanamorphiques” 62–3 obsession with Hitler’s buttocks 58 on the origin of surrealism 190 “Paranoia” 172 paranoiac critical method 14, 52, 61, 72, 173–4 Persistence of Memory 137, 140 on primitive art 187 publicity 151 as rebel 55–6 “Rêverie” 219–20, 225, 228–32, 234–5 “The Rotting Donkey” 52, 53, 61 Royal Heart installation 282 Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically 192–4 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí 6, 20, 59–60, 147, 173, 193, 217–38 passim self-plagiarism 68 self-reinvention 9 sexual obsessions 210 “Surrealism and Painting” 67 surrealist jewelry 172–3 and the surrealist object 7, 58, 60–9, 152–3, 155, 172–5, 187–8, 191–4, 286 “Surrealist object with Symbolic Function” 285 surrealist theory and practice 10, 51–68 symbolic capital 56, 68 theories of the body 225–32 Time photo 147, 149 Un chien andalou 56 The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí 57–8, 153

Index Venus with Drawers 217 Vogue presence 6, 18, 19, 67, 71, 147, 148, 154, 170–4, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178, 188, 189, 190, 192–3, 245 “Who Is Surrealism?” 188, 189, 190 Damrosch, David 13 Dante Alighieri 33, 46, 105–6, 233, 254, 256, 278, 288 Darío, Rubén 76n, 129 Dazet, Jean 102 de Andrade, Oswald 94 De Baudelaire au surréalisme (Raymond) 1–2 de Gourmont, Remy 105 de Man, Paul 77–8, 79 de Villeneuve, Justin 173 death instinct 248–9 “Declaration of the independence of the imagination and the rights of man to his own madness” (Dalí) 156–7 defamiliarization 67 dépaysement 19, 188 Desnos, Robert 25–6, 32, 39, 57 Despair (Nabokov) 226 Destino (Dalí) 171–2 detective fiction 269–70 Dictionnaire abregé du surréalisme (Breton) 82 Diment, Galya 216 Dimov, Leonid 11 Disney, Walt 145, 171 Documents 70, 92, 100, 120 dolls, Bellmer’s 226–8 Domínguez, Oscar 17, 73 double image 52–3, 54 Doucet, Jacques 47, 272 dream objects 98 dreams 11, 32, 51, 121, 186, 273, 275, 297–305 passim Dreier, Katherine 166–7 Duchamp, Marcel 9, 115–16, 127–36 passim, 155, 160–1, 167, 241, 281 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition 161, 166–8 The Fountain 95 mannequins 170

325

readymades 69, 93, 95–6, 115, 128, 145, 165, 182, 191, 243 Dulita/Dullita 7, 15, 219–23, 224, 225–38, 258 Dumur, Guy 190 Eckermann, Johann Peter 8 Editions du Sagittaire 100 El Jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) (Borges) 87 Elléouët, Aube Breton 9 Eluard, Gala 56, 62, 137–8, 141, 217–18, 229 Eluard, Paul 32, 56–9, 71–2, 83–4, 86, 90, 92, 108–9, 126, 135, 159, 184, 226, 240, 269–70, 298 Enchanter, The (Nabokov) 212, 214–15, 223, 250 Engdahl, Horace 269 Engels, Friedrich 50 Entretiens (Breton) 20–8 passim, 70–1, 157 Ernst, Max 17, 19, 47, 62, 137–8, 167, 168, 182, 197 Etiemble, René 182 “Europe Has the Shape of My Brain” (Cărtărescu) 290, 291 exhibitions 3, 6, 73, 127 Armory Show, New York, 1913 127–31, 135–6 “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” 188 Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism 142–8 First Papers of Surrealism 161–8 Harvard Society for Contemporary Arts 134 International Surrealist Exhibition 11, 73 Levy’s gallery Dalí exhibition 151–3 Fadiman, Clifton 221 fashion, alliance with Surrealism 167 Faucigny-Lucinge, Jean-Louis de 141 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 9 Finkelstein, Haim 62, 190, 193, 220, 227–8 first manifesto of surrealism 32–4, 49, 157, 262, 305

326

Index

First Papers of Surrealism exhibition 161–8 flea market 96, 191–5, 201, 277, 283 Fondaminsky, Ilya 212–13, 226 Fort, Paul 24 found object/trouvaille 52, 69, 96–8, 194–5, 200–1, 253, 277, 282–3 Fountain, The (Duchamp) 95 Fourier, Charles 40 Fraenkel, Theodore 24 France, Anatole 27, 123 free associations 63 Freud, Sigmund 32, 53, 55, 77, 79, 100, 110, 122, 191, 210, 238, 280 Gallimard 25, 266 García Márquez, Gabriel 5, 259, 261, 269, 289, 297–8, 301 Gazette des Amis des Livres 24 “Gemini” (Cărtărescu) 291–6, 298 Genette, Gérard 80 German romanticism 14 Gide, André 22, 27, 101, 126 Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (Vermeer) 53, 54 Goemans, Camille 50, 56, 71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1–2, 8–10, 124 Golan, Romy 191 Goll, Yvan 29, 32, 178, 188 Gómez de Hermosilla, José 106 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 82, 86 Gongorism 117 Gradiva art gallery, Paris 20, 170, 280–3 Grand Masturbateur (Dalí) 62 graphology 120–1, 275 group strategy 6, 10, 28, 146, 163–4, 222 Guggenheim, Peggy 136, 166, 167 Guilbault, Serge 161 Güiraldes, Ricardo 81 Haiti 12, 202 Halberstadt, Vitaly 115 Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí) 54 Hare, David 160, 182, 201–2 Harvard Society for Contemporary Arts 134 hasard objectif 14, 262

Hayter, Stanley William 159 Heine, Maurice 270 Henein, Georges 12 Henriquez, René 71 Hérold, Jacques 17 Hess, Thomas 153 Hidden Faces (Dalí) 220–3 Hilsum, René 28 Hitler, Adolf 58–9 Hoffmann, E.T.A 218–19 Homer 106 Hugnet, Georges 145, 276–7 Hugo, Valentine 82–6 Hugo, Victor 33 Hunting of the Snark, The (Carroll) 37, 283 Ichiro, Fukuzawa 13 ideological friendship 25–6 image, surrealist practice of 40–1 Image Disappears, The (Dalí) 54 Innocence of Objects, The (Pamuk) 282–3, 285–6 intellectual strategy 60–1, 71, 145, 159–60, 183–6 International Bulletins 73 International Surrealist Exhibition 11, 73 internationalism, Paris 29–31 internationalization 49, 68–74 “Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité” (Breton) 7, 259 Invisible Lovers (Dalí) 243–4 Istanbul (Pamuk) 287 Jacob, Max 85 James, Edward 151 James, William 122 Janaby, Abdul Kader El 12 Janis, Sidney 166–7 Jarry, Alfred 37 Jensen, Wilhelm 280 jewelry 172–4, 175, 176, 176 Jolas, Eugene 22 Jolles, Adam 3, 7, 135, 169–70 Jones, Edward 141 Joyce, James 21–3, 81, 92, 150, 179, 210, 214, 266, 288 Judovitz, Dalía 115–16

Index Kachur, Lewis 3, 70, 133, 141, 144, 146, 167, 169 Kafka, Franz 22, 42, 67, 288, 302–4 Kahlo, Frida 12, 137, 166 Kahn, Simone 26, 39 Kant, Immanuel 124 Kelley, Robin D.G. 11–12 Kiesler, Frederick 186 King, Elliott H. 170 kleptomania 94–5, 100 Koons, Jeff 1 Kra, Lucien 28, 31 Kuhn, Walt 129 Kuzmanovich, Zoran 216 “La beauté sera convulsive” (Breton) 66–7 La Conque 99, 112–13 La conquête du monde par l’image 8 La Coupole, Paris 56–7 La Défense de l’infini (Aragon) 271–5 La Femme 100 têtes (Ernst) 62 La Gaceta literaria 56 La Maison des Amis des Livres 22–9, 80–6, 126, 220 La Phalange 89 La révolution surréaliste 24, 85 La revue européene 31 La Revue surréaliste 26 La Rotonde 31 “La situation du surréalisme entre les deux guerres” (Breton) 75 La Tarde 73 Labyrinths (Dalí) 210, 212 Lacan, Jacques 55, 70 Lacroix, Albert 104 L’Age d’or (Dalí and Buñuel) 47, 56 Lagorio, Arturo 77n L’air de l’eau (Breton) 254–7 Lam, Wifredo 17, 18 Lamantia, Philip 186–7 Lamba, Jacqueline 17, 42, 67, 193, 200, 201–2, 246–54, 255, 256 L’Amic de les Arts 56 Lange, Carl 122 “L’Approche du caché” [The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim], (Borges) 87, 92 Larbaud, Valery 21, 23, 82, 88–9

327

Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse) 4–6, 12, 33, 38, 76n, 82, 87–8, 112, 113, 113, 123, 164, 281, 306 Chants de Maldoror 75–6, 88, 102–7, 113, 117 as a model for Pierre Menard 99–107 plagiarism 37, 85–111 passim, 165, 304 Poésies I et II 75–6, 86, 88–9, 93, 102–11, 117, 120 Lautréamont dossier, the 84, 86 “Le cahier noir” (Aragon) 271, 273–5 Le Chateau étoilé (Breton) 73 “Le Corset Mystère” (Breton) 43–6 Le Disque vert 76, 100 Le Figaro littéraire 2 Le Mauvais plaisant (Aragon) 272–3 “Le merveilleux contre le mystère: À propos du symbolisme” (Breton) 86, 112, 113 “Le message automatique” (Breton) 66 “Le monde au temps des surréalistes” 179, 180 Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 6, 11, 15, 24, 49, 52, 55, 61–3, 85, 170, 194, 219, 269–70 “Le Surréalisme autour du monde” 179, 181 Lear, Edward 21 Lecomte, Marcel 71 Lefrère, Jaques 106 Leiris, Michel 92 Lenin, V.I. 58–9 Leonardo da Vinci 35, 66, 89 Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) (Breton and Soupault) 28, 32, 38–9, 42, 89, 100–1, 261–2 “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie” (Rimbaud) 27 Les Vases communicants (Breton) 39 Levantul (Cărtărescu) 288, 290 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 159, 186 Levy, Julien 9, 64, 133–44, 148–57, 278 Lévy, Paul 47 “The Library of Babel” (Borges) 116, 280, 299 Lichberg, Heinz von 218–19 Life 206–9, 207, 210, 211, 212, 217 Listener, The 73

328 literature, sociology of 3–4 Littérature 23–5, 28, 32, 43, 76, 85–92, 113–14, 126–8 “L’Oeuf de l’Église ou le serpent,” (Breton) 277–8 Lolita (Nabokov) 6, 205–6 and Amour fou 245–58 and Dulita 219–38 passim moral question of 215–16 Soleil Vert perfume 238–45 sources 205–28 and the surrealist object 7 Lorca, Garcia 178 Loüys, Pierre 99, 113, 122 Loy, Mina 136 Lübeck, Mathias 47 Luc-Steinmetz, Jean 105 l’un dans l’autre 40 Lyne, Adrian 215–16 Maar, Michael 218 machine-onaniste 155 Machu, Didier 205–6, 214, 252 “Mademoiselle O” (Nabokov) 92, 246 Magic Realism 79, 124 Magritte, René 51, 71, 168, 171 Malkine, Georges 47 Mallarmé, Stéphane 33, 77, 78, 86, 88, 94, 98–9, 112–13 Mandrágora 12 Manifestos 69, 72 manifestos 42 1924 47 Dada 86, 90, 93–5 Dalí’s “Declaration” 156–7 Pour une littérature-monde en français 9 first manifesto of surrealism 32–4, 49, 157, 262, 305 second manifesto of surrealism 39, 49–51, 56, 83 third manifesto of surrealism 183–6 mannequins 152–3, 170–2, 206–7, 207, 208–9, 216–17, 228, 270, 293 Mansour, Joyce 12 maps 179, 180, 181 Mariátegui, José Carlos 12

Index market strategy 20, 152, 156, 168, 176, 179–80, 265 Marx, Karl 50, 191 Masson, André 17 Matisse, Pierre 167 Matta, Roberto 170 Mauthner, Fritz 79 mechanical writing 35–6 Méliès, Georges 2 Menard, Pierre (Borges character) 6, 76–124, passim Menard, Dr. Pierre (graphologist) 15, 75, 76–80, 87, 92, 96, 100, 109–11, 120–2 Menton, Seymour 79 Merrick, L. 128–9 Mesens, E.L. 71 Mesures 85–7, 92, 194, 213–15, 239–40, 246, 248 Michaux, Henri 92, 126, 213–14 Mileaf, Janine 191–2 Minotaure 6, 7, 15, 24, 55, 60–120 passim, 170, 174, 175, 179, 180, 225–8, 227, 234, 239, 252–4, 270, 276, 286, 303 “The Mirror and the Mask” (Borges) 118–19 Mitrani, Nora 12 Monegal, Emir Rodriguez 106 Monnier, Adrienne 6, 9, 21–9, 31, 35, 78, 80–92 passim, 99–100, 125–7, 196, 213–14, 220 Morand, Paul 31 Motherwell, Robert 161–4, 166 Müller, Curt 75, 84, 87, 104 Munro, Majella 12–13 Murakami, Haruki 1, 13 Murat, Laure 6–7, 24, 26, 81–2 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk) 13–14, 20, 247–8, 261, 277–87 Museum of Modern Art, New York 9, 133–4, 142–3, 166 “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” exhibition 188 Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition 142–8 Mutt, Richard 95–6 My Name Is Red (Pamuk) 268

Index Nabokov, Vladimir 3, 13, 87, 306 and Amour fou 245–58 and Dulita 219–38 passim The Enchanter 212, 214–15, 223, 250 Lolita 6, 7, 205–58 passim “Mademoiselle O” 92, 246 in Paris 212–15 sources 205–28 passim Nadja (Breton) 20, 22, 39, 42, 67, 170, 240, 250, 277, 284, 293, 300–1, 305–6 National Book Center, Romania 267 Naum, Gellu 11 Navire d’argent 23–6 Néon 40 Nerval, Gérard de 2, 32, 277, 287, 303 Aurélia 278–81, 291 network of circulation 3, 76–7, 86–7, 111–12 network theory 3, 6–9 New Life, The (Pamuk) 278 New York 3, 4, 9, 31, 150, 214–15, 268 Armory Show, 1913 127–31, 135, 136 Breton’s exile 159–68, 238, 267–8 Dali’s conquest of 137–8, 151–7, 162 Museum of Modern Art 9, 133–4, 142, 166, 188 surrealism introduced in 133–42 World’s Fair 153–7, 217–18 New York Dada (movement) 127–31, 132, 133 New York Dada (magazine) 131, 132, 133 New York Review of Books, The 222–3 New Yorker, The 220 Nezval, Vitĕzslav 11, 72 Nicholson, Melanie 12 noir fiction 268–70 Nord-Sud 23 Nostalgia (Cărtărescu) 288–97, 303 Nougé, Paul 71 Nouvelle Revue Française 25, 27, 85, 92, 117 object of desire 34–5, 42, 66–7, 70, 184, 193–5, 197, 200, 217, 225, 228–9, 231–2, 243, 246, 248, 253, 278, 283, 287, 294–5 objective hazard 35, 51, 69–70 “Objets psycho-atmosphériquesanamorphiques” (Dalí) 62–3

329

Ocampo, Victoria 6, 9, 80–6, 92, 112, 124–5 Okun, Henry 8, 190 Oppenheim, Meret 145 Orange Alternative 202 Oui 61 Pamuk, Orhan 1, 3, 5, 13, 259, 264–8, 306 The Black Book 6, 267–87 passim The Innocence of Objects 282–3, 285 Istanbul 287 The Museum of Innocence 13–14, 20, 247–8, 261, 277–87 My Name Is Red 268 The New Life 278 Snow 267 Papin, Léa and Christine 269–70 “Paranoia” (Dalí) 172 paranoiac critical method 14, 52, 61, 70–2, 173–4 Parinaud, André 21–2, 28, 68–9 Paris 3–4, 22, 73 Americans in 127 Gradiva art gallery 20, 170, 280–3 International Surrealist Exhibition, 1938 11 internationalism 29–31 La Coupole 56–7 La Maison des Amis des Livres 22–9, 81–6, 126, 220 Nabokov in 212–15 Rue Fontaine 202, 203, 272 Shakespeare & Co. 22–3 Paris Review, The 13 Paris-Tokyo League of Rising Art Exhibition 13 Paulhan, Jean 25–7, 78, 85, 89–90, 92, 109, 126, 213–14 Paz, Octavio 12 Pellegrini, Aldo 12 Perec, Georges 14 Péret, Benjamin 2, 12, 26, 40, 119, 160, 269–70 perfume 238–45, 242 Perrone-Moisés, Leyla 106 Persistence of Memory (Dalí) 137, 140 Peyre, Henri 178 phantom-objects 62, 261 Picabia, Francis 32, 94, 127–8

330

Index

Picasso, Pablo 56, 67, 168 “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” (Borges) 6, 75–87, 119 Pierre-Quint, Léon 100 Pifer, Ellen 250 plagiarism 4–5, 37, 68, 75–111 passim, 116, 124, 165, 221, 304 Podhoretz, Norman 215–16 Poe, Edgar Allan 33, 99, 107, 228, 273 poem-objects 13–14, 52, 69, 118, 124 Poésies I et II (Lautréamont) 75–6, 86, 88–9, 93, 102–11, 117, 120 poetic analogy 40–6 poetics Dadaist 32, 93–4 modernist 1–2 of plagiarism 4–5, 75–6, 82, 304 of playful negation and reversal 93 poetry 144, 281 artistic exhaustion 93–4 emphasis on 33 logic of 55 political positon-taking 4, 46 Polizzotti, Mark 25, 39 Pollock, Jackson 161, 166 Pour une littérature-monde en français 9 Prague 11, 72, 73, 173 primitive art 184, 187 prophetic poetry 252 Proust, Marcel 25, 259–63, 282, 287, 293, 298, 300 psychoanalysis 53 Quain, Herbert (Borges character) 97, 107 Queneau, Raymond 126 Ray, Man 26, 31, 130–8, 147, 166–7, 182, 191, 226, 234, 253, 286, 293–4 Raymond, Marcel 1–2 readymades 69, 93–6, 115, 128, 145, 165, 182, 191, 243 Reboul, Jacques 117–18 “Recherches expérimentales: Sur la connaissance irrationnelle de l’objet Boule de cristal des voyantes (5 février 1933).” (Breton) 63 Renéville, Roland de 35

Reverdy, Pierre 23, 38, 40–1 “Rêverie” (Dalí) 219–20, 225, 228–35 riddle-images 275–7, 286–7 Rimbaud 12, 27, 33, 87, 99, 101, 146, 164, 273 Ristitch, Marco 50 Rivera, Diego 12, 71 Rivière, Jacques 261 Romania 11, 72, 202, 287–91, 296 romanticism 250, 259 Rosemont, Franklin 11–12 Rosenberg, Harold 135, 138–9 Rousseau, Henri 146 Royal Heart installation (Dalí) 282 Rubinstein, Helena 167, 272 Ruiz, Edouard 273, 275 Sachs, Paul J. 134, 143 Sade, Marquis de 33, 46, 100, 122, 207, 216, 270 Sage, Kay 159, 182 Sagittaire-Kra 28 Saillet, Maurice 79–80 Sapiro, Gisèle 3–4, 266 Sargeant, Winthrop 217 Sarkozy, Nicolas 9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 126 Sawin, Martica 161 Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically (Dalí) 192–4 Schapiro, Meyer 160, 190 Schiaparelli, Elsa 167, 170, 173, 192, 193 second manifesto of surrealism 39, 49–51, 56, 83 Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, The (Dalí) 6, 20, 59–60, 147, 173, 193, 217, 219, 220, 223, 225, 232–8 Selavy, Rrose 131, 133, 241 self-kleptomania 100–1 Shakespeare, William 33, 46, 107, 123, 233 Shakespeare & Co. 22–3, 31 shoe 191 The Museum of Innocence 282–7 Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically (Dalí) 192–4 shoe-spoon 191–95, 199, 201 Sieburth, Richard 287

Index Silverman, Woodner (Ian) 154 “Situation surréaliste de l’objet” (Breton) 69 Skira, Albert 70, 91 Slauerhoff, J. 101 Snow (Pamuk) 267 Société Anonyme, the 166 Society of Independent Artists 166 Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (Valéry) 24 Soleil vert 241, 242, 243–5 Solenoid (Cărtărescu) 289, 298, 300–6 Solidaridad con los Escritores franceses 81 Sollers, Philippe 103 Sontag, Susan 9 Soupault, Philippe 5–6, 23–32, 88, 103, 126 Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) 32, 38–9, 42, 89, 100–1, 261–2 spectral beauty 174, 216–19, 225–32 Stavitsky, Gail 128 Stein, Gertrude 22, 136 Stieglitz, Alfred 130–6 strategy 57, 100–1 group 6, 10, 28, 146, 163–4, 222 intellectual 60–1, 71, 145, 159–60, 183–6 market 20, 152, 156, 168, 176, 179–80, 265 Sunbeam, Dédé 47 supernaturalism 32 Supervielle, Jules 213 Sur 1, 6, 9, 73–6, 81–6, 92, 112, 194 “Sur la route de San Romano” (Breton) 40 surrealism alliance with fashion 167, 172–3 and commercialization 168–70 conquest of America 159–90 definition 32–3, 50, 121, 187 as a group activity 70 internationalization 47, 49, 68–74 legacy 14–15 New York introduced to 133–42 origins and spread of 1–2, 4, 9, 10–13, 15, 145–6, 190 predecessors 33, 46, 64, 76, 145, 185, 291 Surrealism (Levy) 148–50 “Surrealism and Painting” (Dalí) 67

331

surrealist ideas, circulation of 4–5, 10–13 surrealist jewelry 172–6, 175, 176 surrealist metaphor, the 41 surrealist noir 268–70 surrealist object, the 2, 7–9, 14, 37–8, 190–7, 198, 199, 200–2, 270 Breton and 7–9, 60–70, 93, 96–9, 118, 174, 183–4, 277, 282–3 commercialization 169, 172–3 Dalí and 58, 60–9, 152–3, 155, 172–5, 187–8, 192–4, 286 Dalí’s taxonomy 61–2 definition 68 functions 170 hasard objectif 262 history and development 68–70 la trouvaille 96–8, 194–5, 253, 277 moving 174 Pamuk and 282–7 and plagiarism 93–9 the shoe as 191–4, 282–7 subject-centered 60 theory of 52, 69–70 transparency 19–20 “Surrealist object with Symbolic Function” (Dalí) 285 surrealist poetry 2, 49, 160, 191 Breton 21, 42–6, 164–5 “Surrealist Situation of the Object” (Breton) 72 surrealist theory and practice 10 sur-réalité 14, 80 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth 209 Swift, Jonathan 33, 35–6, 42, 46 symbolic capital 56, 68 symbolist poetry 89 Tanguy, Yves 159 Taro, Okamoto 13 Tarot of Marseille 17, 18, 19, 89, 115, 292 Tashjian, Dickran 3, 5, 7, 133, 138, 169, 173 Teodorescu, Virgil 11 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 122 Tériade, E. 91 Teste, Edmond 77–8, 87, 89, 122–3 “The Rotting Donkey” (Dalí) 52–3, 61 third manifesto of surrealism 183–6

332

Index

Thistlewood, David 143 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll) 66, 145 Thurber, James 221 Time 147, 149, 173 Tiroux, Yamanaka 13 Titus, Edward 272 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges) 108–9, 296, 299 “Toujours pour la première fois” (Breton) 256–7 Toulet, Paul-Jean 117 Toumanova, Tamara 210, 211, 212, 217, 278 Toyen 11 transition 22 Trotsky, Leon 71 trouvaille/found object 52, 69, 96–8, 194–5, 200–1, 253, 277, 282–3 Tzara, Tristan 11, 25, 32, 37, 46, 49–50, 59, 83, 86, 90–7, 100, 107, 127–8, 131, 133, 159, 165 Ulmer, Gregory L. 79 Un chien andalou (Dalí and Buñuel) 56 “Undr” (Borges) 119 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 85–6, 92 Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, The, (Dalí) 57–8, 153, 168 Valéry, Paul 24–32, 66, 77–9, 85–99, 107, 110–13, 117–18, 122–6 Valloton, Félix 112 Variétés 71, 179

Varo, Remedios 12 Venus with Drawers (Dalí) 217 Venuti, Lawrence 141–2 Verdura, Fulco di 176 Vermeer, Johannes, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window 53, 54 Vilaseca, David 220 virtual objects 303 Vogue 6, 67, 71, 147, 148, 153–4, 165, 168, 170–4, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178, 192–3, 245 “Star-Packed Season” cartoon 18, 19 “Who Is Surrealism?” (Dalí) 188, 189, 190 VVV 6, 160, 163, 167–71, 179, 182–6 What is Surrealism? (Breton) 19, 71–2, 202, 204 Whitman, Walt 23 “Who Is Surrealism?” (Dalí) 188, 189, 190 Why We Love Women (Cărtărescu) 289 Wilde, Oscar 130, 176 Williams, William Carlos 161, 164–5 Wilson, Edmund 206, 209, 220–3 window displays 152–3, 169–70, 187 Woodward, Richard 139 Woolf, Virginia 295 world literature 13–14 World’s Fair, New York 153–7, 217–18 Writer, The (automaton) 119 Zalman, Sandra 146–7 Zodiac Group 141 Zola, Emil 30

Plate 1 Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, “1939 New York World’s Fair:” Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus Pavilion © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017, and © Photographer: Sherman Oaks Antique Mall/Getty Images.

Plate 2a Rigaud, “Un Air Embaumé,” perfume bottle and stopper © The Perfume Bottles Auction.

Plate 2b Marcel Duchamp, “Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette,” readymade, 1921 © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017, and Photo © dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy.

Plate 3 Roberto Matta, Cover of VVV 4, 1944 © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Plate 4 Salvador Dalí/Vogue © Condé Nast. Vogue, June 1, 1939. Cover.

Plate 5 Salvador Dalí, Landscape with a Girl Skipping Rope, 1936 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017.

Plate 6 Salvador Dalí, screenshot from the short film Destino © Disney

Plate 7 Salvador Dalí, Paranoia, 1944 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017.

Plate 8 Salvador Dalí, “Desert Flower.” Vogue 109.4 (Feb. 15, 1947): 190–1 © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York 2017.

Plate 9 Box 53 in Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence,” Istanbul.

Plate 10 Salvador Dalí, Scatological Object Functioning Symbolically – Gala’s Shoe. Assemblage with shoe, white marble, photographs, a glass containing wax, a gibbit, a matchbox, hair, and a wooden scraper, Reconstructed 1973. © Salvador Dalí, GalaSalvador Dali Foundation, (ARS ), 2017 Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL (USA ) 2017 © 2017 Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc.

Plate 11 Box 23 in Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence,” Istanbul.