Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose 1317060156, 9781317060154

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Part I: The Breakthrough of Dissident Surrealism
1 The Collège de Sociologie and Dissident Surrealism
Part II: The Explosion of Surrealism in Hispanic America and the Divin Fou of Natural Time
2 Hispanic American and Caribbean Surrealism and the Colligative of Alejo Carpentier's Lo Real Maravilloso
3 Postcolonial Dissident Surrealist Mediums: Geotemporal Conflations of the Isles of Paradise in Alejo Carpentier's the Lost Steps
Part III: The Manifestation of Surrealism in Britain and a Sociological Divin Fou
4 The Brief Moment of British Surrealism, Its Social and Divergent Paths
5 Modalities of the Female Surrealist: the Therianthrope of the Sacred Quest in Leonora Carrington's the Hearing Trumpet
Part IV:The Rise of Romanian Surrealism and Amour Divin Fou
6 The Balkans and the Romanian Avant-Garde: Communism in South-Eastern Europe
7 Erope's Eastern Surrealist Meanings: the Gift of the Primordial Waters in Gellu Naum's Zenobia
Part V: Surrealism's Revolutionary Consciousness: the Collège de Sociologie's Extensions to Surrealist Theory and Reading International Surrealism
8 Theorem, Theorie, Theōreō
Indicative Publication History
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia On the Needles of Days Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker Children’s Stories and ‘Child-Time’ in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde Analisa Leppanen-Guerra Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde Shirley Mangini Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond Vassiliki Rapti Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals Jennifer L. Shaw Consuming Surrealism in American Culture Dissident Modernism Sandra Zalman Cover illustration: V.L. Evans, Dionysus, 45 x 30cm, photograph, 2008.

Studies in Surrealism

Other titles in the series

Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose

Through highly original readings and inspired conjunctions of literary sources, Vivienne Brough-Evans has wrought a surprising, rich and thoughtful study; she has most usefully extended the borders of surrealism as they have been drawn till now, and re-oriented concepts of the sacred and its role in imagining and making community. —Marina Warner, CBE, President, British Comparative Literature Association, UK

Vivienne Brough-Evans

Provocative, dissident, surprising, international in focus, historically grounded: Vivienne Brough-Evans’ book is everything one would wish for in a study of literary surrealism and avant-garde prose. It will help redraw the map of twentieth-century literary history. —Peter Hulme, Emeritus Professor in Literature, University of Essex, UK

Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose ISBN 978-1-4724-5659-5 www.routledge.com Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats

9 781472 456595

Vivienne Brough-Evans

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ Vivienne Brough-Evans proposes a compelling new way of reevaluating aspects of international surrealism by means of the category of divin fou, and consequently deploys theories of sacred ecstasy as developed by the Collège de Sociologie (1937–39) as a critical tool in shedding new light on the literary oeuvre of nonFrench writers who worked both within and against a surrealist framework. The minor surrealist genre of prose literature is considered herein, rather than surrealism’s mainstay, poetry, with the intention of fracturing preconceptions regarding the medium of surrealist expression. The aim is to explore whether international surrealism can begin to be more fully explained by an occluded strain of ‘dissident’ surrealist thought that searches outside the self through the effects of ekstasis. Bretonian surrealism is widely discussed in the field of surrealist studies, and there is a need to consider what is left out of surrealist practice when analysed through this Bretonian lens. The Collège de Sociologie and Georges Bataille’s theories provide a model of such elements of ‘dissident’ surrealism, which is used to analyse surrealist or surrealist influenced prose by Alejo Carpentier, Leonora Carrington and Gellu Naum respectively representing postcolonial, feminist and Balkan locutions. The Collège and Bataille’s ‘dissident’ surrealism diverges significantly from the concerns and approach towards the subject explored by surrealism. Using the concept of ekstasis to organise Bataille’s theoretical ideas of excess and ‘inner experience’ and the Collège’s thoughts on the sacred it is possible to propose a new way of reading types of international surrealist literature, many of which do not come to the forefront of the surrealist literary oeuvre. Vivienne Brough-Evans is an independent scholar, UK.

SęĚĉĎĊĘ Ďē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Series Editor: Gavin Parkinson, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK

With scholarly interest in Surrealism greater than ever, Studies in Surrealism serves as a major forum for key areas of inquiry into the activities of the Surrealist movement. The series extends the ongoing academic and popular interest in Surrealism, evident in recent studies that have rethought established areas of Surrealist activity and engagement, including those of art, politics, the object, exhibitions, photography, popular culture, crime and science. Expanding and adding to existing lines of inquiry, books in the series examine Surrealism’s intersections with philosophical, social, artistic and literary themes. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde Shirley Mangini Children’s Stories and ‘Child-Time’ in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the TransatlanƟc Avant-Garde Analisa Leppanen-Guerra Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond Vassiliki Rapti Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art Edited by Anna Dezeuze, and Julia Kelly Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia On the Needles of Days Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals Jennifer L. Shaw Consuming Surrealism in American Culture Dissident Modernism Sandra Zalman Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and InternaƟonal Avant-Garde Prose Vivienne Brough-Evans

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

Vivienne Brough-Evans

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Vivienne Brough-Evans The right of Vivienne Brough-Evans to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark noƟce: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. BriƟsh Library Cataloguing in PublicaƟon Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicaƟon Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 9781472456595 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315607399 (ebk) Typeset in Calibri by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CĔēęĊēęĘ

Foreword by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Acknowledgements List of AbbreviaƟons Glossary

vii xi xiii xv

PĆėę I: TčĊ BėĊĆĐęčėĔĚČč Ĕċ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ 1

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

3

PĆėę II: TčĊ EĝĕđĔĘĎĔē Ĕċ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ďē HĎĘĕĆēĎĈ AĒĊėĎĈĆ Ćēĉ ęčĊ DĎěĎē FĔĚ Ĕċ NĆęĚėĆđ TĎĒĊ 2

3

HĎĘĕĆēĎĈ AĒĊėĎĈĆē Ćēĉ CĆėĎććĊĆē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ćēĉ ęčĊ CĔđđĎČĆęĎěĊ Ĕċ AđĊďĔ CĆėĕĊēęĎĊė’Ę LĔ ėĊĆL ĒĆėĆěĎLLĔĘĔ

43

PĔĘęĈĔđĔēĎĆđ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę MĊĉĎĚĒĘ: GĊĔęĊĒĕĔėĆđ CĔēċđĆęĎĔēĘ Ĕċ ęčĊ IĘđĊĘ Ĕċ PĆėĆĉĎĘĊ Ďē AđĊďĔ CĆėĕĊēęĎĊė’Ę TčĊ ĔĘę SęĊĕĘ

61

PĆėę III: TčĊ MĆēĎċĊĘęĆęĎĔē Ĕċ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ďē BėĎęĆĎē Ćēĉ Ć SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĈĆđ DĎěĎē FĔĚ 4

5

TčĊ BėĎĊċ MĔĒĊēę Ĕċ BėĎęĎĘč SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, IęĘ SĔĈĎĆđ Ćēĉ DĎěĊėČĊēę PĆęčĘ

103

MĔĉĆđĎęĎĊĘ Ĕċ ęčĊ FĊĒĆđĊ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę: TčĊ TčĊėĎĆēęčėĔĕĊ Ĕċ ęčĊ SĆĈėĊĉ QĚĊĘę Ďē LĊĔēĔėĆ CĆėėĎēČęĔē’Ę TčĊ HĊĆėĎēČ TėĚĒĕĊę

115

ěĎ

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

PĆėę IV: TčĊ RĎĘĊ Ĕċ RĔĒĆēĎĆē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ćēĉ AĒĔĚė DĎěĎē FĔĚ 6

7

TčĊ BĆđĐĆēĘ Ćēĉ ęčĊ RĔĒĆēĎĆē AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ: CĔĒĒĚēĎĘĒ Ďē SĔĚęč-EĆĘęĊėē EĚėĔĕĊ

155

EĚėĔĕĊ’Ę EĆĘęĊėē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę MĊĆēĎēČĘ: TčĊ GĎċę Ĕċ ęčĊ PėĎĒĔėĉĎĆđ WĆęĊėĘ Ďē GĊđđĚ NĆĚĒ’Ę ZĊēĔćĎĆ

171

PĆėę V: SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ’Ę RĊěĔđĚęĎĔēĆėĞ CĔēĘĈĎĔĚĘēĊĘĘ: TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ’Ę EĝęĊēĘĎĔēĘ ęĔ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę TčĊĔėĞ Ćēĉ RĊĆĉĎēČ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ 8

TčĊĔėĊĒ, TčĊĔėĎĊ, TčĊŜėĊŜ

IndicaƟve PublicaƟon History Bibliography Index

205 215 217 243

FĔėĊĜĔėĉ

It would seem that for scholars and curators, their readers and audiences alike, there is no prospect in sight that the subject of international surrealism will cease to fascinate and provoke. Where several decades ago the study of this movement seemed a marginal interest at best, deeply unfashionable at worst, for many years now entire university undergraduate courses have been devoted to specific aspects of its ideas; exhibitions showcasing surrealism are a staple of institutional programmes; young children at school learn of the work of Magritte, Dalí and Miró. The books, catalogues and journal articles could fill a modest library all by themselves. Two things above all else stimulate this tremendous and repeatedly renewed appetite for a movement begun nearly a whole century ago. The first, clearly, is the enduring allure of the works of the surrealists themselves: vivid and elusive at the same time, touching on those parts of who and where we are that seem to lie at the edge of knowledge, in the ambiguous corners of perception. Always something new, even for enthusiasts: a poet not read before, a journal only now reissued in facsimile, entire surrealist groups unearthed from obscurity. With some initial reluctance Anglophone academics have acknowledged over recent decades that the movement concerns not merely Paris between the wars, but dozens of international groups and centres; and that it continued to flourish long after the Second World War, even that authentic surrealist activity continues to this day. Just as significantly, however, what remains compelling about surrealism is the sense of its continued centrality to the history of ideas and its relevance to so many currents of contemporary thought and practice. Whole swathes of today’s critical and cultural theory seem unthinkable without the models of surrealism’s radical perceptions and its innovative models for critical expression. While surrealism’s own concepts often remain poorly understood – and its theorists, with the notable exception of Georges Bataille, undervalued – the movement’s themes and concerns, and with them the deliberately oblique, open-ended but passionate ways in which it engaged with them, anticipate many of the modes and tasks of contemporary theory. V.L. Brough-Evans’s Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and InternaƟonal AvantGarde Prose exemplifies these fertile questions. Issues such as identity, gender and postcolonialism that are key to so many recent debates are here

ěĎĎĎ

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

foregrounded, problematised and explored in sometimes unexpected places: brilliant but for the most part little-known novels that all belong in one way or another to the dialogues and diasporas of international surrealism. In contrast to the majority of recent scrutiny of the movement, the focus on literature rather than the visual arts here is refreshing, and brings the research closer not only to early generations of scholarship on the movement, before art history captured the field, but also to the predominantly poetic and literary sources of surrealism in the early 1920s. Ambitious in its scope, the role of specific cultural locations is crucial for this study, but so is the sense of how surrealism – often taken in its wider resonances rather than as a doctrinaire position – enabled generations of writers, artists and thinkers to negotiate the tensions and exchanges between them without falling back into outmoded or compromised Western philosophical positions. The three authors presented in Sacred Surrealism all have in common this sense of a navigation across and within cultures, many of them less familiar to Anglophone readers: between Europe, the Caribbean and South America (including real and imagined explorations into an ‘uncolonised’ interior) in the case of the Cuban Alejo Carpentier; from aristocratic Britain to the pell-mell creative intensity of France and then Mexico for artist and writer Leonora Carrington; and from the ferment of avant-garde Central Europe, in dialogue with Paris, to the emotional journeys of a dissident forced into internal exile under totalitarian power in the case of the Romanian Gellu Naum. The sheer range of historical, political and intellectual contexts across a generous sweep of the mid-twentieth century could overwhelm this narrative, were it not that the gold thread of surrealism’s ideas – no matter whether in ‘orthodox’ or contested modes – can be seen running through each story, wherever a cross-section of it is taken, with its powerful, sometimes uncanny ability to throw the first filament of a rope bridge across apparently irreconcilable differences of experience. Retold from this perspective, received conceptual models of margin and mainstream, centre and periphery, dissidence and orthodoxy – much as these terms might help us to construct preliminary mental topographies – eventually begin to seem like background features in comparison to the teeming high-key strands of encounter and exchange across communities, geographies, histories and bodies of knowledge. It is as though surrealism can motivate that tiny but paradigm-changing adjustment of the microscope’s lens that brings entirely new and intricate structural networks into focus among what hitherto appeared as indistinct, two-dimensional matter. The complexity of surrealism itself – too often considered from limited or reductive perspectives – is of course part of this challenge as well. Sacred Surrealism prioritises the positions developed by the Collège de Sociologie in Paris during the late 1930s, particularly around such figures as Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, and informed, amongst other strands of thought, by ethnography and sociology. While scholars since the 1970s such as those associated with the journals Tel Quel in France and October in the US have tended to highlight the ideas of the Collège, especially those of Bataille, in order to produce an attractively dramatic but generally misleading model of ‘mainstream’ versus ‘dissident’ surrealism, the intention here is, with greater relevance, to access that part of surrealist thought that in innovative ways has

FĔėĊĜĔėĉ

Ďĝ

both studied and activated problems such as ritual, the sacred and the irrational. In tune with surrealism’s own strategies, this study is also not afraid to propose original concepts and terms as it proceeds, and the new notions such as divin fou or the ‘adject’ set in play here have the potential to spark fresh insights and connections in the material under investigation. The fertile encounters, the interactions and exchanges, the propensity to hybridity and surprise that characterise surrealism’s quest for new and renewed knowledge are all revealed at work in the three novels studied here, at the same time that their scrutiny represents a search for deeper patterns of meaning that glint as tantalisingly close to today’s reader as last night’s dreams. Krzysztof Fijalkowski

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AĈĐēĔĜđĊĉČĊĒĊēęĘ

Great thanks, To Sanja Bahun without whom none of this would have materialised. To Peter Hulme and Leon Burnett for their kind advice and guidance during the planning and progress of this project. To Krzysztof Fijalkowski for his support in taking this text to print, and to Marina Warner for her insightful comments on the text. To J.P. Eburne, Gloria Orenstein and other specialists for early discussions on Carrington, and Seán Kissane for his generous assistance in sourcing material. To the many specialists from differing fields of international literature and surrealism who corresponded with me over the course of this project. To the reviewers whose comments were invaluable and the editorial staff from Ashgate for their excellent work. To Evan Jones, Glyn Harrison and Lorraine Chatwin for reading through drafts of the manuscript. To my friends and wonderful family for their support and encouragement. V.L. Brough-Evans

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AććėĊěĎĆęĎĔēĘ

GBAM

Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: WriƟngs on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 2006). GB‘ARI’ Georges Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter and Tears’ (January 22, 1938), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [Fr. edn, Le Collège de sociologie, 1979]), pp. 103–12. GB‘ARII’ Georges Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure’ (February 5, 1938), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, pp. 113–24. GBIE Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988 [1943]). GBLE Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil: Essays, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: M. Boyars, 1985 [1957]). GB‘SA’ Georges Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (July 1, 1938), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, pp. 12–23. GB‘SAi’ ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in Visions of Excess: Selected WriƟngs, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 223–34. GBTR Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989 [1948]). GBVE Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected WriƟngs, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). HT Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Penguin, 2005 [Fr. edn, 1974; En. edn, 1976]). LS Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet De Onís (London: Penguin, 1968 [Sp. Edn, 1953; En. edn, 1956]). MEMDM൰Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic RealiƟes, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper & Row, 1975 [1957]).

ĝĎě

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

MEMR MEPS

MESP Ph RC‘BC’

RCES

RC‘F’ RC‘ICS’ RCMS SFBPP Zen

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1975 [1963]). Mircea Eliade, PaƩerns in ComparaƟve Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1949]). Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1959 [1957]). Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1995). Roger Caillois, ‘Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches’ (March 19, 1938), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, pp. 152–54. Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Nash (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003). Roger Caillois, ‘Festival’ (May 2, 1939), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, pp. 279–303. Roger Caillois, ‘For a College of Sociology: Introduction’ (July 1, 1938), in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, pp. 9–11. Roger Caillois, Man and The Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1949]). Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Penguin Freud Reader (London: Penguin, 2006 [1920]), pp. 132–95. Gellu Naum, Zenobia, trans. James Brook and Sasha Vlad (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995 [Ro. edn, 1985]).

GđĔĘĘĆėĞ

A few specific terms have been adapted, adopted or created here in order to avoid the prior associations their more familiar equivalents may have, and with the intention of delineating a specific application of the concepts in relation to ekstasis. adject

aesopic

aithein

basanos divin fou

I form this term to signal the opposite of abjection. It is used to describe cases where attraction forces are stronger than the forces of repulsion. A critical term applied by Ştefan Augustin Doinaş to describe a style of poetic language arising in Romania during communism, that disguised its criticism of the ruling power. Doinaş draws his term from ‘Aesop, the traditional composer of Greek fables about animals . . . said by Herodotus to have lived in the 6th cent. B.C., and to have been a slave’ (The Concise Oxford DicƟonary of English Literature, ed. Dorothy Eagle, p. 5). The nonnaturalistic settings and scenarios of these fables relate to human social behaviour. It is this level of symbolic presentation of social situations in narrative that Doinaş denotes with this term. Gk. I have adopted the root term aithein, over more familiar terms – aureole, ethereal or auroral – to indicate the presence of the sacred and avoid prior associations carried by each term. The term is drawn from the Greek root of ‘ethereal’, aitherios: ‘Gk aithĤr (ɲ஀θୱʌ) “upper air”, from the base aithein (ɲ஁θɸɿʆ) “to burn, shine”’ (Concise Oxford English DicƟonary, ed. Judy Pearsall, p. 489). Gk (βάσανος), an ordeal which acts as a touchstone to reveal one’s true character. I have created this term to refer to divine madness, which here is intended to contrast with the Bretonian surrealist interest in amour fou (mad love), hence the poetic licence employed in its translation. It denotes the action of ecstasy or ekstasis correlating with the concept of divine madness outlined by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus.

ĝěĎ

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

kairological Gk Khronos (Χρόνος) gives the term ‘chronological’, denoting the linear ordered sense of time; Kairos (Καιρος) similarly could give rise to the term ‘kairological’, indicating non-linear time. limen L. Threshold. A term used specifically here to allude to the spectral position between presence and absence and to the space in which initiation occurs or a state caused by an initiation into sacred realities.

PĆėę I TčĊ BėĊĆĐęčėĔĚČč Ĕċ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

The successive stages of myth, legend, epic and modern literature have often been pointed out and need not detain us here. Let us merely recall the fact that the mythical archetypes survive to some degree in the great modern novels. The difficulties and trials that the novelist’s hero has to pass through are prefigured in the adventures of mythic Heroes. It has been possible also to show how the mythic themes of the primordial waters, of the isles of Paradise, of the quest of the Holy Grail, of heroic and mystical initiation, etc., still dominate modern . . . literature. Quite recently we have seen, in surrealism, a prodigious outburst of mythical themes and primordial symbols. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p. 35, hereafter MEMDM

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1 TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

THE POSITIONS OF PARISIAN SURREALISM AND ITS PROSE FICTION PERIPHERIES An Absence of Need More Unfortunate Than the Absence of Satisfaction . . . that causes silent decomposition. Georges Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (1938)1

The ‘historical’ surrealist movement began in France in the 1920s, and over the next four decades and beyond many national literatures were influenced by its ideas and practices.2 As the critic Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron observed, ‘there are hardly any countries in which some sort of group laying claim to Surrealism has not arisen.’3 From the mainspring of Parisian surrealism interconnected surrealist groups were established across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Surrealism’s synaesthetic approach toward visual art, performance, literature and philosophy has been the subject of international research. Although the Anglophone art historical field of surrealist study is vibrant and taught widely, in comparison its literary partner fares less well and has been subsumed by study of modernist trends such as the stream of consciousness novel or other avant-garde movements such as Vorticism or Futurism.4 Countering this tendency with a comparative analysis of surrealist prose – written in Spanish, English and Romanian – the aim of this monograph is to consider current concerns in literary study, respectively, postcolonialism, feminism and anti-communism.5 The intention is to demonstrate that international surrealist literature offers an original contribution to the fields of surrealist and literary study. An ‘alternative’ surrealist criteria focused on ideas of the sacred will be established in order to interpret such contributions. A significant gap in knowledge regarding the international aspect of the movement is beginning to be filled by a number of recent studies focusing on surrealist art and literature.6 These studies productively chart under-discussed international surrealism, but rarely engage in multi-site analysis, look to the

4

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theoretical periphery of Parisian surrealism, or develop an alternative surrealist methodology to precipitate such analysis. This shift towards a multi-site comparative analysis is necessary since, as Alyce Mahon has noted, ‘[a]lthough some progress has been made in recent years in recovering the histories of Surrealist circles across and outside of Europe, they are still largely perceived as being on the margins of a movement predominantly based in France.’7 The mentioned volumes chiefly focus upon surrealist poetry, performance and visual arts, an exception being the collection of international surrealist short fiction, The Dedalus Book of Surrealism, edited by the anthropologist Michael Richardson.8 There is, therefore, a need for further analysis of the full history and geography of international surrealist prose fiction. The novels discussed herein derive from important geographical areas of international surrealism which generally receive less critical attention. In addition, these novels connect to an alternative type of surrealist practice which, unlike the practices of the Parisian core surrealist group, engages with the sacred as a living social force (not in its religious acceptation) in such a way that requires a new comparativist method of reading surrealist prose, one that adapts to the locations and societies in which these literary practices were formed. After outlining the methodology to be pursued, subsequent sections consider the place of surrealism in three geographical locations and novels. The selection of novels is intentionally divergent to demonstrate how the lens of the surrealist periphery could be applied to the primary fields of literary study: those of postcolonialism (Europe’s external ‘other’), feminism (internal ‘other’) and anti-(post)communism (Europe’s internal ‘other’); each ‘other’ serving to illustrate the wide spectrum of international surrealist expression. The novels to be considered are the Cuban dissident surrealist, Alejo Carpentier’s (1904–80) Los pasos perdidos (1953, The Lost Steps); the British expatriate surrealist, Leonora Carrington’s (1917–2011) Le Cornet acousƟque (The Hearing Trumpet, 1974); and the Romanian surrealist, Gellu Naum’s (1915–2001) Zenobia (1985).9 Few studies on surrealism and the sacred exist, but one example is offered by Celia Rabinovitch’s Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (2002) which focuses on the core Parisian group and therefore offers an application of the sacred that differs from the focus upon surrealist peripheral theory and practice employed here.10 Studies of the surrealist novel exist, such as J.H. Matthews’s Surrealism and the Novel (1966) and Renée Riese Hubert’s Surrealism and the Book (1988), but their scholarly commitment to the Parisian core of surrealism differs from the focus on peripheral Parisian surrealist theory and international prose here.11 The theoretical framework underpinning the methodology used in this volume is provided by the lectures of the Collège de Sociologie, 1937–39, a group founded by surrealist affiliates and ex-surrealists to explore the topic of sociologie sacrée (sacred sociology) in ways that, I suggest, complement the local concerns of various international surrealist works. The focal point for this investigation is provided by the theory of Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Roger Caillois (1913–78), two founders of the Collège. Bataille, a medievalist scholar who graduated in 1922, approached the Parisian surrealist group in 1925 only to be rebuffed by its leading figure André Breton

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

5

(1896–1966), causing Bataille to become an interconnected critic and theorist of surrealism.12 Caillois, a student of anthropology and sociology, made connections within the Grand Jeu group from 1929 and joined the Parisian surrealist group in 1932, only to leave three years later, dissatisfied with surrealism’s lack of ‘scientific’ analysis of imaginative states (RCES 59). The writings of Mircea Eliade (1907–86), the Romanian scholar of the history of religions and a contributor to Bataille’s journal CriƟque (1946–) from 1948, will be used to assist in transposing the Collège’s theory of the sacred into viable literary praxis, as will the concept of divine madness described by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. Eliade’s presentation of sacralised reality, in my view, situates him in the discursive space between analysis and belief, much like Bataille himself and, arguably, the writers considered here. In 1920s Paris, the surrealist movement formed, developing in part from a version of Zurich Dada (1916–20) which the Romanian Tristan Tzara brought to Paris in 1919. As the development of the core Parisian surrealist group is related in detail by many critics, only a brief overview will be given here. André Breton co-founded the movement with Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Eluard (1895–1952), Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) and others, but he was to take the role of its leader soon after its inception. Breton published surrealism’s first Manifeste du surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) within which, inspired by the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the faculty of the imagination was singled out as the site of the surrealist revolt against conventional attitudes of absolute rationalism, nationalism and civility.13 To forward this revolt, surrealism studied altered states of consciousness such as automatism, the dream (oneiric) and madness as creative stimuli. As Robert Short determines, the ‘surrealist state of mind (and it has been shown states of mind and not techniques or styles are the real issue at stake)’ is paramount.14 During World War I Breton trained at a number of medical centres where he observed the expostulations of patients suffering from what would be diagnosed today as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and applied various methods of treatment. While training near Paris, at ‘the neuro-psychiatric centre of the second army at Saint-Dizier . . . [he] especially cared for shell-shock victims [and] wrote several case studies for [his mentor Raoul-Achille] Leroy.’15 Breton went from Saint-Dizier to the front, then in 1917 to La Pitié hospital, a neurological centre under the direction of Joseph Babinsky; he moved to Val-de-Grace military hospital where he chose not to take final examinations, giving up a medical career in favour of exploring the implications of his observations in the creative, cultural and social spheres. This choice led to one of the most astounding and startling avant-garde movements of the twentieth century which impacted upon the aesthetic history of many countries. In psychiatric wards at the beginning of the twentieth century it was common to use the association of ideas and automatic writing as treatments, and Joost Haan et al. connect this feature to the first Manifesto of Surrealism for its comments on pure psychic automatism, amongst other aspects.16 Breton’s medical training during World War I was to stimulate the surrealist interest in ‘illogical’ states and set the tone with which it approaches such a topic.17 Other co-founders of surrealism underwent medical training: ‘Aragon, a medical

6

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auxiliary, meets Breton at Val-de-Grace’, Paris, 1917;18 and Eluard, a military nurse, upon demobbing in 1919 went to meet Breton and his coterie.19 Soupault, however, did not, but met Breton at Guillaume Apollinaire’s flat.20 The scientific foundation of the surrealist quest is expressed in the formation of the Centrale Surréaliste (Bureau for Surrealist Enquiries or Research) in 1924, which accepted material on life and dreams from the public, and from this repository looked to investigate the unconscious working of the mind.21 Breton’s core group in Paris issued guidelines and evaluated the contributions of other international groups. This had a positive effect in that the movement had a strong cohesive bond, unlike many other literary groups, but contravention of such rules, specifically in Paris, led to expulsions that are evident in the immediate periphery of ex-surrealists and dissatisfied surrealists. These expelled or marginalised figures can still be considered to hold true the aims of surrealism even if their version of surrealism did not match that of Breton. Surrealism’s vision was increasingly internationalised from the mid-1930s and its ideas expanded across the globe. This expansion was regulated and authorised by Breton who led the movement until his death in 1966, after which the core dissolved somewhat but the continuation of international surrealist groups adhering to Bretonian lines attests to its applicability. Whether the avant-garde is defined as part of modernism, as Hal Foster determines, or contemporaneous with it, as Matei Călinescu and Peter Bürger delineate, is a point of contention.22 The former stance indicates the connections between the two, a shared focus on myth, ‘moments’ of revelation and subversion of pure realism; the latter highlighting different purposes and methods of presenting such ideas. While accepting the connections and exchanges between modernism and the avant-garde, as well as the notably more radical stance of the avant-garde, the avant-garde is in effect both inside and outside modernism proper. Surrealism, like other modernist and avantgarde trends, was in part a specific symptomatic reaction to the horrors of World War I and to the stresses of modernity, the increasing regulation and utilitarian use of time, high capitalist values and the excesses of pure rationalism. Kenneth E. Silver details that unlike some earlier Parisian avant-garde reactions to war, which turned towards an increased endorsement of order, nationalism and anticosmopolitanism, surrealism revived pre-war values of internationalism and cosmopolitanism.23 In response to such social pressures there was an outpouring of non-realist literary styles which often demonstrated a heightened awareness of the unconscious motivations of consciousness, of the strange in the everyday, or of the fantastic in the real. Often the fragmentation and breaking apart of stable worldviews were mirrored in literary expressions of formal fragmentation and new ways of representing the world. For their part, the surrealists chose to attack authority and order through experimentation with form, to play with fragments and juxtapose images rather than to mourn this epistemological and social crisis in their works. Surrealism incorporated various irruptions of the unconscious into its aesthetic practices: the medial state of mind between full ‘rationalist’ consciousness and non-dreaming sleep fascinated the surrealists, as did the oneiric, madness and automatism, all characterised by spatial and

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

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temporal distortions, repositioning of the relations between subject-object and rule breaking. These interests are expressed immediately before the formation of the surrealist group in 1924, as Chenieux-Gendron demonstrates: According to Breton’s first written testimony of 1922, they [Les champs magnéƟques] were born of the discovery of the productive power of the phrases that come to mind as one is falling asleep, together with the attention given by Breton to the method of free association prescribed by psychiatric treatises . . . [In the journal LiƩérature of 1922], we find the preoccupation with narratives of dreams; . . . the interest in oneirism; the stories of amazing coincidences (‘L’esprit nouveau’ in Les pas perdus); experiments with hypnotic trance [carried out mainly by Breton and Robert Desnos].24

We see in this the surrealist desire to reduce the rational mind’s control over poetic language and ideas in order to access revelatory moments of le merveilleux (the marvellous). This is carried out by entering a different state of mind using the artistic practice of automatism, in hasard objecƟf (objective chance), focused on random, unmotivated actions such as errance/dérive (walking without intention or goal), the objet trouvé (found objects) and humour in jokes or games. Sigmund Freud’s works, The InterpretaƟon of Dreams (1899 [1900]) and Jokes and their RelaƟon to the Unconscious (1905), were highly influential in the development of these artistic practices and Breton specifically refers to Freud in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).25 * The surrealist merveilleux, as many scholars of surrealism detail, is multiform. First, it is an engagement with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of wonder, suggested by the movement’s archive drive, the reality their writings construct and the mythical creatures that inhabit it. The surrealist merveilleux, characterised in one aspect by objective chance, is in addition described by Balakian as a substitute for ‘the religious concept of the merveilleux’.26 While Freud’s psychoanalytic theory gave surrealism an access to the imagination and approach to the merveilleux, Marxist theory provided it with the critique of the capitalist conventions of the art market.27 Marxism was extensively theorised by Aragon and caused Soupault to separate from the movement from around 1926.28 The watchwords ‘poetry, liberty, and love’ were to encapsulate surrealism’s theoretical resistance to social and capitalist repressions of the imagination from the 1940s – concepts previously transferred into their aesthetic practices.29 A common expression of the surrealist agenda occurs in the meeting of the poles of the logical and ‘illogical’. Inspired by a dialectical monism present in Heraclitus’ thought, for whom ‘[o]pposites come together and from what is different arises the fairest harmony’,30 Bretonian surrealism, like Dada, sought to find the ‘supreme point’ at which contradictions cease to be perceived.31 In 1949, the critic Robert Clancy observed that ‘untapped human resources must be explored, the processes of pure thought must be understood. These resources and processes are inhibited by tradition, convention, conscious “reason”.

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To release the energy that lies deep within us and that alone has value, is the aim of surrealism’.32 Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss, paraphrasing Herbert Marcuse, also refer to this matter: Marcuse has identified ‘the surrealist effort’ as one that asserts that there are forces operating in the world ‘[with] which we refuse to come to grips. We are subject not only to the causality of reason, as explored in the natural sciences and in common sense, but also to “irrational,” surreal or subreal (in terms of accepted rationality) forces . . . [that] undo the mutilation of our faculties by the established society and its requirements.’33

Marcuse identifies that it is exactly the fusion of the rational and irrational which would in turn serve to make whole the self that is repressed and ‘mutilated’ by rationalist and positivist philosophies. As the surrealism developed over time its resistance against rational control would lead the movement to venerate not only the hypnotic state of automatism, madness, oneirism and the sleep-waking state but also altered states of consciousness present in childhood, the ‘female’, the ‘primitive’ and in an erotic amour fou (mad love) for the female muse. In choosing to elevate the states of mind considered ‘illogical’ by rationalist criteria, Bretonian surrealism took on an authority for the voices it spoke for. Louise Tythacott highlights the problems with this tendency in relation to the image of the ‘primitive’.34 By extension one can see this as problematic in relation to surrealism’s other valorisations. Bretonian surrealism can, as such, be criticised as limited by its location, class, race and gender positioning and, using a Derridean move, can be seen to contain the very bourgeois, Eurocentric and misogynistic attitudes it aimed to reject. Therefore, although analysing international surrealist literature through a Bretonian framework is important, it can limit analysis of the specificities of alternative surrealist works and the ways in which international surrealism may not reproduce its specific approach to the surreal. Although not the favoured medium of the Parisian surrealist group, prose fiction did gain a number of adherents; the most frequently discussed example is Breton’s Nadja (1928) to which can be added novels by the surrealist co-founders Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, et al.35 In some international locations the dominance of poetry and painting evident in the Parisian group held firm, in other locations prose fiction flourished. When attempting to define the diverse phenomenon of international surrealist prose fiction it is perhaps wise to first provide a baseline using Breton’s thoughts on the matter. Breton famously rejected the traditional novel in favour of a different vision, in the Second manifeste du surréalisme (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930): One enjoys imagining novels that cannot end, as there are problems without solutions. When will we see a novel in which the characters, copiously defined by a few unimportant characteristics, will act in a completely predictable manner toward an unpredictable result, or, conversely, another novel in which psychology will give up trying perfunctorily to perform its great useless duties, at the expense of people and events in order really to hold a fraction of a second between two blades and to surprise there the seeds of the incidents; or that other novel in which the verisimilitude of the setting will, for the first time, stop concealing from us the strange symbolic life which objects, the most commonplace as well

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as the most clearly defined, have only in dreams; or another in which the construction will be extremely simple but the words generally used to describe weariness will be employed to describe a scene of kidnapping, or happy words used to describe, with great precision, a storm, etc. Anyone who is of the opinion that it is high time to put an end to these insulting ‘realistic’ insanities will have no problem making up his own selection.36

From Breton’s description a number of features arise, including linguistic/ semantic play, a focus upon the strange and the instantaneous, to which can be added the surrealist technique of generic collage. Breton’s definition is intentionally polyphonous in order to preserve the diversity of surrealist novelistic expressions. Denis Hollier draws attention to a particular autobiographical aspect of surrealist narrative, which is indicated by Breton’s directive to ‘[s]peak of yourself, you will teach me much more . . . Just limit yourself to leaving me your memoirs; provide me with the real names.’ This imperative suggests, as Hollier has commented, that Breton asks the writer to ‘leave the third person for the first’ and ‘wants tales that would be more realistic than the novel’, a point Breton’s Nadja reinforces in its telling of his purported liaison with Nadja.37 In any survey of international surrealist novels one sees great variety, both within novels from one group and between groups, in the way that they express individual, group, national and international traditions. As Breton’s earlier description implies, the international surrealist novel cannot be easily delimited.38 The quote from Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries that begins this discussion details the resurfacing of mythic themes and primordial symbols in the modern novel, specifically in surrealism and, one can infer, by extension in surrealist novels. Surrealism’s interest in altered states of consciousness lends itself to the subversion of realist narrative forms through alternative narrative perspectives, unfamiliar imagery, spatio-temporal distortions and decontextualised features. The aim was to liberate the ‘original powers of the mind’ and in doing so, ‘[s]urrealism calls upon its public to witness a form of unreasonable confrontation because it believes that illuminations can come only in the absence of reason’, J.H. Matthews notes.39 Central to surrealist thought is the view that the unconscious is the route to creativity. Certain scholarship attends to the periphery of surrealist thought articulated by Parisian ex-surrealists or surrealist affiliates, which is nonetheless very much surrealist in intention.40 Any such separation of the core and its periphery is, of course, admissible to a fluidity, erosion and osmotic interchange over time and upon certain ideas. This may mean that a text fits at once, in part, into both core and periphery in differing ways. A possible cause for the ex-surrealists’ or affiliates’ dissatisfaction with Bretonian surrealism (and vice versa) is raised by Celia Rabinovitch: ‘While surrealism’s early focus (1920–30) lay in the use of experimental methods to invoke creativity, by the 1930s a rift between the logic of empiricism and the liberation of creative inspiration appeared in the movement.’41 Susan Laxton affirms this change: ‘It would seem that within a mere half-decade the founding notion of Surrealism as essentially dynamic and therefore representable only through an index of process had disappeared.’42 In addition, the scientific investigations carried out by the surrealist Bureau

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were short-lived and did not arise again in Bretonian Parisian surrealism. In this second phase rationalism was not so much countered as subsumed under the altered notion of the imagination and this shift led to internal conflicts and the departure of a number of members, each excision having its own cause. In 1929 one major schism occurred, leading the surrealist affiliate Georges Bataille and other ex-surrealists to publish Un Cadavre (1930) which attacked Breton in print. Hollier notes, that the 1929 split between Bretonian surrealism and its dissenters became visible around the group contributing to Bataille’s journal Documents (1929–30) and related predominantly to the issue of the sacred: [T]he most important fault-line that separated the people around La RévoluƟon surréaliste and those around Documents during the [surrealist] crisis of 1929, was probably the issue of religion. It was, indeed, at Documents that Bataille started to develop his theoretical reflections concerning the sacred and its fundamentally ambivalent nature, high and low, pure and impure.43

Critical approaches to surrealism are divided: some critics like Steven Harris argue to retain the purity of Bretonian surrealism against dilution or deformation and he is joined by Raihan Kadri amongst others;44 in contrast, critics like Foster, Hollier and Rosalind Krauss raise the validity of Bataille’s surrealism. Foster, respectively, terms Breton’s and Bataille’s versions of surrealism as ‘official’ and ‘dissident’.45 In the discussion that follows Foster’s terminology is adopted, using the term ‘official surrealism’ or formal surrealism to refer specifically to Breton’s surrealism, not that of other prominent members of the group, and the application of its ideas internationally. The term ‘dissident surrealism’ will refer specifically to one group around Bataille, not in its wider sense which could be said to include a variety of splinter groups formed in Paris. It is given that the circumscribing that occurs in the use of defined terms can potentially limit the irrepressibility of any concept, for the breadth of Bretonian surrealism and Bataillean surrealism, their exchanges, interchanges over time and parallels far exceed the boundaries of the terms ‘official’ and ‘dissident’. However, what is denoted by these terms is a very specific separation of the concept of the sacred as it appears in surrealism and peripheral surrealist theory. One can argue that charting a periphery need not destroy the core as Harris fears, but, instead, that peripheral surrealisms add to our understanding of the core group and contemporary reactions within and without it. The journal Documents and the publication Un Cadavre indeed marked the beginning of a Bataillean strain of peripheral surrealism which later gave rise to the group that provides the focus of this study, the Collège, formed by the dissident surrealists Bataille, Roger Caillois and, later, Michel Leiris.46 In the activities of this group one sees something quite different from that of official surrealism: the Collège was still guided by surrealism’s ‘moral sense’, as Hollier notes, but was focused upon ‘Sacred Sociology’.47 The specific peripheral surrealist theory of the Collège has been widely discussed in academic scholarship. Michèle H. Richman has provided erudite accounts of the Collège’s work acknowledging the influence of Emile Durkheim’s thought. However, further analysis of the relevance of the theory of this dissident group to the surrealist agenda is important, given the growing critical interest in Bataille’s theories.

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

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At the talks given by the Collège, one could identify a number of strategic thinkers on the intellectual left amongst the audience: Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer.48 Such connections are no doubt amongst those that caused Călinescu to note the formative role surrealism then played in shaping postmodernism and poststructuralism: Taking the term avant-garde in its Continental acceptation we can argue that what [Ihab] Hassan calls postmodernism is mostly an extension and diversification of the pre-World War II avant-garde. Historically speaking, many of the postmodernist notes defined by Hassan can easily be traced back to Dada and, not infrequently, to surrealism.49

Philip Rothman concurs that, ‘despite the generational gap separating Surrealists from Poststructuralists, evidence suggests the latter owe the former a considerable and complex debt.’50 Bataille played a central role in this transition and his influence on French poststructuralist theory is notable in the work of Jacques Derrida and others.51 There is still a great deal to be understood about the Collège and Bataille’s expression of surrealist aims and its applicability to the interpretati on of international surrealist literature. Stephen Ungar indicates this when discussing a 1954 novel by the African writer Camara Laye: The pertinence of the Collège de Sociologie in my reading of Le Regard du roi [The Radiance of the King] concerns conceptual and narrative formulations of the sacred. While reading Laye’s narrative in the context of Surrealist practice, it struck me that beyond the individual instances of verbal and narrative play that could be associated with Breton’s views in the Manifesto, Le Regard du roi set into narrative form a vision of the sacred that was closer to the one developed in the 1930s by former Surrealists.52

A reading of surrealist literature that highlights elements of the Collège’s dissident surrealism over features of Bretonian surrealism exchanges an exploration of ‘irrational’ internal, unconscious factors for the ‘irrational’ external, sacred sociology. An alternative surrealist engagement with states of mind and the merveilleux is forwarded by examining the Collège’s dissident surrealist investigation of sacred sociology, returning a sacred aspect to the official surrealist merveilleux, beyond that endorsed by Breton’s official remit. This pushing against limitations is a continued expression of the causes of the 1929 break in the surrealist group, a position Bataille restates clearly in his journal CriƟque in 1948: [Surrealism] is also a state of mind which reaches towards unification; in which, through this union, an existence beyond the self is experienced as a spiritual authority in whose name it is possible to speak . . . And the spiritual authority (by spiritual I merely mean: beyond the individual) that surrealism embodies is surely not limited to the few people closely connected with André Breton. (GBAM 55)

As Ungar highlights, ‘[w]hereas Breton’s version of the marvellous situates the quest for the marvellous at the individual level, Bataille’s view of the sacred as the privileged moment of communal existence offers an alternate

12

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perspective.’53 Both forms of surrealism privilege moments of the marvellous and chance in ordinary experience, but the qualitative difference in the nature of that experience is clear. An alternative method of reading surrealist prose can be developed through a specific interpretation of the work of the Collège de Sociologie and Bataille’s thoughts on the sacred; the latter, as will be discussed, differ markedly from other, more well-known, aspects of his theoretical oeuvre. Such a reading uncovers features that are occluded when literary texts are read solely in relation to official surrealist theory.

SOCIOLOGIE SACRÉE AND THE ECSTATIC STATE OF MIND: A CURATIVE SYMBOL It seems that present circumstances particularly lend themselves to a criƟcal work having as its object the mutual relations of man’s being and society’s being: what he expects from it, what it requires of him. Roger Caillois, ‘For a College of Sociology: Introduction’ (1938)54

Although a number of Collège members gave lectures, the focus here is a selective reading of the Collège’s work on the sacred, derived from lectures by Bataille and the ex-surrealist Roger Caillois, further informed by Bataille’s 1940s writings on the sacred, specifically Inner Experience (1943).55 Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz, the Collège viewed the sacred as a social manifestation. Caillois, Leiris and Anatole Lewitsky were students of Mauss during the 1930s, at which time Bataille also ‘attended Mauss’s lectures’ and later worked on his idea of the gift.56 The critic Daniel Cottom likens the ‘gift’, discussed by Mauss as non-capitalist logic, to the surrealist ‘found object’ further indicating the relations between official surrealism and the Collège’s dissident surrealism.57 Danièle Hervieu-Léger explains that the sacred appears in two forms in Durkheim’s thought: [P]rimary experience – at once collective and individual – constitutes the source of all authentic religiosity and, as such, cannot be reduced to the body of doctrine and liturgies which comprise its socially accepted expression . . . The function of the secondary level is to connect to the elemental primary level and apply its emotional experience of the sacred.58

The ‘secondary level’ of the sacred, present in religious ‘doctrines and liturgies’, is thereby separated from a ‘primary experience’ of the sacred. The primary experience is one Durkheim allied with ‘effervescence’, as Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor point out: ‘Durkheim insisted that the effervescence of social gatherings could lead to a “bloody barbarism” (as in the French Revolution) as well as a socially beneficent solidarity.’59 It is this primary level of emotional sacred experience, in its collective sense, that is of interest to the members of the Collège and, in its individual sense, which Bataille explored in Inner Experience.60 Richman observes that Durkheim made an ‘impassioned call for a revival of feasts and festivals, so that modern society may overcome its crisis of

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

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moral mediocrity through social regeneration’,61 further indicating Durkheim’s favouring of the primary level of the sacred, as follows: This privileged moment is what Durkheim qualified as sacred because it occurs when the group becomes aware of itself as something other than a mere juxtaposition of individuals and as a result forges the bonds of solidarity. In a similar vein, Bataille concluded that the sacred was discerned in the communicaƟon it engenders and, by extension, in the formaƟon of new psychic beings.62

Durkheim detailed that the sacred gave rise to a dual reaction, as ‘an object at once of fascination and of revulsion, of attraction and terror’.63 The dual affective force of the sacred is widely discussed in terms of the ganz andere (wholly other), as Mircea Eliade explains: In Das Heilige [(1917) Rudolf] Otto . . . finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum), the majesty (majestas) that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power; he finds religious fear before the fascinating mystery (mysterium fascinans) in which perfect fullness of being flowers. Otto characterises all these experiences as numinous (from the Latin numen, god) . . . The numinous presents itself as something ‘wholly other’ (ganz andere).64

What was it, though, about the primary ‘emotional experience’ of the sacred that regenerated the social bonds and formed new states of being? A possible answer is to be found in the work of the Collège, and this answer is closely related to earlier surrealist research into the unconscious. The Collège chose to analyse the sacred in their own contemporary society by looking to ‘certain traces and surviving elements of a past in which the sacred could have a constitutive value’.65 In this way, their studies avoided reproducing the exoticisation of ‘primitive’ realities that official surrealism – and even much of the work in Documents – may be seen to fall prey to.66 The critic Claudine Frank explains that Caillois ‘criticize[d] the movement for having betrayed its stated purpose . . . [through the] incoherent or deceptive attitudes of Breton (and the Surrealists) toward the image, which destroy any true revelation’ (RCES 326). For Caillois, specifically, it was the application of surrealism and not its aims that alienated him. By 1937, having rejected official surrealism’s ‘stubborn indulgence of personal simulacra’, Caillois’s work for the Collège aimed to enact a rigorously scientific surrealist investigation of revelation (RCES 330). In Caillois’s ‘Introduction’ to the Collège, he states the nature of this enquiry: There are certain rare, fleeting, and violent moments of his intimate experience on which man places extreme value. From this given the College of Sociology takes its departure, striving to reveal equivalent processes at the very heart of social existence, in the elementary phenomena of attraction and repulsion determining this existence, as in its most marked and meaningful formaƟons such as churches, armies, brotherhoods, secret societies . . . [Studies] undertaken . . . with critical severity. (RC‘ICS’ 11)

Caillois’s emphasis upon scientific enquiry and ‘critical severity’ when considering the sacred and surrealism was pivotal to the Collège’s perspective. The ‘supreme point’ of balance between logic and ‘illogic’ determined by Breton’s vision of

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surrealism in the 1930s is relocated by this severity back towards the analytical attitude that had shaped the early investigations of the Bureau. Bataille echoes this position in his later comment that ‘[n]atural exaltation or intoxication have a certain “flash in the pan” quality. Without the support of reason, we don’t reach “dark incandescence” ’ (GBIE 47). The necessity for reason to balance the ‘illogical’ at a different point finds exposition in the Collège’s study of sacred sociology. The new point of balance they establish from 1937 to 1939 offers a different way in which to view the surrealist revolt: now the surrealist irruptions of the unconscious are replaced by an intricate analysis of ‘fleeting’ ‘moments’ of sacred ‘intimate experience’ on a social plane. An artistic investment in such experiences of the sacred is evident, I propose, in international forms of surrealist literature, and the work of the Collège offers a way to begin to understand these moments without eliding the social specificities of each novel and the location of its production. In the ‘Introduction’ to the Collège (1938), Caillois, following Durkheim, observed that the sacred was composed of ‘the elementary phenomena of attraction and repulsion determining this existence’ (RC‘ICS’ 11). In the Collège presentation, ‘Attraction and Repulsion I’ (1938), Bataille extends this image in relation to the sacred nucleus: ‘its basic content being that which is disgusting and debilitating’ and its ‘active function’ being ‘the transformation of a depressive content into an object of exaltation’; borrowing the terms the ‘left sacred’ and ‘right sacred’ from Hertz’s Death and the Right Hand (1907), Bataille describes this transformation as one from ‘the left into the right, distress into strength’ (GB‘ARI’ 111). He qualifies that one side of the object dominates and the social transformation in either direction occurs ‘in the course of ritual practices’.67 It is possible to view certain social actions as causing the reverse transformation, one from strength to distress, indicating the method of exclusion from the group that Bataille defines through heterology and which is seen psychoanalytically in PTSD, and again, critically, in the concept of abjection. It is primarily the move from left to right that concerns us here. Bataille’s heterological theory forms part of his political and social critique of liberal democracy, which extends the official surrealist critique of liberal democracy’s ethical and aesthetic levels. Hollier suggests this may be understood as the theory of that which theory expels. In its battle with the angel of repugnance, in the depths of darkness, thought persistently faces the things that repel it. What unites men? The things that repel them. Society stands upon the things it cannot stand.68

Bataille’s critique, concerned with repulsive schemas that shape society, valorises the status of what is excluded – thereby developing a theoretical validation for surrealism’s anti-rationalism. Rather than focusing on what conventional society excludes by coding it abject, Bataille moves to ask how this occurs and through his research into sacred sociology uncovers the affective schema at work. The ‘active function’ of society’s sacred nucleus is then to transform ‘distress into strength’ via ritual. Therein resides the motor of the transformative capabilities of the primary sacred, which, as an expression of the left sacred, turns repulsion to attraction, creating anew the right sacred. During the time of the Collège, Bataille saw the duality of the sacred as a mobile transition from repulsion into

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attraction – observing that which is deemed ‘abject’ moving towards an affective state that could be termed adject.69 In studies on Bataille there is a trend towards focusing on the repulsive, or abject, quality of the left sacred above its active function.70 However, Bataille’s work in the Collège, mediated by Caillois’s approach, highlights this acƟve function of the sacred in society. In observing the transformation of left to right sacred, following Hertz, the work of the Collège translates into social terms Freud’s observation that the psyche will respond to unpleasure with the pleasure principle. Indeed it was the Collège’s intention that sacred sociology would find ‘points of coincidence between the fundamental obsessive tendencies of individual psychology and the principal structures that govern social organization’.71 Freud states: When we further find that the activity of even the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series, we can hardly reject the further hypothesis that these feelings reflect the manner in which the process of mastering stimuli takes place.72

The Collège’s work on attraction and repulsion demonstrates that society selfregulates its emotional equilibrium much as the individual does. Emphasising the functional role of the abject and adject offers a new way to look at the forces of sacred repulsion in Bataille’s theory and in the field of Bataille scholarship. In his Collège lecture ‘Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches’ (1938), Caillois determines that emotions of ‘collective ecstasy’ and ‘paroxysmal death’ can be seen to ‘rejuvenate’ society (parenthetically, Bataille gave this lecture using Caillois’s notes).73 In the lecture ‘Festival’ (1939), Caillois, following Durkheim, details two types of interaction with the sacred. The first constitutes a primary sacred experience which Caillois terms ‘the sacred as infracƟon’, as experienced during festival or mystic rituals when the rules or doctrines of society are transgressed inaugurating ‘creation’. The second corresponds to the secondary level of the sacred instituted by bodies of doctrine or liturgy (religion) that attempt to interpret the primary emotional experience of the sacred, which Caillois terms ‘the sacred as regulaƟon, that of prohibitions’.74 In ‘Festival’, the shift from unpleasure to pleasure, from left to right sacred, occurs in the cycle of regulation and infraction denoted by the ‘alternation between feasting and work, ecstasy and self-control, that annually revived order out of chaos’ (RC‘F’ 302). Primary and secondary experiences of the sacred, respectively, infraction and regulation are vital. The first is a ritual release, a chaotic, rejuvenating, emotional, primary experience of the sacred: a crucible, ‘represent[ing] the time of intense emotions and the metamorphosis of . . . being’, in which the bonds of the group loosen and rebind as the group returns to ‘the sacred as regulation’ as a newly ‘revived order’ (RC‘F’ 282, 302). It is the affects of sacred ‘ecstasy’ and its resulting social rejuvenation that serve to master distressing social stimuli and turn abjection to adjecƟon, and which will direct our reading of the representative international surrealist novels that detail an alternative surrealist position. What seems evident from recent work on distress and trauma is that re-engaging with altered states of consciousness can have a therapeutic effect. This explains why in the wake of World War I official surrealism may have forwarded

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SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

automatism, the oneiric, being childlike or ‘primitive’, entering a sleep-waking state, engaging in madness, or amour fou – to which one can add the ‘dissident’ surrealist state of ecstasy – for the salutary creative effect they afford, as the rational mind is bypassed. Surrealism aims to alter conventional attitudes shaped by rationalism, logic and empiricism through the anti-rational and ‘illogical’. In a strikingly different way from official surrealism, the Collège’s study of sacred sociology alters conventional attitudes using images of the ‘illogical’ that valorise the affective releases brought by attraction and repulsion, ritual excesses and purificatory sacrifices in a social pleasure-unpleasure series. As Patrick Ffrench argued, the Collège applied the theory of individual drive discharges to the social body.75 Hollier, too, referring to the releases Caillois describes in ‘Festival’, notes a social interpretation of Freud’s observation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, such that expulsion of waste (tension) is vital to survival.76 Along similar lines, the transformation of the left to right sacred has been compared to a social enactment of Freud’s dynamic of the pleasure-unpleasure principle introduced above. Social psychology defines that there are three approaches to altering attitudes: cognitive, affective and behaviourist.77 Inez Hedges has incisively observed that official surrealist methods are primarily ‘constructivist’, therefore denoting a cognitive approach to altering attitudes.78 In contrast, in the Collège the dissident surrealists, Bataille and Caillois, through their focus on the emoƟonal experience of the primary sacred, utilise, I suggest, an affective approach. The branch of psychoanalytic study which considers affects is a complex field but it may offer further insight into the transformations resulting from what the Collège conceptualised as the ‘sacred as infraction’. Affect psychology looks to understand the emotional dimension of the psyche: a feature integral to Freud’s thinking.79 Charles Brenner defines the affect as ‘a sensaƟon of pleasure, unpleasure, or both, plus the ideas associated with that sensation’.80 Affects are also individually, culturally and socially encoded. Ruth Stein alerts us that encoded ‘affects are linked with self and object representations and are thus absolutely necessary for psychic development’.81 If identity is shaped and changed by affects, then altering the affective sensation attached to an idea linked to self or other, potentially moving from a negative association to a positive one, can cause ontological transformation just as Bataille suggests a turn from ‘distress to strength’ in ritual practices would. The emotional experience of the primary sacred (a collective or individual experience of, for example, ecstasy), can release affective tensions, alter sensations attached to ideas thus altering (transforming) social bonds in the group, a transition verified by psychoanalytic studies of affects and their role in identity development. The Collège’s descriptions of ‘collective ecstasy’ and ‘paroxysmal death’ not only indicate emotional experiences of the sacred, but also, for the ‘historian of religions, these symbols express the aƫtudes taken up by man . . . and these are always sacred realities’ (RC‘BC’ 152; MEMDM 117). The move from official surrealism’s cognitive approach to changing attitudes to the affective approach of the Collège’s surrealist enquiry was decisive. This is not to say that official surrealism does not utilise affectivity:82 it does so in the gothic overtones of the uncanny and in amour fou. However, this is subsidiary

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to its constructivist agenda and focus upon the individual unconscious. Therefore, the official surrealist presentation of objects and images underscores conceptual novelty which alters one’s view of reality and Bataille and Caillois, in the Collège, turn rather to explore the affective content of primary experiences of the sacred which alter views of reality. The Collège’s study of society in this way reorients surrealist revolt, gained through the faculty of the imagination, from cognitive play to the social role of emotional excesses; towards ‘ecstasy’ rather than amour fou or clinical madness; towards social ‘paroxysm’ rather than ‘convulsive beauty’.83 In these ways, the Collège’s analyses of the role of infraction in society offer to surrealist theories of liberation the methodological specificity that Caillois saw lacking. Quintessentially for our purposes here, this dissident surrealist understanding of ecstasy offers the basis for a methodology with which one can better interpret surrealist literature produced by writers in locations outside the Parisian circle, for whom the sacred was an integral part of social experience and their surrealist attitude. * The Collège details societal affective expulsions, as Hollier and Ffrench identify above, which suggest the socius is a self-regulating organism along the same lines as the individual psyche. Further, descriptions of the social action of the ‘sacred as infraction’ by the Collège see it as a release of the affective tensions of the group, leading to ‘a new and reinvigorated order’ and a ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ in a way that the ‘sacred as regulation’ shaped by ‘taboos’ or ‘rules’ does not (RC‘F’ 282).84 Moving between unbinding/release (infraction) and binding/tension (regulation) Caillois’s description of the festival ritual illustrates Bataille’s heterology, which highlights and recovers what is repulsed from conventional society. Indeed Bataille indicated this connection when he commented: ‘There is no doubt indeed that there exists an intimate connection between repulsion, disgust, and what psychoanalysis calls repression’ (GB‘ARII’ 120). As Joseph Libertson identifies, Bataille’s theory is similar to the ‘Freudian “return of the repressed”, [in] the surrealist vision of objects’.85 In this way the Collège continues official surrealism’s aim to liberate the imagination from repression but looks instead to sacred expelled (repellent) elements in the group and the metamorphosis its reintegration brings to ontology. In this the Collège fulfils its stated aim to apply individual psychology to society through a study of the sacred. For the theorists of the Collège modern society fails to adequately release social tensions because it excludes the ‘sacred as infraction’. Later, Bataille was to formulate this as the repression of a necessary, affective excess: ‘The lesson . . . of all religions, is that there is an instructive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear.’86 Further, Caillois was to observe that the effects of this repression are extreme: ‘when these exhausting and ruinous festivals are abandoned, under the influence of colonization, society loses its bonds and becomes divided’ (RCMS 126; cf. RC‘F’ 301). Indeed the ontological metamorphosis Caillois attributed to ritual transformations, and Bataille to the move from distress to strength (left to right sacred), illuminate

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SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

the active function of ‘prophetic and messianic’ cults of ancient civilisations and ‘cults of liberation’ during the periods of colonial oppression, thereby reinforcing the ‘close ties between religious life and secular, political, and cultural life’.87 Social bonds need renewal in times of stress, and sacred ecstasy, Bataille and Caillois believed, offers the route to such rejuvenation. Hypnosis, as a form of therapeutic trance state (altered consciousness), was used by psychotherapy at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has incisively attested, this utilised the ‘curative’ power of the sacred trance state which traditional society had previously uncovered in sacred rituals: that trance heals, ‘is actually not so surprising if we bear in mind that the “psychotherapies” . . . that preceded psychoanalysis – from shamanistic techniques to “animal magnetism” . . . – have always included, in one form or another, an element of trance or disappearance of self.’88 In these altered states, one sees incidences of non-linearity and symbol-directed communication. It is the symbol which ‘delivers its message and fulfils its function when its significance escapes the conscious level’, as Eliade details.89 For Breton rationalism repressed altered states leading to creativity, and for Bataille in the Collège order repressed altered states leading to tension release. The Collège’s investigations of sacred infraction detail how Western European civilisation represses the unbinding, releasing drive necessary for a renewal and rejuvenation of the community. This investigation is inherently surrealist as Tythacott identifies: ‘The Collège de Sociologie perpetuated the idea that European culture had become dehumanized through the eradication of everyday contact with the divine and – in true Surrealist fashion – members attempted to reactivate the sacred in everyday life.’90 Later they would doubt the possibility of artificially reactivating the sacred in these ways. However, the drive-based affective reading of society theorised by the Collège serves to extend not only Durkheim’s sociological remit through the input of psychology but it expands our understanding of surrealist methods of countering the repression imposed by rationalism. In Caillois’s terms ‘the metamorphosis of . . . being’ arises from infraction in the social cycle of ‘feasting and work, ecstasy and self-control’, therein the emotional connection with the primary sacred, in ‘ecstasy’, facilitates development and ‘rejuvenate[s]’ the social group (RC‘F’ 282, 302; RC‘BC’ 152–53). From a psychological standpoint Stein details that affective changes facilitate psychic development in the individual.91 The Collège details that loosening the bonds that codify social authority serves to ‘bind’ society in a new ‘accord’.92 This new recognition has the effect of redefining the boundaries of the self/group and what is excised from it. The same is true for manifestations of the sacred which Eliade theorises under the term ‘hierophany’. The discussion above has highlighted how, in relation to the Collège’s investigation into sacred sociology, psychoanalytic theory offers a way to explain how ancient and modern spiritual ritual symbols engage with an affective form of attitude shifting that can catalyse ontological or egoic transformation. In order to further translate the Collège’s theory of ecstasy into a working literary praxis it is of assistance to pick apart the mechanics of this social development, the ancient philosophy it rests upon and theories explored in the history of comparative religions.

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The Collège’s view of sacred ecstasy and attendant ontological metamorphosis can be viewed as congruent with Eliade’s observation that the sacred ‘makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another’ (MESP 63). In Eliade’s terminology ritual and myth provide forms of ‘symbolic analogy’ which connect the sacred and the profane.93 Symbols in myth and ritual play an important role in social bonding by shaping the identity of social groups and nations. Indeed, ‘one of the chief characteristics of the myth . . . is the creation of exemplary models for a whole society’, as Eliade identifies (MEMDM 32). Furthermore, ‘[o]n the occasion of the re-presentation of the myths the entire community is renewed; it rediscovers its “sources,” relives its “origins” ’, so that the recitation of myths is socially regenerative.94 However, all symbols are not equally effective at delivering their message and connecting the sacred to the profane as Eliade makes clear in his distinction between ‘coherent’ and ‘concret[ised]’ symbols. Whereas, ‘a coherent symbolism, [is] a symbolism built up on cosmological and theological principles’, a ‘concret[ised]’ symbolism is a ‘degeneration’ or ‘infantilization’ because ‘with this sort of substitution there must inevitably be a process of infantilization – and that is not only among “primitives”, but even in the most developed societies’ – with the coherent symbol carrying a meaning which has corroded in the concretised symbol (MEPS 445, 444). The function, if not the affect, remains the same for both: ‘to transform a thing or an action into something other than that thing or action appears to be in the eyes of profane experience’ (MEPS 445). Coherent ritual or mythic symbols are vital elements, as Bataille states: ‘Myth is perhaps fable, but this fable is made the opposite of fiction if one looks at the people who dance it, who act it, and whose living truth it is’; therefore, as ‘ritual practices’ lead to ‘transformation’ he suggests myth may also do so (GB‘SA’ 22; GB‘ARII’ 121–22).95 Caillois, using Georges Dumézil’s term ‘Great Time’, comments that the primordial ‘mythical time is the origin of the other and continuously re-emerges by causing everything that is manifestly disconcerting’; it is a ‘return to the beginning of the world . . . to the powers which at that time transformed chaos into cosmos’ (RC‘F’ 288; RCMS 102–03).96 Further, Bataille details that ‘[m]yth is born in ritual acts . . ., the violent dynamism that belongs to it has no other object than the return to lost totality; even if it is true that the repercussions are decisive and transform the world’, and refers to mythic and ritual recourses to the time of origin as the ‘instant’ of ‘ecstasy’ or ‘the temporal immediacy of the divine life’ (GB‘SAi’ 233; GBAM 66).97 It is this ‘instant’ of sacred ecstasy that may irrupt into profane temporality as an indication of the presence of sacred time for Caillois and Bataille.98 In this the Collège reflect observations made by scholars in sociology and comparative theology, whereby ritual and myth offer a momentary access to the living sacred. From the viewpoint of the history of religions, Eliade identifies that time – as a feature of sacred reality, like symbols from myth – has a regenerative capacity. Sacred time associates myth with sacred reality in ways that are central to this understanding of the affective force of ecstasy. Eliade affirms that ‘by ‘living’ the myths one emerges from profane chronological time and enters a time of a different quality’ (MEMR 18). One could differentiate these two distinct forms of time using the ancient Greek concepts of Khronos (ɍʌʊʆʉʎ), which gives the term ‘chronological’, denoting the linear ordered sense of time,

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and Kairos (Ⱦɲɿʌʉʎ), which could give rise to the term ‘kairological’, indicating non-linear time.99 Kairological ‘time’ is then a time of ritual and mythic creation (illud tempus) which fractures chronology, offering release and renewal: ‘the “regeneration” which is effected in the depth of the psyche’ Eliade writes, ‘is not to be completely explained until the moment when we realise that the images and symbols that have evoked it express – in religions and mysticisms – the doing away with Time’ (MEMDM 119). To expand this understanding of ecstasy as a transformative emotional experience of the primary sacred beyond that which the work of the Collège alone can provide, it is of assistance to consider Bataille’s representation of individual rather than collective ecstasy, most notably discussed in Inner Experience. Bataille explains that ‘the subject knows ecstasy and senses it: not as a voluntary direction coming from itself, but like the sensation of an effect coming from the outside’ (GBIE 60). The focus on sacred ecstasy pursued by the Collège and Bataille’s Inner Experience shifts surrealism toward a consideration of that which is outside the self, quite unlike the Bretonian surrealist experience which expresses the individual unconscious within the self, as illustrated ‘in L’amour fou, [where] Breton constituted a whole Surrealist ethic from the image of a screen or grid on which human desires are projected’.100 The ‘irrational’ altered state of consciousness described by Bataille as ecstasy is implicitly surrealist, but its directionality is anti-Bretonian. As Bataille indicates in 1946: ‘[Surrealism] is also a state of mind . . . in which . . . an existence beyond the self is experienced as a spiritual authority . . . [one] surely not limited to the few people closely connected with André Breton’ (GBAM 55). This point bears reiteration, for the conceptual crux of this volume rests upon Bataille’s distinction and the surrealist prose that illustrate this stance. It is this sense of an effect coming from outside into the self through ecstasy and a non-Bretonian interpretation of the spiritual that provides the basis for our literary praxis here. Sacred ‘ecstasy’ brings the self to the ‘extreme limit (l’extrême) of the possible’ (GBIE xxxiii). In ecstasy the ganz andere becomes momentarily part of the self, thereby breaking the boundary of the self, as Eliade states: The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being . . . The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible. (MESP 25)

On this limen (L. threshold), between corporeality and spirit, the inside and the outside, the self and the experience of the ‘other’ through ecstasy, one encounters moments of crossing wherein ontology and experience can be transformed by sacred intent (MESP 168–71). Depending upon which text or period in Bataille’s oeuvre is considered, the terms used to describe an experience outside being vary between ‘ecstasy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘instants’, ‘inner experience’, ‘non-knowledge’, ‘night’, ‘continuity’, ‘communication’, or are marshalled under ‘expenditure (laughter, heroism, ecstasy, sacrifice, poetry, eroticism . . .)’ (GBIE xxxiii). Bataille also can be observed interrelating these categories: ‘inner experience is ecstasy . . . we reach ecstasy by a contestation

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

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of knowledge’; in ‘[e]cstasy . . . the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence’ (GBIE 12, 59). Linda Pavlovski echoes Bataille’s list when she expresses that ‘Bataille sought loss of self through transgression and excess, notably through laughter, religious ecstasy, sacrifice, eroticism, death, and poetry.’101 Although the boundary between absence and presence or self and self-loss is, in Bataille’s theory, accessed through various methods of affective expenditure, it is ecstasy, in its sacred sense, which is of concern to us here (GBIE xxxiii). Bataille’s routes across the boundary of the self cannot be completely extricated from one another, and it is primarily death that intertwines with ecstasy in ritual and myth in ways that require further explication. As a concept and a potential for symbolic representation, the death instinct, which Freud sees as a universal drive subtending the activity of Eros, is of particular importance to the Collège’s study of ‘power, of the sacred, and of myths’ (RC‘ICS’ 11). The Collège’s and Bataille’s view of the sacred is not only closely linked to the activity of Freud’s death drive but also to its symbolic representation in the threshold or limen. Various critics note such transitions in Bataille’s theories: for example, Maria-Christine Lala terms Bataille’s action as the ‘feigned putting to death’ leading to ‘resurgence’; Paul Hegarty describes it as the Bataillean ‘undoing’ of identity; and Anca Parvalescu as a Bataillean ‘death’ leading to ‘birth’.102 In Bataille’s later oeuvre, images of ‘loss’ and ‘death’ leading to ‘rebirth’ reiterate the sacred dramatisation of what the Collège terms ‘infraction’ and ‘regulation’ and the communal ‘accord’ that alters being (GB‘A’ 22; RC‘F’ 282). In Literature and Evil (1957) Bataille observes the ecstatic dissolution of being in ‘death’ followed by a renewal of the self, much as, for the Collège, there is ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ following festival ecstasy or change from left to right sacred, and chaos to creation (GBLE 26; RC‘F’ 282; GB‘ARII’ 121). The figurative or literal painful death, sacrifice or loss of self (anguish), in the sacred experience of ecstasy opens new vistas upon the subject, such that ‘[m]yth reveals a region of ontology inaccessible to superficial logical experience’ (MEPS 418). Bataille allies this understanding of absence (nothingness) as creative renewal to ‘an atmosphere of death, knowing’s disappearance [and] the birth of that world we call sacred’.103 Such symbolic images of death offer one way to interpret Bataille’s references to sacrifice and ecstasy and their meaning in the work of the Collège. Ecstasy, as a movement coming from beyond-the-self, irrupts into profane reality (and the secondary sacred as regulation) through myth and the ritual analogy of sacred reality, and like the unconscious is unknowable. Being ‘beyond the self’ means crossing this limen. This alters the relationship between the subject and the object, subsequently impacting upon views of reality and identity. Hegarty indicates the profundity of this critical move when he describes Bataille’s concept of inner experience as ‘a radical phenomenology that exceeds Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (the being of Being)’.104 When read in relation to the work of the Collège and Bataille’s dissident surrealism, certain international surrealist prose works can be seen to contain an alternative concept

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of the sacred than that presented in official surrealist theory and practice. If, as Rabinovitch’s study, Surrealism and the Sacred, highlights, eros and the uncanny define the official surrealist engagement with the sacred, then the dissident surrealism outlined here engages with the sacred through thanatos and the ganz andere, exampled by Bataille and Caillois’s engagement with sacred infraction: an ecstasy, bringing social release and ‘death’ as the self and the socius cross the limen to a metamorphosis. * Modes of expression influenced by myth or non-realist features could be considered then to offer society, not a temporary retreat from the reality principle, but in very real ways to affect the reality principle through its ability to renew the group. In literary theory, Fredric Jameson observes that ‘positional thinking’ in literature occurs in times of social stress: [Romance and] the chanson de geste from which romance emerged, as well as popular forms such as the American Western . . . suggest that this positional thinking [‘of good and evil’] has an intimate relationship to those historical periods sometimes designated as the ‘time of troubles,’ in which central authority disappears.105

Therefore literary forms become an index of culture, indicating whether social bonds need renewing, affirming and strengthening. In the field of art theory, Wilhelm Worringer, paraphrased by Joseph Frank, likewise observed that in times of social stress, ‘when the relationship between man and the cosmos is one of disharmony and disequilibrium’, nonnaturalistic styles predominate and in times of social stability, mimetic or naturalistic styles flourish.106 In the field of religious studies, Richard Fenn notes that in times of social crisis interest in the sacred rises,107 a sentiment Eliade expands upon when he notes the use of nonnaturalism during a period of social crisis or trial: The destruction of artistic languages was accomplished by cubism, dadaism, and surrealism . . . Everything leads us to believe that the reduction of ‘artistic Universes’ to the primordial state of materia prima is only a phase in a more complex process; just as in the cyclic conceptions of the archaic and traditional societies ‘Chaos,’ the regression of all forms to the indistinction of the materia prima, is followed by a new Creation, which can be homologized with a cosmogony. (MEMR 190)

By understanding the mythic and ritual symbols analogising sacred realities which feature in nonnaturalistic literary genres, one gains a greater insight into the ebb and flow of the socius. Similar to Freud’s observation that the individual psyche will respond to unpleasure with the pleasure principle, these viewpoints – from a number of academic fields – imply a connection between social stress (social unpleasure) and the recourse to the sacred or to nonnaturalistic styles in literature (social pleasure principle). Rather than treating such reactions (which Silver saw, above, as rejections of the shoring up of identity evident in nationalistic or fascistic responses) as an escapist release of social tensions alone, one can underscore

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the curative, active function of these artistic reactions, specifically in dissident surrealism’s theorisations of ecstasy in the social body and the alternative surrealist praxis investigated here. Literature, although not a primary experience of the sacred, may draw coherently upon the affective transformations and attendant ontological metamorphosis occasioned by the living sacred expressed in myth and ritual symbols, in ways similar to those Eliade assigns to Robert Desoille’s psychoanalytic cure: [R. Desoille] obtains psychic cures by re-animating, in active imagination, certain symbols which comprise, in their own structure, the ideas of ‘passage’ and of ‘ontological mutation’. In the frame of reference in which they were known to the historian of religions, these symbols express the aƫtudes taken up by man and, at the same time, the realiƟes he is confronting, and these are always sacred realities, for, at the archaic level of culture, the sacred is the pre-eminently real. (MEMDM 117)

As Eliade notes, the curative result arises from the use of sacred symbols derived from myth and ritual transposed into the psychoanalytic treatment of the individual. When reanimated using this technique, the sacred symbol serves to alter the attitude that causes affective distress to the patient and thereby provides an adject ontological or egoic development and transformation. A similar regenerative effect can occur in any smaller social or literary group which use symbols from myth, according to Eliade (MESP 204). However, when discussing literary uses of sacred symbols which can have a curative effect, as with all uses, they must fulfil Eliade’s caveat that it be ‘a coherent symbolism’ rather than symbolism subject to concretisation, for as stipulated above, in the latter case the function remains but not the connection to sacred realities (MEPS 445–47). The ontological impact of symbols from myth is connected, as Eliade explained, to their alogical nature: [M]yth reveals a region of ontology inaccessible to superficial logical experience . . . Myth expresses in action and drama what metaphysics and theology define dialectically. Heraclitus saw that ‘God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger: all opposites are in him.’ (MEPS 418)

Heraclitus illustrates the dialectical monism that sits at the core of myth and sacred reality. Although surrealism’s fusion of ‘the real and the imagined’ offers the opportunity to draw upon symbols from myth and ritual in more direct ways than realist literature, the official aim is not to contextualise such uses but rather, as Lepetit details in relation to its post-war use of alchemical symbols, reveal ‘a “secular theosophy” aspect in surrealism’.108 The work of the Collège, however, aims, as Bataille states in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, to look to ‘living myth’ as it exists in a ‘total existence’ not comparable ‘to the scattered fragments of a whole that is broken apart’ (GB‘SA’ 22). The Collège follows this logic in its discussions on contextualised regulation and infraction, tension and release, death and renewal, self-control and sacred ecstasy, demonstrating their understanding of the import of dialectical monism in mythic and ritual access to

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individual and group ontology. The acts of social bonding and release that the Collège sought to uncover in modern society lead to a specific understanding of the social function of ritual, myth and ecstasy. Before turning to examine the Collège and Bataille’s views on the type of metamorphosis attending ecstasy, and in order to further understand how sacred experiences of ecstasy may transform attitudes and ontology, we can, as Durkheim urged, envision the act of ‘pulling’ the mind ‘outside itself’ into an ecstatic state, ‘provided that the word be taken in its etymological sense’.109 Our understanding of Bataille and the Collège’s conceptualisation of sacred ecstasy, and its basis in the material world, can be advanced by heeding Durkheim’s advice to look to the description of ecstasy in ancient thought.

EKSTASIS, ECSTASY AND THE INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST NOVEL Etymologically, ecstasy stems from the ancient Greek concept ekstasis (ୢʃʍʏɲʍɿʎ), meaning to be ‘standing out of oneself’.110 One description of ritual ekstasis stipulates that to the leader of his thiasos, the band of god-intoxicated worshippers . . . what happened was that the god himself entered into him, took possession and acted through him . . . They were entheoi, the god was in them, or from another point of view ekstaƟkoi, outside themselves. This is only one example of what was repeated in a large number of cults of the same ecstatic kind.111

In this rendering of ancient philosophy, ekstasis (self-absence) and entheos (divine presence and hierophany) are viewed as conjoined actions. Ecstatic cults are often allied with images of physical violence and sexual abandon, much as are Bataille’s theories on the abject, and which are described as part of Caillois’s analysis of the festival, and in many senses this is not an incorrect correlation. However, this is not the only possible extrapolation based upon the evidence: there is another way of viewing ancient ekstasis just as there is another, ecstatic, side to Bataille’s descriptions of self-loss. The violence and sexual abandon associated with the affective break in being and exceeding of the self in ekstasis or ecstasy can also be gained by nonphysical violence and nonsexual abandon. It stands to reiterate the caveat that, as such, this is a specific reading of ekstasis, ecstasy, and of self-loss in relation to the work of the Collège and Bataille’s oeuvre. The discussion above has focused upon this specific sense of the ecstatic in Bataille and the Collège’s writings, and, as will be discussed further, elements of ancient Greek philosophy provide the basis for such an approach. Indeed Plato’s Phaedrus (375–65 BCE)112 provides an account of ekstasis as divine possession or madness through which the subject experiences sacred reality in just this way.113 The Phaedrus is a two-part Socratic dialogue. The first part contains two contrasting speeches by Socrates on the nature of love; the second part, not considered here, discusses writing and rhetoric. In the first speech Socrates

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imitates Phaedrus’ view of Lysias’ speech, presenting one who desires as preferable to a partner who loves.114 In the second speech Socrates overturns the falsity of the first speech and defines love as one of the four pathways to the altered state of consciousness of divine madness. Like Guthrie, the translators of the Phaedrus draw attention to the dual movement in divine madness consisting of ekstasis and entheos: possession here means to be ‘ “possessed by god”: enthousiazƃn . . . [which] suggests both ecstasy, being beside oneself, and the presence of a god (theos) within (en) a person’ (Ph 249dn89). In the Phaedrus Socrates stipulates that ‘the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god’, describing this madness as ‘a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour’, differentiated from the madness ‘produced by human illness’ (Ph 244a, 265a). Socrates’ separation of human and divine madness offers a model upon which to designate: the madness caused by ‘human illness’ as akin to official surrealism’s interest in clinical madness (as an alternative to rationalism); and a ‘divinely inspired release’ as akin to the Collège’s interest in sacred-social ecstasy. Divine madness in this way can elucidate what is understood by the Bataillean loss of self in ‘ecstatic, breathless, experience’ leading to ‘communication’ and Caillois’s description of ‘collective ecstasy’ that ‘rejuvenate[s]’ (GBIE 103, 53; RC‘BC’ 152–53). Socrates continues by detailing four pathways though which to attain divine madness and the Greek divinities that act as symbols for each path. First, the divine madness of the ‘prophet’, ‘prophetess’ and ‘priestesses’ is attributed to Apollo;115 second, in ‘prayers to the gods and in worship, discovering mystic rites and purifications’, the participant is brought to safety, through a madness aligned with Dionysus; third, the ekstasis of the poet, history, and so forth are signalled by the Muses; and fourth, love is indicated by Aphrodite (Ph 244b–e, 265b). In the Phaedrus, Socrates’ first speech (imitating Lysias) argues for a purely physical desire felt by the non-lover, his second speech describes the greater gift of the divine madness of the lover (ୡʌழʆ) (Ph 243e–257b, 237a–241d).116 Here Socrates separates physical attraction from the divine madness of ekstasis induced by love, and potentially each remaining pathway (prophecy, mysticism and poetry) may be separated into two forms along the same lines: one of desire or human madness; the other in which the material world can lead to a divine madness. Therefore, aesthetic, prophetic or mystic experiences do not indicate ekstasis per se, just as those of sexual desire do not denote ekstasis in Socrates’ second speech; rather, one must interact with the material stimuli not in itself but as riven with sacrality (of sacred rites and reality); in a coherent and not concretised symbolism. In looking to ancient philosophical views of sacred reality to understand alternative practices of surrealism one delves into the root of aesthetics and its relation to sacred experience – a connection Bataille alludes to when he describes music as ‘divine intoxication’, and which Eliade makes clear in his observations about the ‘ecstatic origins of epic poetry’ (GBIE 69).117 This is visible in a concretised form in Breton’s focus on altered states of mind, valorisation of poetry and the muse, to access creativity. The ancient Greek philosophical concept of an experience of standing outside the self in ekstasis, in contact with the sacred, divine madness and

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the methods by which this is attained, echo in the Collège and Bataille’s sociologically orientated studies of ecstasy and loss of the self. For example, it is possible to view the mystical purifications and rites of Dionysus’ pathway, detailed in Plato’s Phaedrus, relative to Bataille’s or Caillois’s descriptions of ritual leading to transformations in the bonds of society (GB‘ARII’ 121; RC‘F’). In the Phaedrus, Socrates stipulates that divine madness is a gift of ‘good fortune’ that enables the conjoined ‘anguish’ and ‘joy’ to become ‘bliss’ (ʅɲʃɳʌɿʉʆ) following the ‘divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour’ (Ph 245c, 251d, 256a, 265a). Bataille’s presentation of sacred ecstasy or ‘inner experience’ as an affectively gained experience breaking the boundaries of the self comes also with an anguish preceding ecstasy. Furthermore, in the theory of the Collège, the ‘ecstasy’ of the ‘sacred as infraction’ turns ‘left into the right, distress into strength’, bringing ‘rejuvenation’ and it is ritual ‘fasting and silence’ preceding excess that leads to this ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ (RC‘BC’ 152; RC‘F’ 282, 300–01; GB‘ARI’ 111). Each bears the same ontological ramifications as the ‘gift’ which Socrates refers to as the culmination of anguish turning to bliss. Bataille explains the role of anguish in this process in Inner Experience: ‘anguish is evidence of my fear of communicating, of losing myself’, but this fear is transformed so that ‘[i]n rapture, my existence finds a sense once again . . . As soon as I emerge from it, communication, the loss of myself cease; I have ceased to abandon myself – I remain there, but with a new knowledge’ (GBIE 53). Bürger draws attention to this feature in Bataille’s thought: ‘Anguish and the rapture of ecstasy are simulations of death. By way of them, the self comes to itself in that the self exposes itself.’118 This ‘new knowledge’, however, is not an idealised summit of inner experience: it has no ‘other goal than itself’ and rather is a process in which ‘anguish which turns to delight is still anguish’ (GBIE 7, 35). Sacred ecstasy, conceived in this way, is a stage in a process of alternation between sacred regulation and infraction. In Inner Experience, Bataille, it appears, is fully cognisant of the momentary nature of release and ‘new knowledge’ which reverses again in turn, although previously he and Caillois had argued that such limited releases could have vital and long-lasting transformative effects in the sociopolitical sphere. World War II no doubt neutered such hopeful and leisurely explorations, as suggested by Caillois’s comment that ‘[t]he war had shown us just how inane the College of Sociology’s endeavour had been’ (RCES 145). Marxist-orientated and other critics may, as had been popular in relation to surrealism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, highlight the ephemeral nature of this release as an indication that on a social level ecstatic effervescence is wholly or partly ineffective as a political tool.119 If the political is social then individuals and communities engaged in social sacred ritual may attest otherwise, specifically when such practises rise in the socius in times of social trouble. A constituent feature of social action is the movement between infraction and regulation, which offer a necessary symbiotic interchange. As such, measuring the extent of ‘success’ of avant-garde revolution is perhaps less relevant than asking what these small adjustments in social life (traditionally offered through the primary experience of the sacred enacted in myth and

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symbol, or to a lesser extent, for Eliade, in literature) indicate about the selfregulating behaviour of the socius and the potential for its transformation. What the Collège’s study of sacred infractions elaborate is the affective function of Bindung and Entbindung attained through symbols of myth and ritual, which leads one to consider the way in which ancient philosophy can inform our understanding of sacred realities, modern society, the dissident surrealist sacred and alternative forms of international surrealism. Juxtaposing this ancient explanation of ekstasis as divine madness with a modern sociological explanation of ecstasy (the latter as a dissident theorising of the surrealist quest) provides a method by which to read international alternative surrealist practices that demonstrate the transformation of the anguish of basanos (ɵ୐ʍɲʆʉʎ, ordeal/ trial) into a ‘touchstone’.120 One way in which this comes into focus is through the idea of the instant. The Collège’s sacred sociology deemed affective releases to be vital in society and by analysing the vestiges that remained they defined that the sacred irrupts into the real, through living myth or ritual and the value of the instant in a ‘seizure of the instant [which] cannot differ from ecstasy’, among other methods (GBAM 66).121 Official, dissident and alternative surrealism may be seen to treat the moment or instant in differing ways, although of course they can be seen as more or less similar depending upon the text and topic considered. In official surrealism one can see mythic kairological time or moments that fracture chronological time presented through irruptions of the Freudian ‘unconscious mental processes [that] are in themselves “timeless” ’: dreams, jokes, slips, cognitive derangement caused by the juxtaposition of opposites, objective chance and le merveilleux’s moments of illumination (SFBPP 27). In practice, as Walter Benjamin highlights, official surrealism’s ‘profane illumination did not always find the Surrealists equal to it, or to themselves’.122 This official surrealist moment and the Collège’s description of the affective instant of sacred ecstasy and metamorphosis of being present two very different, if related, versions of time in surrealism. International surrealist practice when read through the lens of the Collège, may indeed reveal this alternative surrealist formulation. The releases and renewals society is gifted in the moment of sacred ecstasy offer an insight into why, as Fenn noted, interest in the sacred may rise in times of social stress. Social releases offered by the sacred experience of time also appear in profane forms. For example, Robert Seguin identifies this need to separate oneself from chronological time as a reaction to modern social stresses: ‘Responses to the trauma of time under capitalism [include] trying to extricate oneself from capitalist time in some more ambivalent and imaginary fashion.’123 A correlation has been noted above between Fenn’s argument, and Jameson and Worringer’s respective observations that society privileges romance and nonnaturalist aesthetic styles in times of social stress. Can one then hypothesise that in profane reality nonnaturalistic styles offer a release from chronological time and have a social function in ways that are not dissimilar to that of myth and ritual in sacred reality? The affective representation of divine madness in literature cannot of course equate to that of its role in living myth. However, it can be represented in more or less coherent ways, and thereby indicate the

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curative psychological force of ‘re-animating, in active imagination, certain symbols which comprise, in their own structure, the ideas of “passage” and of “ontological mutation” ’ (MEMDM 117). * Many writers from across the globe were drawn to Paris to participate in modernist trends and vibrant avant-garde movements like surrealism. In this Parisian cosmopolitan environment, such writers absorbed, appropriated, adapted and influenced avant-garde trends and philosophies and, often, went on to reside in very different cultural conditions. Some of this cohort wrote novels that are part of international surrealism and which in their own way altered literary history in their country of residence. We turn now to consider how the theory discussed above can provide a way of reading international surrealist novels that present a concept of unbinding not fully explicated by official surrealist features. This theory offers a praxis which analyses moments of novelistic surrealist ekstasis in reference to the Collège’s and Bataille’s theory of sacred ecstasy and Socrates’ four pathways to divine madness. Some international writers affiliated with the surrealist movement in Paris in the 1930s would produce surrealist texts of insurrection, which bear the marks of moving beyond Bretonian edicts, with representations of ecstasy as a form of the ‘sacred as infraction’. These texts demonstrate an affective engagement with coherent sacred ritual and symbols resulting in the transformation of the character’s social identity, be it regional, gendered or national. In these narratives, ekstasis is not simply a drive for release but serves an ontological function in society. These practices show that on the periphery of surrealism a coherent literary discourse concerning sacred poetry, liberty and love is offered explication through the dissident theories of the Collège and Georges Bataille. Three such writers are Alejo Carpentier, Leonora Carrington and Gellu Naum, each of whom spent time within Parisian surrealist circles during the 1930s, and respectively participated in dissident surrealism in Paris, joined the core Parisian surrealist movement and went on to establish the Romanian surrealist group. Their novels, The Lost Steps (1953), The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and Zenobia (1985), contain surrealist and alternative surrealist features whilst highlighting the need for derepression, respectively, within postcolonial, feminist and anticommunist discourses. Most of the novels overreach even Alyce Mahon’s extended dating of surrealism to the events of 1968.124 However, these novels by first-generation surrealists or dissident surrealists, which for various reasons became later works of surrealism, demonstrate surrealist aims and techniques. Together, the novels validate Hubert’s opinion that the surrealist book finds its best expression in later works: ‘The book can in a way be considered the most representative surrealist art form . . . Volumes that we consider masterpieces of this Janus-faced genre . . . appeared after World War Two – long after the heyday of surrealism.’125 Indeed the dating for surrealist expression is by necessity enlarged when considering international surrealist works because groups flourished and in some cases emerged following World War II.126 A further conceptual extension is also needed so that the proposed ‘alternative’ surrealist remit can include ex-centric surrealist works, exemplified here by the selection

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of Carpentier’s novel, which, despite its indisputable surrealist characteristics and the author’s engagement with dissident surrealist ideas, is not customarily described as even a peripheral surrealist novel.127 International surrealist literature may thus be investigated using an alternative remit excavated from the history of dissident surrealist thought. Part II of this study will analyse the transmission of surrealism to Hispanic America and the Caribbean and consider The Lost Steps by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. In 1929, Carpentier, after escaping house arrest in Cuba with the help of the surrealist Robert Desnos (1900–45), entered into the orbit of the Parisian surrealist group in 1929, moving into its dissident periphery soon after. In 1939, following his return to Cuba, he renounced all surrealist associations. However, in The Lost Steps he expresses an anti-capitalist stance and artistic techniques indicative of surrealism, whilst critiquing the artificiality of its view of ‘primitivism’ and ‘poetry’ as an access to creativity. The Lost Steps is read here as an alternative surrealist novel in which an instant of ekstaƟc self-loss offers a change to, and a postcolonial commentary on, social ontology. Study of Hispanic American and Caribbean literature enriches our understanding of surrealism as the profound influence, and not imposition, of surrealism on some of its central figures has charted – thereby offering a bridge between discourses that seek to counter Western rationalism. Part III discusses the British surrealist group and the manifestation of MassObservation, turning then to the novel The Hearing Trumpet by the Britishborn surrealist painter and short-fiction writer, Leonora Carrington. Carrington joined the Parisian surrealist group in 1937, and during World War II left France, relocated to New York then Mexico, both popular sites of surrealist exilic activity. Carrington’s novel is a later surrealist work, in this case by a one-time intimate of Breton’s inner circle, and has been discussed by prominent critics as a protofeminist surrealist novel. Like The Lost Steps this is not an understudied text, and the import in discussing it here is both the widespread acknowledgment of her sacred concerns and its position in the understudied area of female surrealist literary creation in comparison to their male French counterparts. Here the novel is analysed using a slightly adapted lens, that of the dissident sociological sacred and the act of ekstasis. In this text Carrington utilised and exchanged the male surrealist call for ‘Liberty’ for that of an alternative female liberation. Although the Collège, like official surrealism, offers little to the female voice directly, it does however, provide a new way to decode the gendered statement of sacred transformations which Carrington elaborates in the novel within a wider international arena of alternative surrealist expression. Part IV looks to Balkan identity and the Romanian avant-garde before analysing a late expression of surrealism in the prose-novel Zenobia by the Romanian surrealist poet and author Gellu Naum. Naum visited Paris in the late 1930s and, inspired by surrealism, co-founded the Bucharest surrealist group in 1941. He was to remain in Romania throughout the four decades of communist rule, during which time he was banned from publishing freely. In Zenobia, Naum goes beyond official surrealist remits in representing a sacred loss of the self in ekstasis that leads to a fresh understanding of society: an understanding that exchanges the familiar surrealist exultation of ‘love’ for ‘objective love’. A doorway into East-Central European literatures and a way to understand

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views of reality that may contravene Western rationalism is offered through an understanding of the impact of surrealist literature in this region. Reading international surrealist literature through the official surrealist merveilleux, or states of clinical madness, the oneiric or automatism, is vital but it is not the only lens through which surrealism’s varied expression can be understood. That lens is replaced here with interpretative tools shaped by the Collège’s theory of sacred ecstasy. The work of the Collège, through their analysis of the sacred-social aspects of such reasoning bring to the fore the shaping of sacred realities, ‘primitive’ views of reality, mythic narrative, ecstasy and its derivatives. It is in this sense which I propose the term divin fou,128 as coextensive to official surrealism’s cognitive consideration of amour fou and clinical madness. The three novels provide apt subjects for such inquiry, for they explore the irruption and function of the sacred in society, rather than the irruption of the unconscious. Although all touch upon issues of the esoteric and alchemical which figured later in official surrealism they do so in ways contravening that of ‘the majority of surrealists [who] simply took possession of traditional symbols and images for use as their prime matter, without the spirituality that goes with them’.129 All surrealists sought to overturn rationalism but there were alternative ways of exploring this aim and different states of consciousness expressed. The intention here is to explore an alternative method of interpreting surrealism through the concept of sacred ecstasy presented by the Collège and Bataille, and negotiated by the ancient Greek philosophical concept of ekstasis as represented in Plato’s Phaedrus. The concept of divine madness or divin fou as a surrealist altered state of consciousness thereby imbues the surrealist cry for ‘poetry, liberty, and love’, with accents occluded in Bretonian readings of international surrealist novels.

Notes 1

‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in Visions of Excess: Selected WriƟngs, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 223, hereafter GB‘SAi’.

2

The term ‘historical surrealism’ has been adopted by some critics to delineate the surrealist movement in Paris and its global impact, rather than those who were influenced by surrealism.

3

Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1984]), p. 186.

4

Peter Nicholls, ‘Surrealism in England’, in The Cambridge History of TwenƟeth-Century English Literature, eds Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 396. Hal Foster, ‘Prosthetic Gods’, Modernism/modernity, 4, 2 (1997), 8; Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 140; Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Unlike Futurism, surrealism did not support the mechanisation of reality; it was, as Hal Foster details, amongst the ‘critiques of technology in high modernism’, ‘Prosthetic Gods’, 8. As argued, most influentially, by Bürger in Theory, the art of the avant-garde and modernism could be differentiated on

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the grounds of its emotional stature and pro-activity: while the modernist orientation is ‘pessimistic’, the avant-garde utilised a playful way of mastering the events that shook society early in the twentieth century. Surrealism reacted to social events by subverting the logical in ways (residually evident in postmodernist works) that require it to be given consideration beyond that which a strictly defined modernism would allow. Because the term ‘avant-garde’ can be used to define literature from the nineteenth-century to the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s, its use here refers to the period contemporaneous with the surrealist movement. 5

Surrealism’s global impact is delineated by the term ‘international surrealism’, which has many variants.

6

Penelope Rosemont, ed., Surrealist Women: An InternaƟonal Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, eds, Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Nicholas Stabakis, ed. and trans., Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley, Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist WriƟngs from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker, Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). Melanie Nicholson, Surrealism in LaƟn American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). In addition, see the unfinished volume on Egyptian and Arabian surrealism titled Imp of the Perverse: Surrealism in Egypt, 1937–1947, by Donald LaCoss, which the University of Texas Press may publish posthumously. Although not comprehensive this is an indication of current Anglophone scholarship.

7

Alyce Mahon, ‘Symposium Summary’, Across the Frontiers: International Surrealism, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Department of History of Art Cambridge, 13 November 2009, (accessed 12 March 2011).

8

Michael Richardson, ed., The Dedalus Book of Surrealism, Vol. 1, The IdenƟty Things (Cambridge: Dedalus, 1993); The Dedalus Book of Surrealism, Vol. 2, The Myth of the World (Cambridge: Dedalus, 1994).

9

Gellu Naum, Zenobia, trans. James Brook and Sasha Vlad (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995 [Ro. edn, 1985]), hereafter Zen; Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Penguin, 2005 [Fr. edn, 1974; En. edn, 1976]), hereafter HT; Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet De Onís (London: Penguin, 1968 [Sp. edn, 1953; En. edn, 1956]), hereafter LS.

10

To a lesser extent Nadia Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult (Oxford: Mandrake, 1991) and on the matter of spiritualism and surrealism, Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, RevelaƟons, and Betrayals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the related but differing concept of alchemy and esotericism we can add recent works such as T.M. Bauduin, ‘The Occultation of Surrealism: A Study of the Relationship Between Bretonian Surrealism and Western Esotericism’ (doctoral thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012 [published as Surrealism and the Occult: OcculƟsm and Western Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton (Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2014)]); and Patrick Lepetit’s The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic and Secret SocieƟes, trans. Jon. E. Graham (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2014 [Fr. edn, 2012]), which also relates peripheral and international contexts.

11

Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism; Armand Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, Yale French Studies, 8, What’s Novel in The Novel (1951), 17–25; J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the

32

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Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 12

Georges Bataille recalls his interview with Breton and his rejection in The Absence of Myth: WriƟngs on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 39–42, hereafter GBAM.

13

André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2010 [1972]), pp. 9–14.

14

Robert Short, ‘Dada and Surrealism’, in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature (London: Penguin, 1991 [1976]), p. 302.

15

Joost Haan, Peter J. Koehler and Julien Bogousslavsky, ‘Neurology and Surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Babinski’, BRAIN: A Journal of Neurology (June 2012), 2.

16

Haan et al., ‘Neurology’, 3.

17

Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘Authenticity and Art in Trauma Narratives of World War One’, Modernism/modernity, 9, 1 (2002), 102.

18

Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman (Columbia, OH: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 263.

19

A similar medical configuration contributing to surrealism occurs around Aldo Pellegrini at the Facultad de Medicina in 1920s Argentina.

20

J.H. Matthews, André Breton: Sketch for an Early Portrait (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986) p. 44.

21

See Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, trans. Gordon Clough (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989 [1969]).

22

Foster, ‘Prosthetic Gods’, 8; Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, p. 140; Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.

23

Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 387–89, 396.

24

Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, pp. 33, 36.

25

Breton, ‘Manifesto’ (1924), pp. 10–11.

26

Anna Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism: A New MysƟcism in French Poetry (London: University of London Press, 1967 [1947]), p. 20.

27

Breton also validated the imagination by forging a tradition of historical precedents, marking writers and times which viewed the imagination as vital to an understanding of human experience; Breton, ‘Manifesto’ (1924), pp. 26–27.

28

Louis Aragon, ‘Le Proletariat de l’esprit’, Clarté (30 November 1925), referenced in Robert S. Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–1936’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 2 (1966), 8.

29

Breton, Arcanum 17 [1944], p. 132, also cited in Anna Balakian, André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 207, as Arcane 17, p. 95.

30

Heraclitus of Ephesus, from On Nature, 34, 8, cited in M.R. Wright, The PresocraƟcs: The Main Fragments in Greek (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1985), (accessed July 2009). It is perhaps of note that this is also a principle of Hermetic philosophy.

31

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1930), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Seaver and Lane, pp. 123–24.

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

33

32

Robert Clancy, ‘Surrealism and Freedom’, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 8, 3 (1949), 272.

33

Letter from Hubert Marcuse to Franklin Rosemont (12 October 1972), rpt as ‘Letters to Chicago Surrealists’, in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, 4 (1989), 40, quoted in Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss, ‘Introduction’, Surrealism, PoliƟcs and Culture, eds Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 4.

34

Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the ExoƟc (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 197.

35

Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926), including, arguably, his post-1965 novels and Soupault’s Les Dernières nuits de Paris (1928). The following list of surrealist prose writers in Paris is not fully representative of the breadth of Bretonian led international surrealist prose work and recourse to specific regional studies is advised. Of the first generation one can name André Breton, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret and Philippe Soupault, and later works published between the 1940s and 1970s, by Salvador Dalí, Joyce Mansour, Gisèle Prassinos and Robert Lebel. Armand Hoog named first-generation surrealist novelists in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s as Aragon, Georges (Louis) Scutenaire and Georges Limbour. For the second generation, of prose writers active in the 1940s and 1950s, he names Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Julien Gracq, René Roger and Marcel Schneider; see Hoog, ‘The Surrealist Novel’, 18n6, 7.

36

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 163n.

37

André Breton, ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’, Point du jour, p. 9, cited by Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, 69 (Summer 1994), 125–26.

38

Again, this list of international surrealist fiction is, by necessity, only indicative and I have avoided those of Western Europe, apart from the UK. In many of these areas, the surrealist novelistic terrain is difficult to chart using Anglo-American scholarship. In Czechoslovakia we find the elaborate surrealist fictions Hra doopravdy (1933) by Richard Weiner and Valerie a týden divƽ (1945 [En. edn, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 2005]) by Vítězslav Nezval, Dominík Tatarka’s surrealist fiction Panna zázraēnica (1944/45) and later Eva Švankmajerova’s JeskynĢ Baradla (1981 [En. edn, Baradla Cave, 2000]). In Egypt, alongside Joyce Mansour, cited above, important works were produced by the surrealists Georges Henein, Ramses Younane, Fouad Kamel and Kamal al Tilmisani, although inaccessibility of material makes ascertaining whether these works are prose or poetry difficult. In the UK, David Gascoyne’s April: A Novella (1937) provides an example of surrealist prose; to this one may add the overtly gothic works of Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron (1935) and Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes (1961). In Greece the second-generation surrealist Nanos Valaōritēs turned prolifically to prose from the 1980s; and one can recognise strong surrealist traits in Yoryis Yatromanolakis’s (Giatromanōlakēs, Giōrgēs) Leimonario (1974 [En. edn, The Spiritual Meadow, 2000]). Japan demonstrated an early and fervent outpouring of mainly poetic surrealist expression in the 1920s, which influenced the early fiction of Shimao Toshio and in the 1980s the novelistic outputs of Haruki Murakami and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. In Mauritius, in the 1950s, Malcolm E. de Chazal pursued surrealism in the novel Le Grande révélaƟon (1952). In Mexico, surrealism influenced Juan José Arreola and Juan Rulfo who wrote the fictions, y Confabulario (1952 [En. edn, 1974]) and Pedro Páramo (1955 [En. edn, 1959]), respectively. The Peruvian Leopoldo Chariarse wrote fiction, such as ‘Les Mélanges inadmissibles’ (1957 [En. edn, ‘Unacceptable Mixture’, 1975]); and Rosamel del Valle in Chile in 1930 produced the surrealist novel Eva y la fuga (1970 [En. edn, Eva the FugiƟve, 1990]).

39

Breton, EntreƟens, cited in J.H. Matthews, An IntroducƟon to Surrealism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965), pp. 83, 123.

34

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

40

See works by Dawn Adès on Georges Bataille; Katharine Conley on Robert Desnos; and Claudine Frank on Roger Caillois. The UK journal Papers of Surrealism forwards this wider image of the surrealist movement.

41

Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Icon Editions, Westview Press, 2002), p. 123.

42

Susan Laxton, ‘The Guarantor of Chance: Surrealism’s Ludic Practices’, Papers of Surrealism, 1 (Winter 2003), 9.

43

Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealism and Its Discontents’, Papers of Surrealism, 7 (2007), 11. This schism was also motivated by issues of political fervour.

44

See Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, PoliƟcs, and the Psyche (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Raihan Kadri, Reimagining Life: Philosophical Pessimism and the RevoluƟon of Surrealism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).

45

Terms used by Hal Foster in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 110. Amongst others, Michèle H. Richman refers to Leiris, Caillois and Bataille as ‘dissident surrealists’ in Sacred RevoluƟons: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. vii.

46

Members included Jules Monnerot, Jean Paulhan, André Masson, Alexandre Kojève, Pierre Klossowski, Denis de Rougemont, Anatole Lewitsky, Jean Myer, et al., as noted in Michèle H. Richman, ‘The College of Sociology’, in The Columbia History of TwenƟethCentury French Thought, eds Lawrence D. Kritzman with Brian J. Reilly, trans. Malcom DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 15.

47

Claudine Frank references Hollier, in Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Frank and Camille Nash (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 326, hereafter RCES. The term ‘sacred sociology’ is coined by the Collège to define its focus and subject matter; see Georges Ambrosino, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Libra and Jules Monnerot, ‘Note on the Foundation of a College of Sociology’, in The College of Sociology, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [Fr. edn, Le Collège de sociologie (1937–39), 1979]), p. 5.

48

Alexander Nehamas notes that Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude LéviStrauss attended meetings of the Collège de Sociologie, ‘The Attraction of Repulsion: The Deep and Ugly Thought of Georges Bataille’, The New Republic (23 September 1989), 31. Roland Champagne comments upon the attendance of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer at the meetings: ‘Many of the College’s themes would later be developed further in works by the members of this first generation of the Frankfurt School of Theory’, Georges Bataille (New York: Twayne, and London: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 13.

49

Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, pp. 142–43.

50

Roger Rothman, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Two Sublimes of Surrealism’, in Modernism and Theory: A CriƟcal Debate, ed. Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 50.

51

Paul Hegarty, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (London: Sage, 2000), p. 1. Frank Pearce traces Foucault’s relation to the Collège in ‘Foucault and the ‘Hydra-Headed Monster’: The Collège de Sociologie and the Two Acéphales’, in Michel Foucault and Power Today: InternaƟonal MulƟdisciplinary Studies in the History of the Present, eds Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006), pp. 115–38.

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35

52

Steven Ungar, ‘Blinded by the Light: Surreal and Sacred in Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi’, Dada/Surrealism, 13 (1984), 127.

53

Ungar, ‘Light’, 127–28.

54

Roger Caillois, ‘For a College of Sociology: Introduction’ (July 1, 1938), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 9, hereafter RC‘ICS’.

55

Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988 [1943]), hereafter GBIE.

56

Hollier, ‘Introduction’ to Lewitzky, ‘Shamanism’, in College, ed. Hollier, p. 249; Tythacott, Surrealism and the ExoƟc, p. 224.

57

Cottom, Abyss, p. 169.

58

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 52–53.

59

Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor, ‘Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collective Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action’, The BriƟsh Journal of Sociology, 49, 2 (June 1998), 195.

60

Focus on collective effervescence at this time incurred accusations of fascism. See Michèle Richman, ‘The Sacred Group: A Durkheimian Perspective on the Collège de Sociologie’, in Bataille: WriƟng the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 58; Hollier’s ‘Foreword’, in College, ed. Hollier; and Hegarty, Bataille, pp. 150–52. Gaëtan Picon articulates a rebuttal in Panorama de la nouvelle liƩérature française (Paris: Le Point du jour, 1950; 2nd edn, 1959), p. 204, cited in College, ed. Hollier, p. 386. As Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi details, it was easy to level charges of nationalism, or even fascism, at the Collège, since ‘the Collège found itself battling on two fronts: on the one hand the lack of community (represented by democracy) and on the other traditional blood or soil based communities characterised by forms of nationalism’; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, ‘A Left Sacred or a Sacred Left? The Collège de Sociologie, Fascism, and Political Culture in Interwar France’, South Central Review, 23, 1 (Spring 2006), 47.

61

Richman, ‘The Sacred Group’, p. 68.

62

Richman, Sacred RevoluƟons, p. 115, my emphasis.

63

Hervieu-Léger, Memory, p. 49.

64

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1959 [1957]), p. 9, hereafter, MESP.

65

Georges Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter and Tears’ (January 22, 1938), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 104, hereafter, GB‘ARI’.

66

Tythacott, Surrealism and the ExoƟc, p. 70.

67

Georges Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure’ (February 5, 1938), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 121, hereafter GB‘ARII’. For a description of Hertz’s theory of the left or impure sacred, see Alexander T. Riley, ‘The Sacred Calling of Intellectual Labour in Mystic and Ascetic Durkheimianism’, European Journal of Sociology, 43, 3 (2002), 365. On Bataille’s use of Hertz’s theory of the left sacred, see James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, ComparaƟve Studies in Society and History, 23, 4 (October 1981), 539–64; and Richman, ‘The Sacred Group’, pp. 69–70.

68

Hollier, ‘Foreword’, in College, ed. Hollier, pp. xvi, xix.

69

The term abject etymologically derives from the Latin ab– ‘away’ + jacere ‘to throw’. To denote cases where attraction forces are stronger than repulsion forces, a term is

36

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required to signal the opposite of abjection: changing ab– ‘away’ to ad– ‘to’, creates the term adject, meaning literally ‘to throw’ + ‘to’. 70

Benjamin Noys refers to Hegarty’s discussion on Bataille’s use of abjection in relation to Julia Kristeva in Georges Bataille: A CriƟcal IntroducƟon (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 61–62, cited in ‘Shattering the Subject: Georges Bataille and the Limits of Therapy’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 7, 3 (September 2005), 133. An exception to this trend is Richman, ‘The College of Sociology’, p. 18.

71

Ambrosino et al., ‘Foundation of a College of Sociology’, in College, ed. Hollier, p. 5.

72

Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), in The Standard EdiƟon of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, p. 120. Cf. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), in The Standard EdiƟon of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), pp. 8–10, hereafter SFBPP.

73

Roger Caillois, ‘Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches’, in College, ed. Hollier, pp. 152–53, hereafter RC‘BC’.

74

Roger Caillois, ‘Festival’ (May 2, 1939), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 301, hereafter RC‘F’.

75

Patrick Ffrench, AŌer Bataille: SacriĮce, Exposure, Community (Leeds: Legenda, 2007), pp. 13, 17.

76

Hollier, ‘Foreword’, in College, ed. Hollier, pp. xvi–xvii.

77

M.J. Rosenberg and C.I. Hovland, ‘Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioural Components of Attitude’, in Aƫtude OrganisaƟon and Change: An Analysis of Consistency Among Aƫtude Components, eds M.J. Rosenberg, C.I. Hovland, W.J. McGuire, R.P. Abelson and J.W. Brehm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), referenced in Richard Gross, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour (London: Hodder Arnold, 2009 [2005]), p. 407.

78

Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), p. 82. J.H. Matthews also observes surrealism’s cognitive approach in The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1977), p. 261.

79

For a discussion on Freud’s theories of affect, see Ruth Stein, PsychoanalyƟc Theories of Aīect (London: Karnac Books, 1999 [1991]), pp. 1–34.

80

Charles Brenner, ‘On the Nature and Development of Affects: A Unified Theory’, PsychoanalyƟc Quarterly, 43 (1974), 545, 535, my emphasis.

81

Stein, Aīect, p. 174.

82

Indeed official surrealism’s emotional concerns are noted by many critics, including Short, ‘Dada and Surrealism’, in Modernism, p. 302.

83

André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 160.

84

Roger Caillois, Man and The Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1949, En. edn, 1959]), pp. 116, 131, hereafter RCMS.

85

Joseph Libertson, ‘Bataille and Communication: From Heterogeneity to Continuity’, MLN, 89, 4 (May 1974), 677.

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37

86

Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil: Essays, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: M. Boyars, 1985 [1957]), p. 22, hereafter GBLE.

87

Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963), pp. vi–vii.

88

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The EmoƟonal Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Aīect, trans. Douglas Brick et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 116, 51.

89

Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1990), p. 106.

90

Tythacott, Surrealism and the ExoƟc, p. 221.

91

Stein, Aīect, p. 174.

92

Georges Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (July 1, 1938), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 22, hereafter GB‘SA’.

93

Mircea Eliade, PaƩerns in ComparaƟve Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [1949; En. edn, 1958]), p. 10, hereafter MEPS.

94

Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 35, hereafter MEMR.

95

This concept figures strongly in GBIE using the term ‘dramatisation’; see Leslie Ann Boldt’s introduction, p. xviii.

96

Dumézil was a former student of Mauss, and Caillois was a student of Dumézil’s as well as Mauss.

97

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989 [1948]), p. 98, hereafter GBTR.

98

Speaking of the potential of imagined communities, Benedict Anderson identifies a similar sacred moment in Auerbach’s description of medieval ‘simultaneity’ and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Messianic time’. Benedict Anderson, ‘From Imagined CommuniƟes: ReŇecƟons on the Origin and Spread of NaƟonalism’, in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 422.

99

Michael Holquist discusses these two forms of time in relation to novelistic practices in Dostoevsky and the Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), pp. 10, 30.

100

Chénieux-Gendron on Breton’s L’amour fou, text 5 [1936], in Surrealism, p. 83.

101

Linda Pavlovski, ‘Georges Bataille: Introduction’, in TwenƟeth-Century Literary CriƟcism, ed. Linda Pavlovski, Vol. 155 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Cengage, 2005), (accessed 21 November 2008).

102

Respectively, Maria-Christine Lala, ‘The Conversions of Writing in Georges Bataille’s L’Impossible’, trans. Robert Livingston, Yale French Studies, 78, On Bataille (1990), 241; Hegarty, Bataille, p. 75; Anca Parvulescu, ‘To Die Laughing or to Laugh at Dying: Revisiting The Awakening’, New Literary History, 36 (2005), p. 489.

103

Georges Bataille, ‘Un-Knowing and Its Consequences’, trans. Annette Michelson, October, 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing (Spring 1986 [1951]), 84–85.

38

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

104

Hegarty, Bataille, p. 81. Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein, in Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) develops his conceptualisation of ‘being itself’ or Being in direct opposition to Plato’s (and the post-Platonic) notion of being. Therefore to make a link between Bataille and Plato and between Bataille and Heidegger may seem at first contradictory. However, one sees Bataille syncretically fusing a philosophical appreciation of ecstasy with a consideration of ontology, and presenting ecstasy as an ontologically transformative release. Kojeve, another member of the Collège, was greatly influenced by Heidegger.

105

Fredric Jameson, ‘From The PoliƟcal Unconscious: NarraƟve as a Socially Symbolic Act’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, p. 406.

106

Joseph Frank refers to Wilhelm Worringer’s theory in ‘From SpaƟal Form in Modern Literature’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, pp. 798–99. Worringer outlines both primitive and transcendental catalysts of nonnaturalism.

107

Richard Fenn, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 215.

108

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 123; Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, p. 437.

109

Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968 [1912]), p. 227.

110

F.G. Fowler and H.W. Fowler, Pocket Oxford DicƟonary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 262.

111

W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 231.

112

Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett, 1995 [375–65 BCE]), hereafter Ph.

113

For an alternative image of ekstasis in Plato’s works, see Michael Anthony Rinella, ‘Plato, Ecstasy and Identity’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of New York at Albany, 1997).

114

Giovanni R.F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) details pathways and benefits of intoxication over sobriety, pp. 60–61, 113. See Albert Cook, ‘Dialectic, Irony, and Myth in Plato’s Phaedrus’, The American Journal of Philology, 106, 4 (Winter 1985), 427–41.

115

On Apollo and ecstasy, see Fritz Graf, Apollo (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 41, 52.

116

Anders Nygren elaborates on this point, using the terms ‘Eros’ and ‘Agape’ to denote alternative aspects of love, in Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), cf. William E. Phipps, ‘The Sensuousness of Agape’, Theology Today, 29, 4 (January 1973), 377. Agape, a later Christian scriptural term denoting divine love, is not dissimilar from the love described by Socrates in which the human object of love becomes an expression of the divine: the term is not used by Plato in Phaedrus.

117

Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs, Journal, 1957–1969, trans. Fred H. Johnson, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 280.

118

Peter Bürger, The Thinking of the Master: Bataille Between Hegel and Surrealism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 35.

119

Mikhail Bakhtin’s brother, Nikolai, was an associate of Bataille’s in Paris and could be said to have discussed intellectual matters. See Stuart Kendall, Georges Bataille (London: Reaktion, 2007), p. 47.

TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ Ćēĉ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

39

120

Northrop Frye states the ‘Greek word for ordeal (basanos) also means touchstone . . . [ordeals] in part reveal one’s genuine character’; see The Myth of Deliverance: ReŇecƟons on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 27.

121

Here Bataille marshals support for surrealism against existentialism; however, the social thrust of Bataille’s views on ritual and myth separate him from surrealism proper, if it no longer means they stand opposed; GBAM 64.

122

Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), in Selected WriƟngs, Vol. 1, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 209. A similar distinction can be considered to be made regarding the female hysteric by Natalya Lusty, where the fetish object of the female hysteric for Breton in his novel Nadja becomes the lived experience for Carrington in her novel Down Below, in ‘Surrealism’s Banging Door’, Textual PracƟce, 17, 2 (Summer 2003), 335–56.

123

Robert Seguin, Around Quiƫng Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American FicƟon (Durham: NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 155–56.

124

Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the PoliƟcs of Eros, 1938–1968 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

125

Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, pp. 25, 344, 40.

126

Michael Löwy substantiates such a position in Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, SituaƟonism, Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 108.

127

For an interpretation of Carpentier’s anti-surrealist manifesto, ‘De lo real maravilloso’ [1948], as separate from, rather than incorporated into, surrealism or its dissident Parisian periphery, see Michael Richardson’s ‘Surrealism Faced with Cultural Difference’, in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 68–85. Newly published works by Charlotte Rogers and Melanie Nicholson attest to a turn in this opinion.

128

I have created this term to refer to divine madness, which here is intended to contrast with the Bretonian surrealist interest in amour fou (mad love), hence the poetic licence employed in its translation.

129

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, p. 436; a view echoed by Bauduin, ‘Occultation’, ch. 1, (accessed 2 July 2014).

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PĆėę II TčĊ EĝĕđĔĘĎĔē Ĕċ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ďē HĎĘĕĆēĎĈ AĒĊėĎĈĆ Ćēĉ ęčĊ DĎěĎē FĔĚ Ĕċ NĆęĚėĆđ TĎĒĊ

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2 HĎĘĕĆēĎĈ AĒĊėĎĈĆē Ćēĉ CĆėĎććĊĆē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ćēĉ ęčĊ CĔđđĎČĆęĎěĊ Ĕċ AđĊďĔ CĆėĕĊēęĎĊė’Ę LĔ ėĊĆL ĒĆėĆěĎLLĔĘĔ

The politics and needs of postcolonial writing expressed in postcolonial surrealism differ enormously from those that shaped French and other Western European surrealism(s). As such, postcolonial surrealism may, I propose, have closer links with feminist and Eastern European concerns and their forms of surrealist expression. Critical debates about the relationship between Western European and postcolonial surrealism take a number of forms. Some critics observe that French surrealism offered limited assistance to postcolonial emancipation and its literary articulations; others inversely see postcolonial writers utilising Western European surrealism to form effective anti-colonial critiques and thereby moving through the first steps of reclaiming and re-establishing a politics of identity. In Anglophone surrealist studies, Francophone Caribbean surrealism from the islands of Martinique and Haiti is extensively discussed, with significantly less attention given to surrealism from the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and America. This privileging of Francophone and official surrealism has served to somewhat narrow the field of international surrealist study.1 Hispanic Caribbean and American surrealism differed from the more official lines of Francophone Caribbean surrealism, which may explain its critical neglect: it held a different relationship to French culture and language from its coloniser, and in many cases countries in this region were no longer colonies. These two features may explain why Hispanic Caribbean and American surrealism was more naturally predisposed to reshape Parisian official surrealism. Naturally, this differing relation does not override the common experience of colonisation in the Caribbean, Central and South America, nor does it negate the power relation in place between Western Europe and the postcolonial regions in which colonial attitudes had been or still were enforced: this in itself raises issues of neocolonial cultural imposition and highlights the need for site-specific as well as comparative surrealist studies.

44

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

The Hispanic American avant-garde, la vanguardia, was active from approximately 1912 to 1939. Some vanguardistas spent time in Europe, often drawing on European avant-garde ideas and adapting them to voice specific concerns within their work, for example, César Vallejo (Peru), Vicente Huidobro who instigated Creationism in 1912 (Chile) and Jorge Luis Borges who instigated Ultraísm in 1918 (Argentina).2 During the early 1920s surrealism was generally resisted in the region, as Arturo Reyes observes: ‘Cesar Vallejo, although having instituted friendship with the majority of the surrealists . . . impugns surrealism more from the social vantage view than formally’; and Huidobro viewed automatism as if it were a ‘spiritist trick’.3 Amongst the key issues addressed by la vanguardia, questions of social identity were paramount. Vicky Unruh articulates this as a concern with ‘modernity versus cultural authenticity’, noting that ‘cultural nationalism was common in Latin America’s vanguards, and literary experiments were often marked by the deliberate reclaiming of autochthonous traditions’.4 NaƟvismo, one form of this recovery of local tradition – shaped in part by European avant-garde interests in the ‘primitive’ as a renewing force for Western culture – offered a literary expression of this reconstruction of national identity. La vanguardia observed the effects and affects of capitalism and modernity in the ‘first world’ from a unique postcolonial vantage point and this assisted the shaping of a ‘national imagination’ that resisted the ills of European modernity and often actively reshaped European avant-garde practices.5 The vanguardistas who did not travel to Europe had access to it via the Spanish avant-garde which reached Hispanic America through a number of publications. Roberto González Echevarria specifically cites the translations and reproductions of avant-garde material in Ortega y Gasset’s influential journal Revista de Occidente (f. 1923), as instrumental in this transmission.6 In this way Hispanic Caribbean and American surrealism were influenced by a vibrant Spanish surrealism, as well as French surrealism. Although during the early 1920s la vanguardia had resisted surrealist ideas, by the mid-1920s the region engaged with surrealist expressions, with further periods of interest beginning in the late 1930s and again in the 1950s.7 For example, Huidobro mentored the Chilean surrealist group, Mandrágora (f. 1938) who were equally influenced by his Creationism and surrealism in their reworking of official surrealist ideas. Despite a ‘nativist impulse’ in Ecuador and Paraguay and a conservative intelligentsia in Colombia, Peru and Uruguay which provided sources of resistance to surrealism, it gained ground elsewhere, as Melanie Nicholson points out, with a further second period of ‘creative adaptation’ of surrealism from 1950 to 1980.8 Surrealism had a wide and significant impact on Hispanic Caribbean and American literature, but its writers can often be seen to actively reshape official surrealist ideas.9 La vanguardia’s drawing upon European avant-garde culture and individual self-assertion against the limitations of Western modernity sets its engagement with Parisian surrealism within a unique frame where adaptation often meant transformation. In Hispanic American letters, surrealism was at its height by the 1940s, to the extent that José Quiroga states: ‘It is impossible not to see the change in aesthetics that will occur around the 1940s without taking Surrealism into account, with its emphasis on both personal and social liberation.’10 Surrealism’s appeal in the region rested upon a number of

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factors, and no small part was played by its privileging of mythos before logos, a standpoint resonating with traditional indigenous rather than European positivist values. Surrealism’s anti-colonial stance, evident as early as 1925 in protests against war in Morocco, offered an internal critique of Europe which was to prove immeasurable in uniting international surrealism.11 As Susanne Baackmann and David Craven point out, anti-colonialism was ‘one of the few common threads that precariously linked all of these disparate factions of Surrealism on both sides of the Atlantic’.12 A further factor in surrealism’s appeal was its anti-capitalist attitude which offered a counter-ideological stance to that generally held in Western Europe, as articulated by Jean Schuster: ‘It is now the workers (producers) who destroy themselves, by frenzied consumption of finished products the need for which is completely artificial in any case.’13 The corruption in the Western European mindset, which becomes clear to surrealists following the atrocities of the First World War, was perhaps always already clear to the ‘third world’ vanguardia. The Hispanic American and Caribbean surrealist field is difficult to trace definitively, for vanguardia writers had a highly original way of fusing different strands of aesthetic expression and older generic forms into a single work or style. This often meant that works would contain many surrealist elements but could not strictly be called surrealist. Across the region a number of non-official surrealist groups and individuals demonstrating surrealist techniques and ideas sprang up.14 The recognised surrealist groups on the continent were located in four major urban centres: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile; Lima, Peru; and Mexico City, Mexico. It is important to note that each of these countries has a specific and complicated history of both colonisation and independence. Following independence, each country has also struggled with neocolonialism, often in the form of US intervention and authoritarian rule with a general swing towards the right during the 1960s and 1970s. Such histories provide the background to an understanding of their surrealist expressions that are yet to find full expression in Anglophone criticism. Nicholson’s study marks a change in this trend and pays due attention to the fact that ‘Latin American surrealism refuses to fit into a neat package, and its manifestations from one country or writer to another may reveal themselves to be, on examination, quite distinct.’15 In the Hispanic Caribbean, clear surrealist groupings arose in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In Cuba, Alejo Carpentier’s homeland, the political dictatorships of Gerardo Machado y Morales in the 1920s and Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s curtailed most avant-garde, vanguardismo, expression. Nonetheless, the island maintained a vanguardismo scene, to which Carpentier belonged, and although no official surrealist group existed in Cuba he expressed early sympathies with surrealist ideas.16 From the 1930s, José Lezama Lima, who ‘tempered his Surrealism with a classical bent’, directed the journals Verbum (1937), Espuela de Plata (1939), Nadie Parecía (1942) and Orígenes (1944–56), of which the last ‘prepared the way for the continuing presence of surrealism’ in Cuba in the 1940s.17 In addition to groups and individuals practising surrealism in Hispanic America and the Caribbean, some writers, such as Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba)18 and Lydia Cabrera (Cuba), went to Paris in the 1920s

46

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

where they directly experienced European surrealism.19 Asturias arrived in Paris in 1923 to study anthropology and Mayan civilisation under Georges Raynaud and Joseph-Louis Capitan and became involved in official surrealist circles, returning to Guatemala in 1933.20 A common validation was recognised by such writers, as detailed by Ricardo Roque-Baldovinos, quoting Asturias: ‘Surrealism, for Latin American writers and especially for me, was a great possibility of independence from Western models. Surrealism awoke in us the feeling. It favored our tendency to feel things instead of thinking them out.’ The most appealing element of these lines is the rereading of the topography of the Freudian subject through nationalist clues. Here, Mayan ancestral culture is the unconscious, whereas the rational agency is Western rationalism. If Surrealism privileges the irrational, thus legitimizing the vernacular, it simultaneously contributes to the task of strengthening the notion of charismatic community by underlining the instinctual, or primary, links over those of rational organization.21

Here it is shown how the ‘individual unconscious’ as the focus of the official surrealist ‘irrational’ translated into the national arena, as ‘ancestral culture’, for these surrealist exponents. What surrealism did, as Asturias decodes, was to offer a way of seeing that countered colonial logic and this was a forceful validation upon which to form postcolonial critiques. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s these writers interacted with surrealism in Paris and studied their own cultural history, and by the 1940s and 1950s they had adapted such ideas to express their form of anti-colonialism. The role of surrealism in Hispanic America and the Caribbean is more complex than it is possible to fully represent here but generally, as noted, it surfaced at points in the 1920s, late 1930s and 1950s, with the 1940s providing a heyday for surrealist expression in the region. It is possible to see that surrealism offered modes of initial liberation to Hispanic American writers, much as it would to women artists from the 1930s. However, this liberation was circumscribed, as Louise Tythacott suggests, because Parisian surrealists were ‘caught within the ideological framework of their time and naively reproduced some of the conventional stereotypes of the primitive’.22 Parisian surrealism’s stereotyping of the primitive within its expression limited the effectiveness of their fervent anti-colonial protests and theory. It is understandable that for some vanguardista writers, surrealism’s view of the ‘primitive’ was, for political reasons, problematic, in much the same way as surrealism’s view of the female was to prove problematic, as will be discussed below.23 French surrealism’s limited view was not, however, to be an intellectual dead end. Instead, as in many areas, it provided a springboard for further development, and a New World flank developed surrealist ideas beyond such stereotypes. The critic Jack Spector indicated the importance of this development, when he stated that ‘[w]hatever headway the Surrealists made against colonial prejudices, it required independent action and thinking by Third World intellectuals educated in French culture to begin the writing of a genuinely social critique of colonialism.’24 The anti-empiricist, anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist views of official French surrealism appealed to many in the international avant-garde, binding region after region to its call for liberation. The last word does not only lie with them, for their ideas began a worldwide expression that renegotiated and reshaped its

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initial limitations. One cannot disconnect the role of surrealist ideas from later innovations, as critics, such as Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, have noted: ‘Carpentier, Asturias, and [the Argentine Leopoldo] Marechal, on different levels and with different backgrounds, all avidly read the works of the French surrealists. Latin American fiction emerged from the hands of these founders deeply transformed not only in appearance but also in essence.’25 Carpentier’s pivotal role in the history of Hispanic American modernist literature makes analysing his modification of surrealist tenets using sacred realities and ekstasis a necessary feature in beginning to outline the full range of international surrealism. Carpentier consequently brings the Hispanic postcolonial contribution to international surrealism into play, and before considering his 1953 novel, Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps), as an illustration of divin fou, the remainder of this chapter will consider his experiences in Cuba, dissident surrealist affiliations in Paris, his time in Venezuela and later role in Hispanic American modernism. * In 1898 Cuba gained independence and became subject to the US’s military rule until 1902. However, US involvement in Cuba’s affairs persisted beyond this date and the impact of this may well have influenced Carpentier’s view of the US. Throughout the late 1920s in Cuba the authoritarian regime of Machado had state control. Carpentier was born in 1904 and shortly afterwards his parents moved to Cuba from Switzerland; as such, his cultural identifications were Cuban; however, he was undoubtedly marked out by his French paternal heritage, not least linguistically, although this would assist his later move into Parisian surrealist circles. In the 1920s, Carpentier’s father abandoned the family and he had to leave his university studies in architecture to find employment, becoming a journalist and writer. It was at this time that Carpentier entered into Cuban cultural life, joining the vanguardismo as a result of his support of the Afro-Cuban movement, which was part of the much wider Hispanic American rediscovery of ‘primitivism’ or naƟvismo. Carpentier became increasingly political; a fact evidenced in his involvement in the Grupo Minorista (f. 1923) and contribution to its 1927 manifesto which criticised Machado’s regime and US involvement in Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua by outlining the need for social and educational reforms.26 The Machado regime reacted to this public criticism by incarcerating the co-signatories of the Groupo Minorista manifesto for several months. In 1928 at a press event in Havana, under house arrest and having already written a pro-surrealist article, Carpentier met the surrealist Desnos, a friend of Georges Bataille, who was to help Carpentier escape to France.27 In Paris, Desnos introduced Carpentier to literary circles and during a 1929 split in the surrealist group Carpentier sided with Desnos and the dissident faction around Bataille. In 1930 Carpentier contributed to the publication Un Cadavre, a dissident riposte to Breton’s derisory comments about certain writers in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) (see GBAM 30, 32). The publication was signed by Bataille, Carpentier, Desnos, Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau amongst others and aped the title of the official surrealist publication Un Cadavre (1924). Carpentier published in Bataille’s journal, Documents (1929–30),

48

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

an unusual journal engaging with a ‘semiotic’ ‘conception of culture’ where dissident surrealists began to develop a unique form of surrealism which has been termed ‘ethnographic surrealism’.28 Carpentier published only one article, ‘La Musique cubaine’, in Documents but, as Amy Fass Emery notes, his involvement in the journal was greater than this suggests.29 At the onset of World War II Carpentier left Paris and returned to Cuba but in 1945 he moved to the more democratic Caracas in Venezuela. Three short years later Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s military junta took hold in Venezuela and remained in power for a decade. In Caracas, Carpentier wrote for the newspaper El Nacional de Caracas and contributed to José Lezama Lima’s Cuban journal, Orígenes. In Venezuela the Grupo Viernes (1938–41) mentored by Angel Miguel Queremel is described as surrealist, but Carpentier was not affiliated with its members.30 The Cuban revolution in 1959 instigated Carpentier’s return to Cuba at which time he accepted a government position overseeing cultural affairs. Carpentier was posted to the Cuban embassy in Paris in 1966, where he remained until his death in 1980, a fact that could imply he was not fully in accordance with developments in the new Cuba and its political and economic links to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Carpentier, for his part, had been involved in the first flush of surrealist interest in the 1920s and lived in the centre of surrealist activity in Paris in the 1930s, choosing to mix in the dissident surrealist coterie. He returned to Hispanic America during its surrealist fulcrum in the 1940s. Carpentier’s work is made more pivotal by the role he played in shaping Hispanic American literature in the decades following his return from Paris. What is perhaps uniquely important in Carpentier’s case, given his stature in Hispanic American literature, is his involvement in, specifically, dissident surrealist circles in Paris. The emphasis on the surrealist rupture of social norms, base materialism and criticism of official surrealism in Documents, as well as its semiotic view of culture, appear in The Lost Steps, just as the presentation of society and official surrealism in the novel shares commonalities with the work of the Collège de Sociologie. In the moments of ekstasis identifiable in the novel one can see an adaptation of official surrealist presentations of time, its collage technique and dissident surrealist cultural critique turned to great effect to articulate postcolonial images of ‘first’, ‘third’ and ‘fourth world’ American identity. What is of concern in this reading of the novel are the dissident surrealist tools used for presenting the Hispanic American national imaginary and construction of an anti-colonial critique. Carpentier’s own reflections on the role which surrealism played in his thinking give an indication of this: I never felt in tune with the French . . . and my surrealist drive seemed a vain task to me . . .  I had a contrary reaction. I felt passionately a desire to express the world of America . . . But surrealism did mean a lot to me. It taught me to see structures, aspects of American life I had not perceived, caught up as we were in waves of nativism.31

The ways in which Carpentier transformed surrealist tools for his own aims can be illustrated by two critical terms, the expression of which come to the surface in Carpentier’s novel. James Clifford provides one term when he cites Carpentier’s

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‘third world modernism and nascent anti-colonial discourse’ as an outgrowth of the same ethnographic surrealism shaping the Collège and which unquestionably has links to Carpentier’s involvement in Bataille’s Documents.32 Guido A. Podestá offers the second term when he outlines that Hispanic American and Harlem Renaissance writers who through, ‘assessments of European modernity, and the awareness of what was unique in their own artistic production’ developed an ‘ethnographic Marxism’ which ‘highlighted elements absent in the portrayal of modernity, its political requirements and duties’.33 Clifford’s term ‘ethnographic surrealism’ and Podestá’s term ‘ethnographic Marxism’ together indicate the ways in which Carpentier altered dissident surrealism to speak about the needs of the Hispanic American and Caribbean social context. In practice this occurred through his rejection of surrealism, a rejection that still bears traces of dissident surrealist thought, as will be examined. The combination of Carpentier’s vanguardista concerns regarding issues of cultural authenticity and his experience of European modernism and ethnographic surrealism gave rise to a specific type of narrative, one that qualifies as an emergent ethnographic Marxist text. The surrealist movement embraced the pursuit of liberation in all aspects of life, which inspired artists and writers around the world.34 The altered states of consciousness endorsed by the official surrealist movement, those of automatism, the dream, madness, amour fou, female, child, primitive, esotericism, had by the 1930s lost the drive lent by the medical observations of World War I trauma wards. The interest of Bataille and Caillois in the sacred state of mind given in ecstasy, when conceived via ekstasis as divin fou, offers an addition to those surrealist categories which leads back to the origin of surrealism’s quest. It is just this issue that Carpentier tackles in his novel by discussing surrealism’s idealisations and by offering an alternative contemporary ethnographic surrealist presentation of the ‘primitive’ world. Of the three authors considered here, Carpentier offers the most overtly politicised attitude, the closest style to that of realism and the most criticism of official surrealism’s methods of poetic creativity in his novel. Carpentier is also the only one who was a dissident surrealist collaborator working with Bataille and for a time extolled his theories. Although, after 1939, Carpentier would dissociate himself from Parisian surrealism, evidenced in articles published in El Nacional in the 1940s and 1950s, it is possible to analyse the ‘nascent anticolonial discourse’ of the novel as a derivative of his contact with dissident surrealism.35 Although Carpentier was not involved with the Collège as he had been with Documents, ideas expressed in his novel parallel its interest in sacred sociology. For these reasons this chapter moves into the surrealist penumbra where occluded forms of surrealism offer a new image of narrative ekstasis and, in Carpentier’s case, a distinctive approach to surrealism in Hispanic America and the Caribbean. * Carpentier’s travels to Haiti and the Venezuelan jungle in the 1940s became a catalyst for his representation of the Hispanic American imaginary. Haiti inspired his article, ‘Lo real maravilloso de America’ (‘Marvellous American Reality’, 1948)

50

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

and his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949).36 The Venezuelan jungle, La Gran Sabana and its tableau mountains and the Upper Orinoco in 1947–4837 inspired a series of nonfiction articles entitled ‘Visión de América’ (‘A Vision of America’, 1947),38 part of the unfinished Libro de la Gran Sabana and his novel The Lost Steps.39 Attacks on the Batista regime in Cuba took place in the same year that Carpentier’s The Lost Steps was published, with Fidel Castro leading the battle from 1955. Given Carpentier’s political activism in Cuba, it is possible to read the novel in relation to this political desire for a new type of community, one that is neither traditional nor capitalist. The title for the novel, echoing the title of Breton’s text treating the formation of surrealist ideas Les Pas perdus (The Lost Steps, 1924), suggests a direct renegotiation of surrealism.40 Much as the dissident surrealist publication Un Cadavre of 1930 had reprised the title of Breton’s official surrealist text of 1924 with the aim of challenging the former, Carpentier’s reiteration is a similar riposte. This use of Breton’s title becomes clearer in the novel as Carpentier rejects surrealist primitivism and overwrites the steps Breton, in Les Pas perdus, charted from Dada to surrealism with steps from surrealism to his own concept of realism.41 Carpentier’s title, then, at once establishes its connection with surrealism and independence from it. Carpentier’s ‘Lo real maravilloso de America’ (1948) levelled a radical critique both at surrealism and at Western Europe through a concept he termed lo real maravilloso (the marvellous real). In the same year, the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri, a friend of Carpentier and Asturias, who lived in Paris from 1929–34,42 adopted in Letras y hombres de Venezuela the German art critic Franz Roh’s 1920s formula of ‘magical realism’ to discuss Venezuelan narrative.43 The critic María Ruth Noriega Sánchez states that ‘Uslar Pietri uses here the term magic realism to refer to . . . “the consideration of man as a mystery among the realist facts”.’44 In 1949 the Argentine Aldo Pellegrini discussed the real and the marvellous in ‘La conquista de lo maravilloso’ Ciclo; for whom, Christina Rossi states, the marvellous exists in ‘“events or things outside the commonplace that inspire admiration” . . . part of the objective world . . . both find[ing] their center within the subject. This inspires exaltation within him regarding the spiritual components of being.’45 The late 1940s proved a pivotal time for ‘third world’ avant-garde writers who articulated the boundaries between the imagined America and Europe and the real. By appreciating the parallels between Carpentier’s novel and the Collège’s dissident surrealism, it is possible to reconsider Carpentier’s concept of lo real maravilloso and his place within this late 1940s Hispanic American discourse on the real. This reconsideration foregrounds the marvellous as an aspect of sacred myth or ritual, rejects the surrealist merveilleux and engages with a specific ‘third world’ interpretation of ethnographic surrealism. In order to orientate this reading, the position of ritual in the history of religions and psychoanalysis will be considered briefly. The reactivation of symbols from myth, as Eliade observed in relation to Desoille’s successful treatment of psychological distress, can potentially bring about curative changes in attitudes (MEMDM 117). Similar to the ontological transformation that occurs in Lacan’s mirror stage (where the relations between

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the self and the outside are reshaped), symbols reflected in the ‘mirror’ of sacred reality reshape relations between the self and the group and thereby revitalise relations in the socius.46 Applying social analyses of myth and the sacred to the field of literature entails changes and adaptations. Eliade is sensitive to this point when he details that myth is camouflaged in literature and only relays a level of mythic structure and symbolism: A whole volume could well be written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies camouflaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads . . . countless mythical motifs – the fight between the hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic figures and images (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on). (MESP 205)

Therefore myth, as a ‘“sacred action”, “significant gesture” and “primeval event”’, also provides a bridge that connects sacred meaning and literature (MEPS 416). Freud has demonstrated in relation to individual psychology that the imagination, in the service of the pleasure principle, can defend against distress caused by the reality principle (SFBPP 9). The use of symbols from myth may be a reaction to social distress in a similarly defensive manoeuvre. Similarly the Collège’s study of sacred sociology may attend such relations in their aim to find ‘points of coincidence between the fundamental obsessive tendencies of individual psychology and the principal structures that govern social organization’.47 Such a parallel can be proposed if one accepts that the phantasies of an individual which form writing and day-dreaming also appear in myth, so that, as Freud stated, ‘it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity’.48 Freud details ‘the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer – a series which begins with neurosis and culminates in madness and which includes intoxication, self-absorption and ecstasy.’49 If individual and group phantasy can be seen to fulfil the criteria of selfabsorption and at times demonstrate ekstasis, one may potentially add myth and narrative to this list, as indeed Freud adds humour. In this way the social imaginary – created through myths and symbols – may provide a defence against the ‘real’ in times of social distress. Individual or group uses of the imagination as a defence against the real, echoes what the Collège describes as the socius’s appropriation of myth, the symbols it expresses and the rituals that evoke it, to metamorphose being (RC‘F’ 282). At once both defensive and curative, the symbols from myth that are camouflaged in literature are utilised more clearly in its nonnaturalistic forms. Literature’s camouflaged myths retain in part some of the major effects of myth and both official and alternative surrealist prose works reflect the modalities of the sacred (myth, symbol and rite) used to describe an arational reality. The use of these modalities in official surrealist practice expresses the individual unconscious and its desires. Attitude shifting is a constituent part of the surrealist engagement with myth and its symbols to liberate the unconscious. This finds a sacred-social explication in the dissident surrealism of the Collège and its discussions on ecstasy and rejuvenation. It takes on a new ekstaƟc tone in some international surrealist works where expressions of myth and sacred sociological realities engage

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coherently with symbols of affective regeneration to reveal the active presence of the sacred and its adject expression. Like Caillois and Bataille in the Collège, Carpentier was to implicitly critique official surrealism in his concept of lo real maravilloso. Not dissimilarly for Carpentier, surrealism had ‘shortcomings which he ascribed to an overemphasis on individual imagination and to a lack of concrete basis in the extraliterary world’.50 Rather than ‘reproducing artificially’ Breton’s ideal moment of being – in which one is ‘seized by this something “stronger than himself”’ 51 – Carpentier prefers the actualised marvellous and the living sacred: In surrealism, the fantastic element was usually arbitrary, beautiful but totally arbitrary or oneirical. But I found myself in South America and in Haiti before people with the power to transform into animals, with unbelievable kings, before characters à la Lautreámont, and all this in a context of an age and in the context of historical veracity.52

In this way Western discourse becomes a tool with which to critique the West and establish an independent statement about the future of America in Carpentier’s oeuvre. In Anglophone criticism, although his use of the baroque to this end is widely recognised, less often is his similar use of surrealism noted and discussions of his shift from the surrealist merveilleux to lo real maravilloso are not fully contextualised if one does not attend to his ethnographic dissident surrealist connections.53 Carpentier describes that lo real maravilloso ‘arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle)’; its ‘marvelous presupposes faith [fé]’ and offers an altered perspective of reality gained by an ‘exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado límite]’.54 His refashioning of surrealism through the sacred and estado límite parallels that of the Collège’s reshaping of official surrealism to incorporate sacred sociology, transgressive ecstasy, and the ‘extreme limit of the “possible”’ which Bataille described as ecstasy (GBIE 39). Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso and Bataille’s theories on sacred ecstasy evoke the sacred reality that Socrates too describes in the ‘divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour’ in divine madness (Ph 265a). Each extreme sacred-sociological state offers releases that affectively alter attitudes, values and ontology. They are reached by a similar altered state of consciousness that leads to Breton’s ideal moment of being, but here the ‘something stronger’ than the self is, for Carpentier, ‘the miracle’. As William Spindler notes, lo real maravilloso ‘signals the representation of a reality modified and transformed by myth and legend’, and González Echevarría describes it as an ontological rendering of the surrealist merveilleux.55 The real as it is described in lo real maravilloso echoes a reality infused by fé (faith) such that the ‘sacred is the pre-eminently real’ (MEMDM 117). Carpentier offers a specific altered state of consciousness which sacralises the real, thereby placing it outside official surrealism but within the orbit of dissident surrealism. Just as Desoille used symbols from myth to affect individual ontology psychoanalytically, the sacred symbols used lo real maravilloso and the novel affect national ontology creatively. Many critics accuse Carpentier’s real maravilloso of essentialism and of being caught within the trap of European views of America. For example, David Mikics wrote that ‘Carpentier’s marvellous real, reveals itself only to the stranger’ to

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America; and Jason Wilson defines the ‘exoticist surrealist gaze employed by Carpentier’.56 Similarly, Gonzalo Celorio views Carpentier’s work as ignoring the ‘indigenous perspective’, which, if he had seen it, ‘he would not have called it marvelous. Instead he would have accepted it as real, rather than theorizing it as the “marvelous real”.’57 Yet, as Esther Sánchez-Pardo demonstrates, this is not the only possible reading.58 A point reiterated by Nicholson who sees lo real maravilloso as a ‘reflective reconfiguration of European ideas’; as a ‘synthesis’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’ for ‘American purposes’.59 A reading that foregrounds the sacred as a miraculous moment of the real casts the symbolism of lo real maravilloso as not that which exoticises as much as it reveals a facet of sacred reality common to all communities who accommodate the living sacred ganz andere. The fé at the core of lo real maravilloso is then a specific elaboration of an international occluded surrealist tradition and global sacred-social reality. Or one could see that for Carpentier, surrealism had ignited the move beyond naƟvismo60 to lo real maravilloso, a mundonovismo statement partly exoticist on the surface but at core a vital step in the expression of national self in the context of discourses of the 1940s.61 This link is first noted, as Barbara Webb indicates, by James A.G. Irish, who ‘rightly considers lo real maravilloso a further development of mundonovismo, the movement of New World consciousness that originated in Latin America in the aftermath of the nineteenth-century independence struggles’.62 As has been discussed, the use of symbolic languages in literature rises in situations of social instability. Worringer’s thesis details that nonnaturalistic genres rise in importance during times of social stress and naturalistic genres during times of stability; and Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious suggests that romance arises in the socius in ‘times of trouble’: thereby indicating the wider historical frame at play in the socius. Following Freud’s theory on the individual imagination as a defence against distress (SFBPP 9), it has been proposed above that potentially the social imagination/imaginary psychologically provides both a defensive and curative reaction to instability in the socius.63 In such times of instability mythic symbols serve to affect social bonding and ontological transformation, and provide a means by which to establish national identity: a feature abused by totalitarian and fascist ideology. The affective mechanics of this bonding has been highlighted by the work of the Collège in relation to the sacred in society and reveal a theorisation for the force of myth in surrealism – much as the emotional tie to the leader cannot be discounted in the process of group formation.64 Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso fits into this extended process of reshaping national identity following regional struggles for independence. While Carpentier’s positioning of the point at which the fantastic and the real fuse in lo real maravilloso is part of a specifically Hispanic American tradition as Flores noted, it also consciously repositions the official surrealist ‘supreme point’ of non-contradiction into the social realm.65 The altered state of consciousness Carpentier calls estado límite, or the Collège calls ecstasy, reached in moments of contact with the sacred, through ritual and living myth, has a sociological basis which Carpentier can be seen to uncover. Ostensibly, this ethnographic approach means he is unable to inhabit ‘third’ or ‘fourth world’ realities from an entirely internal perspective. As Rogers, citing Anke Burkenmaier, states: ‘what

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James Clifford has called surrealist ethnography “seemed to offer a scientific solution to the conflict between an insider’s perspective and an outsider’s”’, and further that in The Lost Steps ‘it is possible to see Carpentier’s disenchantment with surrealist ethnography’.66 What Carpentier achieves, then, is a complex cultural negotiation that alters official surrealist anti-colonial attitudes and images of the ‘primitive’, and a purely dissident ethnography to forward a ‘nascent anticolonial discourse’ and ethnographic Marxism that reshapes the liminal zones of the American national imaginary.67 In lo real maravilloso one finds an experience of living sacrality where the ‘alteration of reality (the miracle)’ irrupts as the maravilloso.68 For Eliade, living myth recalls the sacred time of origins, illud tempus, ‘irruption of the sacred . . . effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another’ (MESP 63). Eliade elucidated that such breaks in plane have a therapeutic effect upon social ontology, in ways that are compared here to Socrates’ description of divine madness as ensuring ‘good fortune’ (Ph 245c). Bataille too saw in sacred ecstasy a route to self-absence, where at the limit of the possible there is a communication with the unknown (GBIE 12; GBAM 66, 92, 98). For Caillois, this break occurs as one contravenes profane reality in ‘rites of catharsis [that] are to the highest degree negations’ (RCMS 39). The irruption of the sacred moment of ecstasy, ancient divine madness or ekstasis serves to puncture profane reality, and as tension releases, affects alter and ontological changes occur. From a materialist theoretical perspective lo real maravilloso is particularly problematic, much as making reality mythic in Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet can be viewed as contentious from a materialist feminist perspective, as discussed below. However, in this moment when reality is altered through miracle, despite not offering an indigenous perspective, Carpentier indicates the ‘sacred as infraction’ is a sacred that parallels Socrates’ description of enthousiazƃn in the Phaedrus: thereby expressing something universal and local (RC‘F’ 302; Ph 249dn89). Such moments of sacred ecstasy analysed by the Collège de Sociologie and represented in moments of novelistic ekstasis exist in international surrealist prose works and attest to an anti-rationalist logic that decodes the social catharsis offered by mythic symbols. Carpentier contributes to international surrealism’s alternative practices not only as a result of his involvement in dissident surrealism but because his work reflects the affective impact of regional sacred myths and symbols upon ontology.

Notes 1

An exception to this trend is Nicholson’s Surrealism in LaƟn American Literature, an excellent and long overdue study, published after completion of the thesis upon which this text is based. Nicholson states her focus is on ‘mainly poetic texts and . . . manifestoes’, and observes: ‘Much research remains to be done on the presence of surrealism in Latin American prose fiction’, p. 5.

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2

As Nicholson points out, the dominant criollo oligarchies, crumbling under an ascendant middle-class shift to the cities and realisations of inequality, shaped the rebellious vanguardistas, marking their motivations and complexities out from those of the European avant-garde; LaƟn American, p. 56.

3

Arturo Reyes, ‘Surrealist Influence in Latin-American Poetry’, (accessed 11 February 2010).

4

Vicky Unruh, ‘Mariategui’s Aesthetic Thought: A Critical Reading of the Avant-Gardes’, LaƟn American Research Review, 24, 3 (1989), 47; Vicky Unruh, LaƟn American Vanguards: The Art of ContenƟous Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 6, 3, 128. Questions of identity arising from affiliation with a movement born in Europe, and the vanguardista conflict between the foreign and the autochthonous are indicated also by Nicholson, LaƟn American, pp. 5, 10, 55.

5

This is Benedict Anderson’s term from Imagined CommuniƟes: ReŇecƟons on the Origin and Spread of NaƟonalism (London: Verso, 1983). ‘First’, ‘second’ and ‘third world’ denote, respectively, capitalist countries (often colonising nations), Soviet or Chinese communist countries, and countries with developing economic and technological relations. The ‘fourth world’ refers to indigenous peoples in or across national borders.

6

Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo CarpenƟer: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 52. The journal published a translation of Franz Roh’s work on magical realism, p. 115.

7

Reyes, ‘Surrealist Influence’.

8

Nicholson, LaƟn American, p. 34.

9

Jason Wilson, ‘Coda: Spanish American Surrealist Poetry’, in Companion to Spanish Surrealism, ed. Robert Havard (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2004), p. 254.

10

José Quiroga, ‘Spanish American Poetry from 1922–1975’, in Cambridge History of LaƟn American Literature, eds Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 337.

11

Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), pp. 112–14, cited in Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 543.

12

Susanne Baackmann and David Craven, ‘Surrealism and Post-Colonial Latin America Introduction’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 3, 1–2 (2009), iv.

13

Jean Schuster, ‘Raison sociale décousue main’ (1965), Archives 57–68 (Losfeld, 1969), p. 73, cited in Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 100.

14

See Wilson, ‘Coda’, p. 254; and Nicholson, LaƟn American, pp. 9–10.

15

Nicholson, LaƟn American, p. 34.

16

Alejo Carpentier, ‘En la extrema avanzada. Algunas actitudes del Surrealism [‘In the Extreme Age. Some Attitudes of Surrealism’]’, Sociale, 13, 12 (December 1928).

17

Quiroga, ‘Poetry’, pp. 345, 338; Ivette Fuentes, ‘Grupo Orígenes: José Lezama Lima’,

(accessed 1 August 2011); cf. special collection on Orígenes and Cuba, Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US.

18

Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (New York: Noonday Press, 1970 [1959]), p. 8.

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19

See Evelyn Picon Garfield, ed. and trans., Women’s FicƟon from LaƟn America: SelecƟons from Twelve Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 17.

20

Ricardo Roque-Baldovinos, ‘The “Epic Novel”: Charismatic Nationalism and the AvantGarde in Latin America’, Cultural CriƟque, 49 (Autumn 2001), 76.

21

José Luis López Álvarez, Conversaciones con Miguel Ángel Asturias (Madrid: Magisterio Español, 1974), p. 81, quoted in Roque-Baldovinos, ‘Epic’, 66n16.

22

Tythacott, Surrealism, pp. 189, 197.

23

For a more accommodating reading of the ‘primitive’, see Nicholson, LaƟn American, p. 39.

24

Jack J. Spector, Surrealist Art and WriƟng 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 190.

25

Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, ‘The New Latin American Novel’, Books Abroad, 44, 1 (Winter 1970), 46; Gerald Martin also highlights Carpentier’s seminal role in Latin American letters in ‘On Dictatorship and Rhetoric in Latin American Writing: A Counter-Proposal’, LaƟn American Research Review, 17, 3 (1982), 223.

26

Unruh, Vanguards, p. 14; Caroline Rae, ‘In Havana and Paris: The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier’, Music and LeƩers, 89, 3 (August 2008), 375. Carpentier co-founded the journal Revista de Avance (1927–30) with Martí Casanovas, Francisco Ichaso, Jorge Mañach and Juan Marinello.

27

Timothy Brennan, ‘The Latin Sound: Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba’, TransiƟon, 81/82 (2000), 166.

28

Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 550.

29

Alejo Carpentier, ‘La Musique cubaine’, Documents (November 1929); Amy Fass Emery, The Anthropological ImaginaƟon in LaƟn American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 24. Carpentier also contributed to Bifur (1929–31), edited by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, which Breton called a ‘garbage pail’. Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 166.

30

Reyes, ‘Surrealist’.

31

Carpentier quoted by Cesar Leante, ‘Confesiones sencillas de un escrito barroco’ [‘Simple Confessions of a Baroque Writing’], Cuba, 3, 24 (1964), 32, cited in James Clifford, ‘Documents: A Decomposition’, Visual Anthropology Review, 1, 7 (Spring 1991), 79.

32

Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 546n18.

33

Guido A. Podestá, ‘An Ethnographic Reproach to the Theory of the Avant-Garde: Modernity and Modernism in Latin America and the Harlem Renaissance’, MLN, 106, 2 (March 1991), 416–17.

34

See Rabinovitch, Surrealism, pp. 57–70; Michael Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 1–18.

35

See El Nacional, 16 September 1945, in Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), 19–21, cited by Roque-Baldovinos, ‘Epic’, p. 66. Cf. Carpentier, ‘La Gran Sabana: mundo del Genesis’ [‘The Gran Sabana: World of Genesis’ – Travel series], El Nacional, 19 October 1947; ‘Lo real maravilloso de America’ [‘Marvellous American Reality’], El Nacional, 8 April 1948; ‘Destino del escritor latinoamericano’ [‘The Destiny of the Latin American Writer’], El Nacional, 24 September 1951; and ‘Fin del exotismo Americano’ [‘The End of American Exoticism’], El Nacional, 2 September 1952.

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36

Carpentier, ‘Lo real maravilloso’ (1948), included as the prologue to his second novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) (1949) and revised as ‘De lo real maravilloso Americano’ [‘On the Marvelous Real in America’], in Tientos y diferencias (Montevideo: Arca, 1967), pp. 96–112. The revised 1967 version is translated as ‘On the Marvelous Real in America’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 75–88; references are to this latter text.

37

Daniel Balderston and Mike Gonzalez, eds, Encyclopedia of LaƟn American and Caribbean Literature, 1900–2003 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 116.

38

The articles are reproduced in Alejo Carpentier, Visión de América (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999). ‘Visión de América: El ultimo buscador de El Dorado’ [‘Vision of America: The Ultimate Search for El Dorado’] was first published in El Nacional, 7 (December 1947).

39

Lúcia Sá attributes the link between these three works to González Echevarría’s discussion in Pilgrim (1977), in Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and LaƟn American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 77.

40

González Echevarría observes this, Pilgrim, p. 159.

41

For a Freudian interpretation of this move see Stephen Henighan, ‘The Pope’s Errant Son: Breton and Carpentier’, in Andre Breton: the Power of Language, ed. Ramona Fotiade (Trowbridge, UK: Cromwell Press, 2000), p. 145.

42

Christopher Warnes, ‘Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence and Magical Realism’, Literature Compass, 2, 1 (2005), 4, with reference to E. Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico y primiƟvismo: Relecturas de CarpenƟer, Asturias, Rulfo y García Márquez (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), pp. 34, 45–49.

43

Arturo Uslar Pietri, Letras y hombres de Venezuela (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948), p. 161. González Echevarría comments upon the relaƟonship between Carpentier and Uslar Pietri in Paris during the 1920s, and that both were in Venezuela at the end of the 1940s, Pilgrim, p. 110.

44

Maria Ruth Noriega Sanchez, Challenging RealiƟes: Magic Realism in Contemporary American Women's FicƟon (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2002), p. 21n18.

45

Christina Rossi, ‘Synopsis’, ICCA Documents, (accessed 6 March 2014).

46

I expand upon this concept more fully in Chapter 5. Jacques Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, The InternaƟonal Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953), 11–17. Also Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 17 July 1949), in Ecrits: A SelecƟon, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton, 1977 [1966]), pp. 3–7.

47

Ambrosino et al., ‘Foundation’, in College, ed. Hollier, p. 5.

48

Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in The Standard EdiƟon of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. IX (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), p. 151.

49

Sigmund Freud, ‘Humour’ (1927), in The Standard EdiƟon of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and Its Discontents, and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961), p. 163.

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50

Naomi B. Sokoloff, ‘The Discourse of Contradiction: Metaphor, Metonymy and El reino de este mundo’, Modern Language Studies, 16, 2 (Spring 1986), 40.

51

Breton, Manifestoes, pp. 161–62, cited in Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 181.

52

Alejo Carpentier, ‘Interview with Radio Télévision Française’, quoted in Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), p. 92, cited by Roque-Baldovinos, ‘Epic’, 67.

53

Charlotte Rogers’s book, Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in TwenƟethCentury Tropical NarraƟves (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), was published shortly after writing the thesis on which this book is based. One chapter of this book approaches The Lost Steps in relation to surrealist and dissident ideas, although our themes differ. Roger’s chapter gives excellent references to the Hispanic criticism of this relationship and to the division within this scholarship over the ‘legacy of surrealism’. She also draws attention to the connection between Eliade and Carpentier’s The Lost Steps made in Anglophone criticism by Bobs M. Tusa, ‘A Detective Story: The Influence of Mircea Eliade on Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidas’, HispanóĮla, 88 (September 1986), 41–65; pp. 155–57, 160, 164, 201–02n15, 20–23.

54

Carpentier, ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, pp. 85–86.

55

William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 39, 1 (1993), 76; González Echevarría, Pilgrim (1990), cited in Roque-Baldovinos, ‘Epic’, 75n32.

56

David Mikics, ‘Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer’, in Magical Realism, eds Zamora and Faris, p. 387; Jason Wilson, ‘Alejo Carpentier’s Re-Invention of América Latina as Real and Marvellous’, in A Companion to Magical Realism, eds Stephen M. Hart and Wen-Chin Quyang (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005), p. 73.

57

Gonzalo Celorio, ‘Alejo Carpentier: Lyrics and Sol-Fa of the Baroque’, trans. Franklin Strong, Revista Barroco, 3, 2 (Otoño [Autumn] 2009), (accessed 9 March 2010).

58

Esther Sánchez-Pardo, ‘Carpentier’s Marvellous Real: Modernity and Its Discontents in the Tropics’, in Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde, Modernism, and the Fate of a ConƟnent, eds Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert can den Berg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), p. 446.

59

Nicholson, LaƟn American, pp. 42–44.

60

Persephone Braham describes lo real maravilloso in these terms in ‘Carpentier’s Marvelous’, (accessed 4 February 2010).

61

Carpentier quoted by Leante, ‘Confesiones’, cited in Clifford, ‘Documents’, 79.

62

J.A. George Irish, ‘Magical Realism: A Search for Caribbean and Latin American Roots’, Revista/Review Interamericana, 4 (Fall 1974), 411–12, 418, in Barbara J. Webb, Myth and History in Caribbean FicƟon: Alejo CarpenƟer, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), p. 21.

63

Freud references his earlier work ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911).

64

Borch-Jacobsen discusses the affective bond in relation to Freud’s theory throughout ‘Group Psychology and the Ego’, in EmoƟonal Tie, pp. 44–48, 60.

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65

Flores, ‘Magical Realism’, in Magical Realism, p. 188; Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 123.

66

Anke Burkenmaier, Alejo CarpenƟer y la cultura de surrealismó (2006), p. 26, cited in Rogers, Jungle, pp. 154–55.

67

Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 546n18.

68

Carpentier, ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, pp. 85–86. As discussed, Carpentier’s novel and Eliade are explored by Bobs M. Tusa.

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3 PĔĘęĈĔđĔēĎĆđ DĎĘĘĎĉĊēę SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę MĊĉĎĚĒĘ: GĊĔęĊĒĕĔėĆđ CĔēċđĆęĎĔēĘ Ĕċ ęčĊ IĘđĊĘ Ĕċ PĆėĆĉĎĘĊ Ďē AđĊďĔ CĆėĕĊēęĎĊė’Ę TčĊ LĔĘę SęĊĕĘ

THE GENERIC COLLAGE OF IDENTITY IN ALEJO CARPENTIER’S THE LOST STEPS The advantages of civilization are offset by the way men profit from them: men today profit in order to become the most degraded beings that have ever existed. Bataille, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’ (1936)1

The Cuban, (ex)dissident surrealist Alejo Carpentier published Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps) in Mexico in 1953, which was then translated into English and published in London in 1956. It is perhaps because Carpentier moved away from surrealism after 1939 that the novel and Carpentier himself are not widely considered to be surrealist and, as Rogers indicates, this legacy is a critically contested point.2 However, like Nicholson and Rogers, it is possible to consider surrealism to be central to Carpentier’s trajectory, with the qualification of a specific dissidence. Although the novel was written after 1939 it particularly demonstrates dissident ideas and substantiates the proposition of a surrealist penumbra which reflect, in their literary expression, ekstasis or a divin fou indicative of a further surrealist altered state of consciousness. Using the theory of the Collège, and given Carpentier’s involvement in dissident surrealism in Paris, it is possible to see a clear correlation between his adaptation of dissident surrealist thought in his post-dissident period and his particular interest in fé (faith) and the sacred.3 Together these features make a consideration of Carpentier’s novel pivotal to this charting of a thread of

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surrealist practices occluded from official surrealist parlance, just as it is central to a full understanding of his role in the Hispanic American Boom literature of the 1950s and 1960s. In the prose work The Lost Steps Carpentier portrays a narrator-protagonist who is jaded by life and love in the US city he calls home, and is given the opportunity to recapture his vitality in a return to his South American country of origin. The narrator-protagonist is nameless and his presentation of modernity in a US ‘skyscraper’ city, also with no name, raises increasingly critical questions about the nature of society (LS 11). This negative image of Western modernity reiterates the ire expressed in the Grupo Minorista manifesto, only now reinforced with a dissident surrealist critique of capitalism. The ‘skyscraper’ city is ‘a city where poverty was harder to bear than anywhere else in the world . . . [and] was as sterile a solution as selling the best hours of your life from sunrise to sunset’ (LS 21).4 The narrator and his American wife, Ruth, sell their hours, and just as he is trapped within a uninspiring routine producing music for commercials, she is surreally imprisoned in an acting contract where for each day of the last ‘four years and seven months’ she had repeated her role in a play about the US Civil War (LS 5). The narrator releases the tension caused by this mechanical lifestyle through drunken excesses with his French mistress and her avant-garde friends. However, by the beginning of the novel he now finds ‘those men wearied me as much as those whose aim is volume and profit’ (LS 29). Life in the US city has rendered him deadened and ‘empty’ under the weight of ‘my Sisyphean stone’ (LS 21, 31).5 This deathly routine of mechanical work and compensatory excess finds its temporary cessation in a vacation period during which the protagonist’s wife is working away. Without occupation and spouse, the narrator is filled with ‘the fear of meeting the person who emerged from myself and waited for me each year on the threshold of my holiday’ (LS 31). However, the break in routine occasions surreal possibilities to arise, as on the first day of his vacation when he engages in an unmotivated wandering through the city (the surrealist practice of errance) he, by (objective) chance, barges into a former acquaintance, the Curator of an Organography museum (LS 16).6 Carpentier’s expression of surrealist chance brings the narrator into new and revelatory encounters but Carpentier does not alter the form in which chance appears, as Naum does in Zenobia. Upon meeting the Curator the narrator is reminded of the value his life held before its utilisation. Therefore, when the Curator offers him the opportunity to travel to South America to locate two Amerindian instruments, this quest serves to place him back in contact with his former academic aspirations and to change his life. Locating the Amerindian instruments will take the narrator, accompanied by his mistress Mouche, on a journey from the US city into the South American interior. This journey begins with a flight to a tropical South American capital, again with no name, where they encounter ‘The Worm’: a local concept denoting nature’s ability to break through the pavements and invade buildings thereby disrupting human attempts at domination (LS 35–37). In the capital an incidence of bloody civil war breaks out, and while hiding in their besieged hotel a manifestation of The Worm, in the form of a legion of insects, begins to creep

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in through plugholes and faucets (LS 51). In the couple’s transition from US social stability to South American war a radical difference between the locations is evident, but more than that a diachronic social parallel of civil conflict is offered by Ruth’s endless play about the 1861 US Civil War, reminding one of, albeit differing, issues of social enslavement and corruption in national reformations (LS 107). From the very first the reader is guided not to just synchronically compare point for point but diachronically associate like for like, a tactic that alters the interpretative framework that one may employ to approach social formations. Bataille observed that ‘A MAN IS A PARTICLE INSERTED IN UNSTABLE AND TANGLED GROUPS . . . Being is always a group of particles whose relative autonomies are maintained’, and Carpentier’s narrator-protagonist travels through many such groups to finally realise the full import of this social observation of being (GBIE 84–85, original emphasis). Throughout the narrator’s journey, US and South American societies are juxtaposed to highlight that the affective political, economic and moral values imposed by a social environment are among the most powerful forces determining group and national identity. Like the forces of attraction and repulsion which Bataille and Caillois describe in the Collège as integral to infraction and the metamorphosis of being in sacred sociology, the narrator’s identity is shaped by the values that he accepts and rejects in each society. In this chapter there will be a sustained movement between Carpentier’s expression of dissident surrealist ideas and his own developments, for as much as Carpentier may be drawn into relation with surrealism and with the theory of the Collège, his insights also present a singular postcolonial articulation of his relation to ‘first’ and ‘third world’, neocolonial realities. The capitals of each country, like the narrator, are nameless but as soon as the couple escape the revolution in the South American capital and travel the narrow-gauge train to the summer resort of Los Altos this anonymity ends and towns and villages provide a geographical orientation. This shift from nameless to named locations coincides with the move from urban to rural spaces in the novel, a distinction which is of particular significance in the postcolonial literary context, reflecting as it does the marked divide between modern urban and traditional rural values. Mikics draws out an additional economic facet to this journey when he terms it one from the ‘capitalist city’ to ‘Feudal countryside’ into ‘pre-Feudal jungle’.7 From Los Altos the couple travel through various locations by bus, then boat, towards Puerto Anunciación at the mouth of the interior. On their way they meet significant travelling companions: Rosario, an indigenous woman who later becomes the narrator’s lover, travelling to visit her dying father; Yannes, a Greek diamond hunter returning to his mine in the interior who becomes Mouche’s lover; and a Capuchin Friar from Santiago de los Aguinaldos, a ghostly town destroyed by past civil wars, in ‘the Lands of the Horse’ where they witness the local Corpus Christi festival (LS 72, 94, 104). When the group reach Puerto Anunciación in the ‘Lands of the Dog’ they meet ‘the Adelantado’ (a title given to early colonial settlers in South America) who agrees to lead them to an Amerindian village where they can find the instruments they seek (LS 114–16).

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The Adelantado leads the group, minus a sick Mouche, through a ‘secret entrance’ into the interior. Here they face two ‘trials’ which can be seen as ordeals in nature: the ‘First Trial’ occurs in darkness and the ‘Second Trial’ in water (LS 147, 154). In the first trial the narrator-protagonist and the group face the fear of the unknown in the darkness of the jungle night, which brings him to a point of vulnerability. They then symbolically enter a purification ritual in the turbulent waters of the river during the second trial, a rendering which, as we shall see, is less mythic than for Carrington’s protagonist who bathes in the purificatory ritual waters of the cauldron, and Naum’s protagonist who is reborn in the purificatory ritual waters of rain. The trial and its triumph is a feature in myth and quest narratives which is reflected in modern narratives and serves to bring one closer to the object of the quest. In this feature one sees the Collège’s observation that in society the sacred offers the chance to turn ‘distress into strength’ (GB‘ARI’ 111). The alternative surrealist practices considered here echo this emotive transformation noted by the Collège, as each protagonist experiences basanos turning to sacred ekstasis and bliss, echoing the structure of mythic narrative and Bataille’s later formulation of ‘anguish’ or ‘torment’ turning to ‘ecstasy’ (GBIE 11).8 It is not in the finding of musical instruments that the quest is won, but in the change to Being, a point exemplified in The Lost Steps when the new couple, in search of an idyll, follow the Adelantado to his founded ‘city’, Santa Mónica de los Venados, in the ‘Land of the Birds’ (LS 170, 183). In this city the narrator undergoes an experience of new knowledge, but chooses to return briefly to the US. When he tries to go back to Santa Mónica, the secret passage proves impassable. In the novel the female characters are not muses or guides to creativity but are expendable objects. As such, Carpentier’s surrealist practice does not innovate in the arena of gender commentary, unlike Carrington and Naum. Instead they stand as allegories of national identities: from the ‘first world’, the US workaholic wife and French surrealist mistress (New and Old ‘first world’ respectively) and from the ‘third world’, the indigenous Hispanic American lover with a herbalist’s knowledge: ‘Through her lips the plants began to speak and describe their own powers’ (LS 76). It is instead the shaman’s Amerindian ritual, encountered on the way to Santa Mónica, which provides the catalyst for the narrator’s transformation. Autobiography, as discussed, is an important component in the surrealist novel, and many critics have emphasised the autobiographical resonances of The Lost Steps;9 as such, it fulfils Breton’s directive to ‘[s]peak of yourself, you will teach me much more . . . Just limit yourself to leaving me your memoirs; provide me with the real names’.10 It is also possible to read the narrator symbolically. As an ‘orthodox unreliable narrator’,11 his hypocrisy or unreliability sets the reader apart from an easy identification with him. This may explain negative readings of the narrator-protagonist’s hybrid position, wherein he is not singularly Hispanic American and lacks an ‘incarnate solidarity with the primitive or ancient’.12 Neither a resident nor indigenous member of this Hispanic American land of his childhood, he is not a complete outsider but instead is situated on a border, one perhaps which Carpentier could also identify with. Despite this resistance it is possible to identify with his journey of egoic development, disaffection with Western society and questioning of the values of authenticity, sacrality

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and morality in each American country. The narrator’s real relevance rests in his reaction to the values held in this society which serve to alter and affect him, much as, one could say, ‘primitivism’ did for the European avant-garde; but in this case it also serves to reveal the social history and traditions of the region as lived realities. His childhood in South America gives him access to the topology, but his distance from the land is indicated by his use of discourse derived from the specular nature of a Western travel journal. A number of critics identify Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso as inaugurating a form of narrative that exoticises and depoliticises Hispanic American history.13 However, as discussed, not all critics deemphasise the deeply Marxist and politicised anti-colonial thought that emerges from postcolonial writing engaged with surrealist ideas during this interim phase of regional identity construction.14 * In surrealism many mediums and forms were utilised for artistic expression, and the collage technique, drawing as it did from disparate sources, was a favoured and familiar tool. When they are juxtaposed, generic codes can also form a surrealist collage. It is the treatment and method of juxtaposition or construction of the collage that marks it out as surrealist in this sense. In The Lost Steps a generic collage is visible, as are its surrealist roots. However, Carpentier employs this to tell a story about politics and history in The Lost Steps and so demonstrates a sophisticated development of the surrealist technique. Carpentier’s collage technique in The Lost Steps can be separated into distinct sections. The first section is composed of varying fragments of South American reality: ancient Amerindian myths, the novela de la Ɵerra and contemporary Amerindian ritual.15 A second section draws on classical reality: the myth of Sisyphus and Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, both of which structure the narrative and influence the music which the narrator begins to write.16 The epic quest is visible in the goal to recover the instruments and the ‘isles of Paradise’ in the image of the founded city. These two sections of generic coding create a sense of ambiguous or multiple meaning in the text and have caused a number of incongruent critical readings. John Silver attributes this ambiguity in meaning to an inclination to ‘counter the possession of the object that it seeks’, a move familiar in surrealist practices.17 In the first section there are coherent, living sacred-social rites and realities, and this ethnographic treatment echoes the approach of Documents and the Collège towards their own culture. This sits in insuperable contrast to the more formal epic genre which details a journey through a foreign landscape, is mythic in detail and shapes the national identity of its ancient nation and constitutes the second section. Third and fourth sections mix European generic codes. The third includes the picaresque genre echoed in the episodic nature of the journey,18 allegory in its characterisations,19 and elements of the romance genre.20 The fourth draws on the genre of the travel journal and Carpentier’s revision of the baroque.21 The third and fourth sections respectively utilise and reject Western genres, adapting them to discuss American identity and reality. Carpentier reclaimed the Old World baroque style and spirit to create a New World baroque evidenced in the tone of the descriptions of the US city and the South American

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jungle.22 On the subject of Cuba’s José Lezama Lima, George Handley identifies the ecological aspects of this revision: ‘the Old World baroque was fashioned to facilitate “a rationalistic elaboration of the city” whereas the American baroque “raised . . . the wealth of nature over and above monetary wealth”’.23 Alongside other Hispanic writers, such as Lezama Lima and the Mexican Salvador Novo from the surrealist Contemporáneos group,24 Carpentier participated in this wider trend in Hispanic American writing25 which arises for very clear sociopolitical reasons. Indeed la vanguardia’s concern with identity hinges on the competing values of urban modernity and cultural authenticity. In the baroque period a similar destabilisation of social identity occurred as a result of European urbanisation. As Ruth El Safir describes, the creation of the urban city in Spain led to the increased artificiality of social identity.26 Carpentier’s neobaroque parodies the artificiality of US modern urban identity and the European travel journal’s rendering of the South American jungle. This parodic use of European generic forms is also evident when Carpentier and certain other American writers used, adapted or appropriated surrealist methods.27 Two fragments of Carpentier’s generic collage in The Lost Steps stand out as deserving further discussion, the first being the legend of great treasures in the South American jungle and the second the specific use of allegory Carpentier employs which was alluded to above. One narrative construction of reality imposed upon America by Europe derives from the legend of El Dorado. The legend tells of an Amerindian ritual in which a gilded king placed gold and jewels into a lake. The possibility of untold quantities of gold hidden in the jungle led to many European expeditions in New Granada (comprising the modern countries Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Guyana, amongst others), some centring upon the Orinoco River which Carpentier navigated during his journey into the Venezuelan interior.28 In the novel Carpentier presents this conquistador thirst for gold and jewels through the legend of El Dorado, and the characters of Yannes and the leper who haunts the city that Adelantado establishes (LS 128, 132). Carpentier takes this thirst for gold and reshapes it into the Adelantado’s hunger for power over others, over ‘the land and the power of decreeing its laws’ termed ‘Reasons of State’ so that the reader sees the corrupting effect of this treasure in the founded city, and possibly in other locations (LS 174, 188). The Adelantado’s rejection of money and embracing of ‘colonial’ power over others echoes the values of Mouche’s avant-garde friends in the US whose admirable material asceticism goes hand in hand with ‘attempts to justify the exiguousness of individual accomplishment’ rather than observing the wider political implications to the community (LS 29). For the narrator, however, a different type of treasure is uncovered: an experience of the land and living ritual which later becomes as elusive as El Dorado, but through which, similar to Frank’s assessment of Caillois, the narrator has undergone trials and an ‘ethics of effort [that] places self-mastery, not power, at the source of civilization’ (RCES 241). The affective alteration of attitudes and therefore ontology brought in the moments of estado límite, described here as the novelistic ekstasis or divin fou, liberates the narrator from the values of Western, capitalist modernity and brings him to the experiential ‘gift’ or treasure of the land of El Dorado as will be elaborated below (Ph 244a).

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The affective rejection of the values of Western societies expressed in moments of novelistic ekstasis concurs with surrealist and dissident surrealist critiques of utilitarianism and ‘project’.29 In Carpentier’s discourse, one is made aware of numerous Eurocentric projections onto the New World, through echoes of Schomburgk’s Travels in BriƟsh Guiana and the legend of El Dorado, so much so that it is possible to propose that Carpentier highlights the mediated nature of American reality in order to slew it off and propose a self-definition – just as Carrington, discussed later, emphasises women’s mediated status in order to reclaim liberty, and Naum reclaims love from its mediated status under Soviet-style communism. In Carpentier’s South America, reality is represented as a present-centred collage of historical periods which mistakenly valued gold and power over others. Contrasted with time as experienced in the space of the jungle, the conventional Eurocentric chronologies distort, and the constructed aspect of societal assumptions made in each period or location unravels. Support for such readings of the inherent violence of man’s values to the other and allegorical fragments to be discussed below are offered in Carpentier’s nonnaturalistic short fiction from the 1940s and 1950s: ‘Journey Back to the Source’, ‘The Wise Men’ and ‘The Highroad of Saint James’.30 Critics have noted the parallel between the mythic reversal of historical time in ‘Journey’ and the symbolic journey back through time in The Lost Steps.31 However, one can also draw a connection between ‘The Wise Men’ and The Lost Steps as both relate the indigenous myth of the Flood, and their conclusions indicate that the new societies that humans create – either after the Flood or in the Adelantado’s founding of a city – serve only to perpetuate human violence (LS 176). Indigenous attitudes towards violence are not idealised in either narrative, and are intimated by the prisoners of the Amerindian tribe in the novel (LS 164–65). Further, The Lost Steps refers to the sacred book of the Quiché Mayan, Popol Vuh, and its tragic prophecy of the ‘myth of the robot’ and the ‘threat of the machine’ (LS 183). Lucia Sá sees such indigenous inflections in The Lost Steps as being overlooked by González Echevarría’s Eurocentric reading of Carpentier’s oeuvre, but she highlights that these inflections offer a vital key to rereading Carpentier’s work.32 The parallel between ‘The Highroad of Saint James’ and The Lost Steps highlights that the narrator’s unreliability could serve an entirely different function, one in which his journey is read not as a quest for Amerindian instruments but a journey of self-mastery. ‘Highroad’ is the tale of Juan who participates in the colonial project in South America. The narrator of The Lost Steps, like Juan in ‘Highroad’, changes his identity to suit the situation, shows little bravery and initially demonstrates no admirable qualities. Both works thematically show mistakes repeated over and over, leading each protagonist to come full circle back to a beginning, albeit less mythically in the novel. ‘Highroad’ has been observed to draw upon the genre of the European medieval morality play and, although this genre is not discussed in relation to the novel, it is proposed here that it also utilises allegory in ways that are indicative of a reworking of the medieval morality play.33 This use of allegory in the novel is also a feature which could be connected with the tradition of crónicas (chronicles) in South America which readily mixed fact and fiction.34

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Morality plays of the sixteenth century are ‘a species of allegorical plays or dramatic allegories’ in which ‘man – any or each or every man – is imagined as faced with two alternative sets of choices’ and this moral conflict is externalised: like myth, it is presented in a ‘non-naturalistic mode’.35 An example of this is Everyman, which as L.A. Cormican outlines, gives a ‘general picture of human responsibility and destiny’ from which the viewer understands ‘the importance attached to Knowledge’ that ‘is very different from the scientific knowledge on which we rely so much today. For Everyman . . . Knowledge is merely faith’.36 With reference to the morality tradition, Cormican also notes that ‘[t]hose of them which, like The Three Estates, describe contemporary conditions, deal with human frailties and abuses of wealth and power.’37 The nonnaturalistic mode of the morality play, like myth, readily accommodates surrealist techniques that question how reality and values are constructed and interpreted. First the narrator’s rejection of Yannes’s thirst for gold and the Adelantado’s hunger for power demonstrates a moral development whilst concurrently exposing his own flawed character. This allegorical presentation of character evokes the figuration of character in the medieval morality play, embodied as Greed, Lust, Death and Temptation. In The Lost Steps the morality play is reclaimed by replacing its doctrinal Catholic value structure with nondoctrinal sacred-social values. The rejection of doctrine is evident in the narrator’s explicit rejection of the laws and religion imposed by the Friar in Santa Mónica (LS 187). Implicitly, this is also a rejection of the moral and religious values that shaped Europe’s colonial rationale: its desire for dominion over others and imposition of values. Interpreted in this way, Carpentier’s unique postcolonial reworking of the medieval morality play genre exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of European civilisation as its corrupt morality infects the model of European law and religion upon which the Adelantado’s city in the jungle is founded. Interpreting Carpentier’s narrative through the medieval morality play, in its reclaimed and oppositional form, offers a way to see how Carpentier has made surrealism’s anti-capitalist and anti-colonial critique relevant in American literature. Instead of Europe’s medieval morality play ‘any or each or every man’ – who is tempted by the Devil – Carpentier’s musician is a man living in the ‘era of . . . the No-Man, when souls were no longer sold to the Devil, but to the Bookkeeper or the Galley Master’ (LS 10). The protagonist, who will hereafter be referred to as ‘No-Man’, faces the moral dilemma posed by the seductive ease of participating in ethical corruption, either through what he sees as the US’s money-driven, mechanical lifestyle and compensatory excesses or the gold in Hispanic America and in founding a city in the jungle which offers the power to dominate indigenous peoples thereby fusing the colonial past with the neocolonial present.38 The moral choice is shown to be a rejection of both of these options despite its personal impact. As in Everyman, faith in The Lost Steps is shown to be a different kind of knowledge to that offered by science, albeit, in the former, faith is expressed through religious dogma and, in the latter, through symbols of the primary sacred. Both the medieval Everyman and Carpentier’s No-Man experience an unexpected parting and are left alone with only a good deed to support them.39 No-Man’s good deed is his refusal to murder the leper or to participate in a cycle of violence. The morality play’s concern with abuses of

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wealth and power in the modern world appears here, as Carpentier shifts from theology to the sacred morality contravening social violence and overlapping patterns of domination and capitalist values. The doctrinal concept of salvation no longer offers a potential reward for No-Man and as a result of the moral dilemma the novel poses, one wonders, much as Bataille did, ‘If salvation isn’t in question, what would the purpose of the spiritual life be? In other words what of the possible might we introduce into the impossible?’40 The work of the Collège and alternative surrealist novels reveal the material basis to the moment of the living sacred and the openness to others that Roland Champagne identifies as leading to a ‘mandate for change in the self’.41 The symbolic force of the living sacred indicated in ekstasis contains the ability to elicit change within the structure of the ‘self’ and ‘other’ and it is with this force that myth, and to a lesser degree literature, engage. As Shoshona Felman states, stories have the ‘power to elicit affect’ and their ‘symbolic efficacy . . . has power over us because it “is compelling us to recognize” something in ourselves’.42 No-Man’s quest is one of ontological discovery and ego development gained through the ritual symbols indicating an affective experience of ekstasis. When he realises he cannot become one with the life of the Adelantado’s city this discovery is most apparent, for Carpentier, alongside Bataille, understands that one cannot become part of a ‘primitive’ unconsciousness: ‘what distinguishes modern man – and this is perhaps especially true of the surrealist – is that in returning to the primitive he is constrained by consciousness even as he aims to recover within himself the mechanisms of the unconscious, for he never ceases to have consciousness of his goal’ (GBAM 72). This separation from ‘primitive’ life, its values and routines is observed in No-Man’s composition of a new musical score, which sets him at odds with the inhabitants of Santa Mónica and leaves him once again in Diaspora. Carpentier’s use of the morality play in The Lost Steps serves at once to put into motion surrealism’s aim to overturn conventional social attitudes, Bataille’s enactment of heterology in theory and the author’s vision of the sacred in lo real maravilloso. Carpentier’s defamation of conventional Western European attitudes politically extends surrealism’s critique of colonialism and its wider aim to validate non-European values and morality. It does so through recourse to and adaptation of the dissident surrealist sacred, here manifested in nature and indigenous ritual, as will be discussed. Through analysis of four sections of generic collage, specifically in treasure legends and the morality play, it is possible to see that the composite meaning created by juxtaposing these generic codes, in true surrealist style, is to highlight the constructed nature of values and reality. Each fragment of each section represents a different way of narrating reality and national identity so that the reader faces the multiple ways in which New World modernity, indigenous values, Amerindian rites, ancient civilisations and Europe construct reality: all of which Carpentier inhabits and deforms in specific ways. It is by using the surrealist technique of collage in this way, that a ‘fictional Europe is compared to an imaginary America – which was, in turn, created by Europe – and contrasted with the “real” America’.43

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TELLING THE TEMPUS OF CLIO’S EKSTASIS AND SYMBOLIC ANALOGY Going back in time, if I follow again the path which man followed in the search for himself (for his glory), I can only be grasped by a strong and overflowing movement – which is exuberant. Bataille, ‘Blue of Noon’ (1936), GBIE 80

Carpentier’s political, projective vision for lo real maravilloso, as it is presented in this reading of The Lost Steps, like surrealism, does not nostalgically yearn to relive the past but looks to see evidence of the past in the present and to make past insights relevant for present understanding. Lo real maravilloso yields a form in which, as Fredric Jameson notes in reference to Carpentier, is ‘Not the “lost object of desire” of the American 1950s, therefore, but the articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the present . . . [which] is the formal precondition for the emergence of this new narrative style.’44 This telling of a nation’s history takes on a further dimension if, as mentioned above, one reads the characters as national allegories: Ruth signifying US repetitiousness and performity; Mouche the French avant-garde’s self-indulgent novelty; the native artists at Los Altos embodying the 1950s American vogue for French surrealism and neglect of local culture; and Nicasio, the leper haunting the periphery of the founded city, Santa Mónica, as a sign of the prospector’s violence to the land. Other characters offer allegories of nations and values that shaped colonial culture: Rosario denotes the ethnic hybridisation resulting from colonialism; the Greek Yannes as a prospector hoping to benefit from the spoils of the land; the Friar re-enacts the colonial imposition of Catholicism; and the Adelantado as the native conquistador. The characters thereby reflect what Stern terms the colonial legacy, where ‘colonial ghosts’ reappear and persist in present values: ‘The formal codes of honor that governed respectable manhood and womanhood in colonial times find striking parallels in the ethnographies and studies of more recent times.’45 Colonialism thereby perpetuates its legacy in the values deemed attractive in the present. It is possible to read No-Man’s character in a number of ways, one of which is to interpret him as an allegory of US values which marks his presence in South America as questionable, another would see him as an allegory for a South America distanced from its own values and subject to the unfulfilling US modernity. As suggested, above, No-Man’s distance from indigenous realities acknowledges that one cannot become ‘primitive’: other critics have seen this as the ultimate failure of No-Man to understand an indigenous way of life. For example, Gordon Brotherston notes he is ‘a kind of intellectual conquistador who fails to become part of what he records’.46 Indeed No-Man does imagine he and the crew are ‘conquistadors’, illustrating his culpability in re-enacting the possession of this land and its people (LS 159). Perhaps this is intentional though, another resistance of the object or subject in this case. To his credit NoMan is unwilling to fit into the role of coloniser in the Adelantado’s city, which calls into question his previous alignment with the conquistadors in the text

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and indicates a change in his position. For example, he rejects the writing down of laws in the city, and he cannot understand why the Adelantado, ‘having this unique opportunity to found a city outside the Epoch, should have burdened himself with a church, which carries with it the crushing weight of its canons, interdicts, ambitions, intolerance’ (LS 187, 171). This rejection of religious institutions echoes surrealist attitudes which viewed religion as a social control comparable to that of colonialism. It is at this point that the changes in NoMan’s values and beliefs begin to become clear: he not only rejects doctrinal religion (which Durkheim describes as a secondary experience of the sacred, as discussed above) but favours, in line with the Collège, an interest in the primary sacred. Neither will No-Man secure the Adelantado’s city by killing the leper, who attempts to rape an Indian child. Although this resistance is also often read by critics as a failing on No-Man’s part, it appears, under the structure of the ‘third world’ morality play, to be quite the opposite, a temptation that has been resisted: ‘something in me resisted, as though from the moment my finger tightened on the trigger, something would be changed forever. There are acts that throw up walls, markers, limits in a man’s existence’ (LS 207). The Adelantado’s son, Marcos, taunts him ‘Weren’t you in the war?’, and berates his failure to kill the man. However, a convincing argument for passivism has previously been revealed in No-Man’s traumatic memories of the Second World War and it is consistent with the working of this trauma that No-Man cannot turn ‘Executioner’ under any conditions (LS 86). If this is a failure, it is only deemed so by the values held by the leaders of this community who follow the ‘colonial ghosts’ and perpetuate the values that supported colonial penetration, domination of indigenous people and violence towards others. It is these values, one could say, that cause No-Man to leave rather than the ostensible reason given as a shortage of paper on which to compose or a wish to resolve marital religious/legal bonds (LS 212). A less historical and more mythic interpretation of No-Man’s departure can be found in intertextual references to Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. After the group arrive in the Adelantado’s city, Santa Mónica provides a parallel with the land of the Lotus-eaters, as No-Man, in a rather unusual reading of the narrative, comments that he ‘had always been irked by the cruelty of Ulysses, tearing his companions from the happiness they had found’ (LS 179). To agree with NoMan is to read the arrival of the rescue helicopter as akin to Ulysses’ cruelty, and his inability to find the secret entrance and return to the community as a failure or a tragedy.47 However, if the actual meaning of the land of the Lotuseaters in The Odyssey is followed, the land and founded community represent a false paradise, a point which concurs with John Silver and Webb’s reading of Santa Monica as ‘neither the Garden of Eden nor Manoa, the City of Gold’.48 Further support for such a perspective exists if the founded community is read as a re-enactment of colonial oppression, meaning No-Man narrowly escapes the seductive, insidious pull to colonise South America once again, even if his escape was not undertaken consciously. Jean Franco suggests that, at this moment in his career, Carpentier was making an important turn away from a cultural nationalism transfixed upon

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the past for, ‘while the artist can and should trace lost steps to his own cultural roots, he must not stay in the past’.49 To which could be added, neither must he repeat the abuses of the past in the present. Anibal Quijano echoes precisely this meaning attached to history in The Lost Steps: ‘Among ourselves, the past is, or can be, a personal experience of the present, not its nostalgic recovery. Our past is not lost innocence but integrated wisdom, the unity of the tree of knowledge with the tree of life.’50 The face of humanity is shown to be scarred by historical violence and there is a refusal to romanticise either South America or the West in the novel: the juxtaposition of the past US Civil War, acted by Ruth, with past and present South American civil wars, colonialism, the Holocaust and the murder which No-Man witnesses in the Adelantado’s city attest to this. Indeed the political dimension of Carpentier’s novel abides in such temporal juxtapositions and, as such, can be allied with the Muse Clio’s ekstasis, that tells ‘the achievements of the past and teaches them to future generations’ (Ph 245a). The potentially curative or cathartic effect of symbols drawn from ritual and myth as noted by Eliade, determines that their camouflaged traces appear in modern narrative (the same has been noted by Borges, in his reference to the ‘similarity between narrative procedure and the primitive’s homeopathic cure’) (MEMDM 34–36).51 There is a telling of the past in the novel that participates in this curative/homeopathic release of social tension and alteration of ontology. It has been noted above that The Lost Steps could be read as a form of generic collage and how this technique can be explicated via surrealism’s pursuit of mythos and use of juxtaposition to distort rationalist views of reality, thereby forcing the imagination to work creatively. Chance or collage provide primary examples of this radical aesthetic expression. The same pertains to the chronotope: as in Carpentier’s postcolonial novel the history of pre-colonialism, colonialism and neocolonialism is told through a present-centred collage of historical phases demonstrating that ‘third world’ synchronic realities are more complex than Western modernity accounts for. Just as Mikics noted that No-Man’s journey from the city to the jungle in this South American country is marked by the types of economies prevalent in each location, similarly they are shaped by differing senses of time. Each location then appears to symbolise a different phase of the West’s industrial social history. As such, the fictional country itself becomes a collage of historical periods. This effect can be attributed to surrealist methods, but also, as Steve J. Stern does, to the hybridising effect of colonialism.52 The fictional conflation of the past into the present expresses a literal reality in America, and so communicates lo real maravilloso of the region, not the region as le merveilleux. Carpentier’s portrayal of the civil revolution is not one of vital or venerated action but appears more as an effect of the larger historical cycle which stands as a glyph at this point in the novel. No-Man hints at this larger sociohistorical inheritance underneath the present political conflict: ‘I found that I was dealing with something more akin to a religious war. Because of an incredible chronological discrepancy of ideals, the conflict . . . gave me the impression of a kind of battle between people living in different centuries’ (LS 47). Instead of dwelling upon this battle and the contemporary South American politics that

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cause it, Carpentier takes his No-Man from the capital to the jungle, and this move, rather than a retreat from reality, in fact begins to decode the historical origins of the present conflict. In Carpentier’s treatment of Amerindian history there is a resistance to elevating it unquestioningly. Rather than celebrating all rituals despite their form, Carpentier critically juxtaposes one particular aspect in Amerindian culture and Western culture: that of the use of drugs, which both Breton and Bataille’s surrealism opposed (GBIE 183).53 When the Headman ritually recites the creation myth, stimulated by the use of a drug, the event is not fetishised in the narrative (LS 189). This rendering implies that, like Benjamin,54 No-Man rejects intoxication as a source of creative illumination. A point further supported by No-Man’s reference to Western recreational use of drugs: Many years before, I had once yielded to the curiosity of smoking opium . . . that brought with it the sudden solution to all the creative problems torturing me at the time . . . when I emerged from my lucid sleep and really wanted to go to work, I made the mortifying discovery that nothing of all I had thought, imagined, decided under the influence of the drug amounted to anything. They were stock formulas, ideas without substance. (LS 191)

The ‘new knowledge’ or ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ resulting from ecstasy for Bataille and Caillois, and from divine madness, ekstasis, divin fou or estado límite is here lacking in the use of narcotics (GBIE 53; RC‘F’ 282). It is as a result of the present-centred collage of history in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps that this insight surfaces. The disparate realities of indigenous peoples and the revolutionaries in the capital exist within the same nation-state which, as noted, is a result of a cultural fusion instigated by colonialism. Each town and each land crossed (the Horse, the Dog and the Bird) is characterised by their differing economic bases and, therefore, by diverse social behaviour as in reverse they echo the differing phases of colonial imposition and its affect on ontology. When this non-chronological rendering of history is allied to the generic collage (European myths about the self and the New World, and indigenous myths) the means by which stories and history in the region have conceptually and affectively shaped the national imaginary is clear, much as stigmatic narrative constructions, as will be discussed, have in the Balkan setting Spatio-temporal distortions expressed in surrealist literature and art, primarily through a dream-logic in which objects and subjects fuse and acausality in which linear temporality is fractured, serve to disrupt rationalism. Surrealist methods of temporal distortion are central to this novel and to alternative surrealism in general, which represent the timeless moments of sacred-social experiences. In The Lost Steps, this occurs on two levels: first, chronological distortion creates a nonnaturalistic kairological sense of time more congruent with mythic realities; second, this distortion symbolically describes a very real overlapping of different socioeconomic features in South America caused by colonialism and neocolonialism. Both kairological distortions, describable as maravilloso, are identified with real geosocial features with the former irrupting as one comes closer to nature, the tellus tempuris (time of the earth), which will now be considered in more detail.

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Like the return to the moment of illud tempus in myth, Carpentier’s narrative leads back through an ever-present past, on a return journey to the source of the modern nation. It begins in the US skyscraper city’s stifling mechanical routine – indicative of Western European modernity. The narrative moves then to South America and a capital where revolution brings a sense of fear and urgency and the ‘nervous tension of the past hours’ grate upon the imprisoned hotel guests, intensifying their experience of time (LS 52). The group move then towards the jungle, and further away from the capital and the revolution, and No-Man experiences an increasing release from the tension of time into a slower pace. Whilst travelling on the river No-Man’s experiences bring a new understanding of time: Here man’s travels were governed by the Code of the Rains. I noticed that I, to whom the measuring of time was a mania, shackled to the metronome by vocation and to the clock by profession, had stopped thinking of the hour, gauging the height of the sun by hunger or sleep. (LS 101)

As part of this new understanding, he also begins to appreciate silence not as a measure but as emanating from the natural environment: ‘Silence is an important word in my vocabulary . . . But then, sitting on that rock, I was living a silence: a silence that came from so far off, compounded of so many silences, that a word dropped into it would have taken on the clangour of creation’ (LS 99). In this, Carpentier conveys the impact of lived silence within societies that venerate nature. The further No-Man travels into this untamed natural profusion, the greater the silence: ‘The nearer we came to the jungle, the more I noticed in the men a growing capacity for silence . . . The rhythm of speech was slow, everybody listening and waiting for the other to finish before answering’ (LS 134). Silence becomes a quality of time, one that holds an experiential value. Just as the kairological is evident in surrealist uses of the dream, the unconscious, automatism, chance and the found object and so on, which all focus time into a moment or instance of experience, Carpentier adds an alternative surrealist appreciation of silence. If there is something felt to be missing in modernity, something that indigenous cultures still access, it is identified as silence. This silence (itself an absence) is vital to No-Man’s experience of the time of nature and, as will be discussed, the ekstaƟc changes to his ontology. Bataille also recognises the importance of silence to inner experience: ‘though we want to give our attention to what is inner, this attention slips nevertheless to the object. We only emerge from this based on states proceeding from objects which are themselves barely graspable (silence, breath)’ and ‘in memory’ (GBIE 140). The pleasure that comes in a release from speech, which alters one’s experience of time, perhaps indicates why the shift from chronological time into kairological time is a vital feature of the release of social tensions in sacred ecstasy or ekstasis and its homeopathic effects. Once No-Man reaches the Amerindian village where the instruments he seeks can be found, a further realisation about time becomes apparent to him. The tessellated synchronic social rhythms of South American society he has travelled

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through analogously suggest to No-Man the diachronic stages of national history, reaching back to primordial time. He experiences this indigenous group as if he had returned to the ‘Palaeolithic Age’: ‘All about me everyone was busy at his own work in a harmonious concert of duties that were those of a life moving to a primordial rhythm’ (LS 156). This realisation leads to a further observation about the disturbing temporal/historical effect caused by the journey: [T]he amazing truth suddenly came to me: since the afternoon of Corpus Christi in Santiago de los Aguinaldos, I had been living in the early Middle Ages. An object, a garment, a drug, belonged to another calendar. But the rhythm of life, the methods of navigation, the oil lamp, the cooking-pots, the prolongation of the hours, the transcendental function of Horse and Dog, the manner of worshipping the Saints, all were medieval. (LS 160)

As No-Man’s trip has progressed, time, it appears has turned backwards so that he feels as if he were ‘travelling in time, as others travel in space’ from the ‘Middle Ages’ to the ‘Palaeolithic Age’ (LS 161). He has travelled, then, from the present revolution back through the remains of past civil wars to a medievallike, pre-mercantile economy, and then to the primordial rhythm of indigenous villages: each stage shaping the living tableau of the South American present. Once the group leave the village and encounter the habitat of the huntergatherer Amerindian tribe living ‘at the very beginning of the night of ages’, the reversal of historical time stops (LS 164). Carpentier’s intricate rendering of the (historical) rhythms of South America’s socioeconomic communities is syncopated by natural tempos and silence. The relationship to natural time established by the members of a community is a determining factor in creating the tempo of the nation: [Rosario] spoke of days that were very long and days that were very short, as though they were in different tempos – tempos of a telluric symphony that had its andantes and adagios, as well as its prestos. The astonishing thing was that, now that time was of no concern to me, I noticed in myself different values of the intervals. (LS 163)

The ‘telluric symphony’ is shaped by tellus tempuris and in turn it shapes American reality depending on the connection of the community to it, one which stands in direct contrast to Western urban realities where natural time is suppressed. When they reach the city founded by the Adelantado, an allegorical second colonisation steeped in a desire to regulate and control others, historical time moves forward from night to the sixteenth century. Then when No-Man is ‘rescued’ from this community by helicopter (funded by a US newspaper at Ruth’s request) and taken to the US, the narrative shifts abruptly from the kairological blending of historical rhythms, silence and the ‘telluric symphony’ into the utilitarian, capitalist temporality of the US city: As I had acquired the habit of walking in time to my breathing I was amazed to see how the people around me came, went, passed one another on the wide pavement, in a rhythm that had nothing to do with their organic wills. If they walked at one pace rather than another, it was because their walking was linked to the idea of getting to the corner in time to see the green light go on to tell them they could cross the avenue. (LS 224)

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This mechanically motivated rhythm of the US city (Western modernity) is the result of the repression of nature, and the capitalist values (consumerist morals) of modern slavery abstractly personified as the ‘Book-keeper’. Importantly, this city is also a product of the same corrupt colonial process of enforced slavery to the ‘Galley Master’ being re-enacted in Santa Mónica. In this juxtaposition, inorganic temporal rhythms measured by clocks and machines symbolise the reality of modern capitalism. The US city’s mechanical dance of simulacra gives no space to non-capitalist values and perfectly expresses, in Bataillean terms, the horror of project (GBTR 94–97, 42). The natural organic temporal rhythm Carpentier eloquently presents as the ‘Code of the Rains’ offers an alternative expression of the radical political and Marxist rejection of consumerist society inherent to surrealism. As discussed, Western European official surrealist rejections of capitalist social values occurred within a different framework to that of certain writers in Hispanic America who were forwarding an ethnographic Marxism. In addition, the official surrealist negation of this value system often remained attached to the opportunities the city offered, although female surrealists often bucked this trend.55 Rather than offering a nostalgic recovery of indigenous myth, Carpentier’s symbolic representation of the modern American nation is shaped by the traces of the past in the present: in the bloody revolution in the capital, in the ghost towns left by the last civil war and in the colonial/neocolonial moral and religious impositions on postcolonial communities. These rhythms and temporalities are juxtaposed with the story of the tempus of the ‘telluric symphony’ in moments indicative of ekstasis. In such moments something other is experienced, the silence and tempo of tellus tempuris, ekstaƟcally releasing the tensions of Mammon-driven time, leading to the cathartic affects of natural kairological time. The shift from a chronological to a kairological tempo echoes the treatment of time which Joseph Frank attributes to nonnaturalism: ‘time is the very condition of that flux and change from which, as we have seen, man wishes to escape when he is in a relation of disequilibrium with the cosmos; hence nonnaturalistic styles shun the dimension of depth and prefer the plane.’56 It is the shift also detailed by Eliade as the fracturing of profane time by the sacred ‘escape from time’ (vestigially present in modern literature; MESP 205) and present in ecstasy and ekstasis. One way of reading the didactic element of the novel is made available by the shift to an allegorical mode, so that the symbolic myths of the land of the Lotus-eaters and El Dorado are shown as false isles of Paradise, shaped by corrupting values; and the inorganic temporality of modern cities, their moneydriven values and morals are shown to negate ekstasis. Rather then, it appears that the sacred experience of reality, nature and time is the true treasure of the mythic isles of Paradise in The Lost Steps. * Socrates’ description of divine madness and the mythic themes used here illustrate a form of symbolic thinking prevalent in sacred discourses across the globe, which are also part of psychoanalytic thought. It is something the founders of surrealism (as medical staff in World War I) came face to face with in the

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deformation of communication and cognition of patients on trauma wards, and in the psychoanalytic methods of recovery that catalysed the surrealist quest. ‘Symbolic thinking’, Eliade states, ‘is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy any other means of knowledge.’57 Similarly, the border of what is unknown or excised concerns Bataille, and much of his thought is directed towards the means of gaining the extreme limit of knowledge through the concepts of ‘non-knowledge’, ‘communication’ and sacred ‘ecstasy’ (GBIE 53). International surrealist writers who express an alternative surrealist ekstasis present the critic with the ‘the inability of man to express what is ganz andere; language is obliged to try to suggest whatever surpasses natural experience in terms that are borrowed from that experience’ (MEMDM 124). Carpentier’s estado límite shares this ground with the Collège and Bataille’s notion of ecstasy, for both symbolise a sacred ontological interaction with the phenomenological world, where the object or ‘other’ is not the inanimate, exotic tool of the subject but coextensive to self. In moments of estado límite or narrative ekstasis which No-Man experiences, the material world offers the platform for the sacred, for fé, thereby reflecting Bataille’s concern with ‘aspects of ordinary life’, as ‘a basis of un-knowing’.58 Sacred rituals and myth, as discussed, utilise symbols to produce nonsymbolic social effects such as bonding, an act which Eliade terms ‘symbolic analogy’ (MEPS 10). The latent possibilities of language and the sacred are set in motion by ‘symbolic analogy’. Lévi-Strauss describes the form of communication that functions outside rationalist categories as ‘symbolic efficacy’: a ritual myth that provides ‘a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed’.59 As related, BorchJacobsen identifies the curative effect of such rituals alongside those of trance and early psychoanalytic experiments with hypnosis. The surrealists, interested in altered states of consciousness as well-springs of creativity, utilised selfhypnosis or trance states in their early experiments. Dissident and alternative surrealism’s interest in states akin to, respectively, ecstasy or ekstasis develops this interest, and in doing so gestures towards humanity’s older, sacred views of reality. The relation between the symbol and its non-symbolic referent established in the ritual has the effect of releasing tension, reshaping ontology and rebonding the group, as Caillois describes in his talk for the Collège, ‘Festival’. The non-symbolic (social) effect of the sacred symbolic ritual is not always immediately clear; it is often elusive and able to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Surrealism’s iconoclastic and humorous use of sacred symbols as a form of countercultural resistance intentionally courts the confusion, not re-fusion, of meaning and therefore bypasses the social effect of the sacred symbol. In this sense official surrealism aims for what Eliade would treat as a concretised symbol whereby, as discussed, a sacred ‘coherent’ symbol which has a meaningful participation in ‘symbolic analogy’ may corrode into ‘concrete’ ‘artificiality’ (MEPS 10, 440–54). The dissident surrealists of the Collège aimed to fulfil surrealism’s original rigour and social applicability and in so doing provided

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a theorisation of the sacred symbol and a rationale for surrealism’s potential to effect social change. Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso similarly highlights the artificiality of official surrealism’s illumination when compared to the living sacred.60 Bataille’s theory of sacred ecstasy underscores that communication with the ‘other’ is externally accessed, a detail contrasting with official surrealism’s internal excavation of the individual unconscious in which the ‘self’ presents an extension of the ‘I’ situated at the heart of neo-imperialism, despite intentions to the contrary. Dissident surrealism, on the point of sacred ecstasy, and by extension alternative surrealist ekstasis, focuses on the sacred-social ‘other’, embracing the ‘not-I’ of non-human spiritual subjectivity, and ‘by spiritual I merely mean: beyond the individual’ (GBAM 55). Dissident surrealism, as an extension of official surrealism, is divergent but not unrelated, for the pursuit to alter attitudes towards rationalist reality remains the same: a fact substantiated by Bataille’s post-war support of surrealism. It is the methodology and intent of this pursuit that differs, separated here along the lines of cognitive and ecstatic affective methods of altering attitudes.61 Ecstasy, for Bataille, is reached ‘by a contestation of knowledge’ where selfloss leaves ‘a new knowledge’, thereby echoing Socrates’ proclamation in the Phaedrus that ‘the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god’: both indicate the non-symbolic gift arising from ritual symbolic ekstasis (GBIE 12, 53; Ph 244a). The Collège’s study of the forces of attraction and repulsion shaping the sacred in society (its repressed centre and excised periphery) demonstrate how groups are formed by a set of common values: values which then shape national identity and can be reshaped through interaction with the values of other national/group identities. Colonialism is the most profound example of this dynamic and it bequeaths a lengthy process of reestablishing community identity, often tied to economic poverty and continued neocolonial exploitation. As George Irish observed in Carpentier’s novel, the ‘difficulty of finding one’s true identity is central to the expression of a regional consciousness in the Caribbean.’62 Sacred ekstasis is central to the presentation of identity reconstruction in The Lost Steps, as it irrupts into No-Man’s profane reality which has been shaped by a US mechanised life that left him deadened and disconnected. Having been exposed to Western surrealism, Carpentier is aware of the liberation and the pitfalls it offers to the American artist. At Los Altos, No-Man expresses his fear that native artists of each creed will soon be pointlessly discussing ‘the need to slap the face of corpses or of taking a shot at the first passer-by’ or become involved in the ‘cult of Dionysus’, a ‘God of ecstasy and fear’ (LS 66). These are two direct criticisms of surrealism: the first attacks Breton’s famous statements about surrealist art; the second potentially aims its arrow towards Bataille’s descriptions of Dionysian ecstasy.63 By contrasting the impact of European culture in North and South America, No-Man articulates a resistance to the adoption of European surrealism by American writers; asking instead that the Los Altos artists learn ‘the history of their country . . . its colonial literature, its folk traditions’ much as Carpentier had (LS 65). Carpentier’s narrator-protagonist in this way identifies a lack of moral and political analysis

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in both Breton’s official and Bataille’s dissident surrealism and therefore interpolates ethnographic Marxism into the novel. Even Bataille’s dissident surrealism, which Carpentier engages with on many levels, comes under attack. Carpentier’s dual rejection is evident in the way in which he revises surrealism in The Lost Steps, and it is here that the mundonovismo elements of this vision become clear. Although official surrealism’s use of ‘primitive’ and ancient sacred symbols is discussed positively by Rabinovitch and Nadia Choucha,64 the ‘primitive’ appears as decontextualised fragment rather than a coherent living sacred, a reading Tythacott perceived when she stated that surrealism did not see beyond ‘some of the conventional stereotypes of the primitive’.65 As a member of the radical, anti-neocolonial Cuban vanguardista, partly educated in Paris, and as a dissident surrealist in the 1930s, Carpentier stands in a unique position to critique the Old World, both its rationalism and its exoticisation of New World realities: a position from which he can refashion the New World national imaginary. The vogue for primitivism within the European avant-garde raised concerns about its appropriation of New World objects, which, for Arjun Appadurai, stemmed from the ‘diversion of commodities from their original nexus . . . [by] the domain of fashion, domestic display, and collecting in the modern West’.66 Indeed No-Man indicates this when he travels from, and for, the Curator’s collection of instruments in the US towards the living use of these instruments. The Western avant-garde exoticisation of the primitive ganz andere is illustrated when No-Man returns to the US city: I paused before a picture gallery where dead idols were on exhibition, devoid of all meaning for lack of worshippers, in whose enigmatic or terrible faces many contemporary painters were seeking the secret of a lost eloquence with the same desire for instinctive energies which made many of the composers of my generation strive for the elemental power of primitive rhythms in the abuse of percussion instruments. For more than twenty years a weary culture had been seeking rejuvenation and new powers in the cult of the irrational. But now I found ridiculous the attempt to use masks of Bandiagara, African ibeyes, fetishes studded with nails, without knowing their meaning. (LS 228)

The symbolic meaning of the mask comes from its use in ritual and here, as in surrealist art, the symbol which was intended to resonate within the artwork has for No-Man lost its power without its context. Eliade identifies this symbolic role hence: ‘the mask is an instrument of ecstasy. He who wears it is no longer himself, since he is projected beyond his personal temporal identity.’67 No-Man notes that modern art strips the ritual symbol of its sacred meaning: ‘By labelling such [irrational] things “barbarous” the labellers were putting themselves in the thinking, the Cartesian, position, the very opposite of the aim they were pursuing’ (LS 228). Indeed his French avant-garde mistress considers No-Man barbarous and ‘would attribute the ‘animality’ of such reactions to [his] early years in a Latin American atmosphere’ (LS 64). This ‘barbarous’ label increases the distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’ and through his narrator Carpentier identifies this as the flaw of Western European avant-garde treatment of the ‘primitive’. As Rogers points out in Carpentier’s novel, ‘Western civilization becomes emblematic of . . . the destructive forces of humanity.’68 Here, this

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is not simply a statement about physical violence but cultural and ideological othering. The ‘primitive’ is unknowable to the modern human Bataille accedes (GBAM 72). As No-Man realises, one cannot possess by emulation, ‘primitive’ reality. Nonetheless one can be transformed through sacred rituals and symbols in moments of ecstasy and ekstasis. It is the community of ‘worshippers’ that becomes central to Carpentier’s textual presentation of estado límite, as behind the symbolic mask of the indigenous ‘other’ stands sacred reality that can in a moment of communication transform the subject’s non-symbolic relationship with society. It is in representing a historical and temporal vision of America that Carpentier becomes one of the ‘third world’ intellectuals who ‘begin the writing of a genuinely social critique of colonialism’.69 Carpentier’s detailed criticism of surrealism is not a complete rejection, however. He wrote: ‘I want to stress that I don’t want to dismiss the surrealist movement. I believe it is a matter of positive interest and has had a role of undeniable importance. But I prefer living matter, the scream, the pure creation given to us by our natural world.’70 His work on lo real maravilloso as ‘an alteration of reality’ stands alongside the aims of official surrealism. Although No-Man may aver Bataille’s erotic or sacrificial Dionysian routes to non-knowledge, the textual expressions of narrative ekstasis as estado límite, positive representations of fé and a veneration of nature imply congruence with Bataille’s consideration of sacred ecstasy as elaborated in and around the work of the Collège. Official surrealism had forwarded the validity of ‘primitive’ reality, and from this basis the Collège theorised and Carpentier elucidated the social import of symbolic analogy and the sacred. For Carpentier this began with collapsing separations between the definitions of civilisation and barbarity. His presentation of indigenous reality is still a form of ethnographical surrealism, as Carpentier speaks of, not for, ‘fourth world’ realities. Viewed negatively, this can be read as an exoticism and cultural neocolonialism enforced by the West so that ‘Latin American writers found themselves in the surprising position of trolling their own countries for native forms of expression in order to claim the specificity of the Americas’.71 For example, Carpentier’s strategy has itself been criticised for exoticising American realities for Western consumption by terming American reality marvellous.72 Conversely, with Nicholson, his relation to surrealism and his role in later Hispanic American fiction can be constructively interpreted. Ethnographic surrealism can also be read positively for its methods of cultural critique, as James Clifford does in relation to the Collège, noting their connection to nascent anti-colonial discourses, the work of the Tel Quel group and Mass Observation.73 Carpentier’s own version of surrealist ethnography infused with ethnographic Marxism indicates a ‘faith’-based reality that speaks of more than naƟvismo. Like the ontological implications of sacred ecstasy considered by the Collège, his estado límite elaborated a form of (ex)dissident surrealist thought that casts new light upon society and upon ancient thought. This estado will be considered in the following section alongside No-Man’s own experience of ritual symbols and ekstasis in order to decode Carpentier’s analysis of the non-symbolic social transformations they imply.

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ESTADO LÍMITE: THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF EKSTASIS This game of the ‘discursive real’ and its disappearance exists in fact. Bataille, ‘Post-Scriptum’ (1953)74

For Bataille, the experience of non-knowledge and being beyond-the-self can occur through a number of routes, one of which is death or the funereal, which much criticism on Bataille interprets as a literal violence or bloody sacrifice (GBIE xxxiii).75 As discussed in Chapter 1 Bataille lists death and ecstasy separately as forms of expenditure. However, they also entwine: ‘Death alone – or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time – introduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy’ (GBLE 26). The break in identity required to achieve ecstasy is created here by death or symbolic ‘death’ that in its metaphysical sense causes a ‘rebirth’: Christian mysticism is based on ‘death to the self’. Oriental mysticism has the same basis. ‘In India,’ wrote Mircea Eliade, ‘metaphysical knowledge expresses itself in terms of a break and of death . . . [and] this knowledge implies . . . a mystical succession . . . The yogee tries to detach himself from the profane condition . . . he dreams of ‘dying to this life’. Indeed, we see a death followed by a rebirth, another way of being – the way of being which is deliverance.’ (GBLE 26n8)

Here, Bataille reflects Eliade’s understanding of the cycle of sacred-symbolic ‘dying to this life’ leading to ‘rebirth’, which is at the core of the ‘eternal return’ (cf. MESP 80–85, 110). The plane between the sacred and profane is ruptured, bringing ecstasy and metaphysical knowledge, so that ‘[d]eath is the condition of renewal’, Bataille argues (GBLE 29). Bataille clarifies in Inner Experience that in communication or ‘[e]cstasy . . . the subject, the object are dissolved’, in the ‘intimate order’ and renewal (GBIE 59).76 The cycle of death and rebirth noted by critics in relation to Bataille’s theories77 is vitally present in the Collège discussions of infraction and regulation and the cycle of primordial chaos and order in which ‘loss’ transforms into a communal ‘accord’ and alters being (GB‘ARII’ 121; GB‘SA’ 22; RC‘F’ 282). In The Lost Steps a specific political and social presentation of death accompanies the consideration of national identity. González Echevarría has observed that the idea of history expressed in Carpentier’s novels is influenced by Oswald Spengler’s theory on the decay of Western civilisation.78 The image of Western decay and deathliness is visible in No-Man’s feelings of being empty as a result of his married life, work and play in the US skyscraper city (LS 21, 27). However, deathliness does not only describe the ‘first world’ and, as is often the case, Carpentier replays-with-difference this thematic in both the US and South American parts of the continent. The difference rests in how death is presented in each location and how it changes across this geographical, social and political divide. For example, in a parallel scene to No-Man’s experience of an emotional death-in-life in the US, Rosario enters the narrative suffering from a

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physical death-in-life resulting from the mountain altitude (LS 72). In this example it is apparent that in the US, deathly forces result from mechanised life and work patterns, and in South America death is allied to nature. Music additionally becomes a symbol for death in the ‘first world’, in contrast to the music of nature in the ‘telluric symphony’ of the interior. It arises in the meaningless publicity score No-Man writes in the US and more clearly in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Hearing this symphony causes a traumatic reaction in No-Man, sending him running out of the US concert hall, ‘crash[ing] head-on into an open umbrella’ belonging to the Curator (LS 16). As a result of this meeting the Curator charges him with the quest for the Amerindian instruments, one of which is traditionally used in ‘funeral rites’ (LS 22). Later, in a South American inn, the Ninth is heard again and No-Man relates the trauma of finding a Nazi death camp, ‘The Mansion of Shudders’, and of the unrepentant Nazi officers singing the Ninth in their cells at night (LS 85–87). This music becomes a symbol of No-Man’s memory of Western atrocities in World War II, and of his view that Western ‘people who knew so many noble things’ created ‘the most cold-blooded barbarism of history’ far outstripping the bloody acts of the guerrillero mass murderer, Pancho Villa, which they label as ‘savagery’ (LS 86–87). Carpentier’s comparison between the Western holocaust and South American guerrillero murderer serves to collapse the logic of the categories of culture and barbarity established by Western ‘civilisation’, thereby exposing its moral hypocrisy and flawed values. The reader is repeatedly made aware that the past is fundamental to the creation of present values and attitudes. Violence is shown to be endemic in the refashioning of national ontology across the world. If sacred realities, myth and literature offer to society a release from the reality principle, history tells that beyond the pleasure principle exists a desire to repeat violence: a death drive. A notion not only related to the West but found in the prisoners of the Amerindian hunter-gatherers and in the waves of civil war. Following the process of Bataille’s theory of heterology would indicate that each country, like each group and each individual, asserts its identity by excising its internal ‘others’. Carpentier’s mapping of the inter-regional moments of violence points towards larger cycles of historical violence, a connection made clear during the revolution in the South American capital: ‘I had more than once stepped on the bodies of men who had died in defence of convictions no worse than those upheld here’ (LS 48, cf. 46–59). These complex representations of socially sanctioned murder shaping present attitudes implicitly link the Holocaust and civil unrest in America to the deathly legacy of European colonialism and the Adelantado’s city. In these novelistic representations of history one can see that Carpentier is, as Bell notes, a ‘historian for the larger, anthropological meaning of art within the given culture’.79 Carpentier is also a historian searching for the meaning of death and renewal in society. In The Lost Steps, myths and rituals begin to shed their symbolic veil to reveal their social role in creating identity and in countering the ‘repetition compulsion’ of society’s death drive through such changes.80 The most powerful affective experiences of symbolic rites surrounding death occur in the South American context. On the journey from the capital to the jungle No-Man begins

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to encounter meaningful social rituals related to death that make the profane, capitalist values of the US city appear even more starkly deficient. This first arises when the group witness the joyous Corpus Christi ritual in the ‘ghost city’ ravaged by civil war, plague and death (LS 105–07). The second social and symbolic engagement with death occurs in Rosario’s story: not only does NoMan meet her when she is close to death but her journey is undertaken in order to transport a sacred object to her dying father. The mourning and funeral rites carried out after her father’s death stand in direct contrast to those of Western consumer culture: The men of the cities where I had lived all my life were unaware of the meaning of these words, for they had forgotten the language of those able to talk to the dead . . . I recalled at the same time, what a sordid, petty thing death had become for the men of my Shore . . . it was nothing but a business. (LS 118–19)

Here No-Man highlights the sacred communal rituals which break the boundary between the sacred and the profane: rituals obscured by the pecuniary interests of capitalist modernity. Death here, parenthetically, demonstrates the link between surrealism’s anti-capitalist attitudes and ‘third world’ anti-colonial or anti-neocolonial protests: serving to highlight ‘elements absent in the portrayal of modernity, its political requirements and duties’ attended to by Carpentier’s ethnographic Marxism.81 Death is perceived as a sacred ganz andere force in many sacred realities, such as the medieval morality play, where Death is a powerful, personified force, as it is for many indigenous realities.82 It is witnessed in this sense by No-Man in the jungle, when the shaman of a hunter-gatherer tribe performs a death rite over the body of a hunter (LS 166). This Amerindian ritual is the third example of symbolic death rites but it, uniquely, has a protective function. Carpentier based his portrayal of this scene upon the realities of the ‘Shirishanas from the Alto Caura’ of whom, ‘[a]n explorer made a recording – the record forms part of the archives of Venezuelan folklore – of the dirge of the shaman’ (LS 252n).83 James Barker made first contact with the Shirishanas (also called Yanomami) in 1950 making this contemporaneous with the writing of the novel.84 For the Shirishanas, death is perceived as a powerful force which the Hekuri (shaman) wards off from the group using ritual. Carpentier details that the shaman began to shake a gourd full of pebbles – the only instrument these people know – trying to drive off the emissaries of Death. There was a ritual silence, setting the stage for the incantation . . . [and] there arose the Word . . . Sounds like guttural portamenti were heard, ending in howls; syllables repeated over and over, coming to create a kind of rhythm; there were trills suddenly interrupted by four notes that were the embryo of a melody . . . This was something far beyond language, and yet still far from song . . . In the mouth of the shaman, the spell-working orifice, the Threne – for that was what this was – gasped and died away convulsively, blinding me with the realization that I had just witnessed the Birth of Music. (LS 166–67)

When the shaman’s protective incantation is interpreted through the symbolic routes to divine madness in the Phaedrus, it offers an example of what Socrates

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describes as Apollo’s ekstasis, under which the ‘priestesses’ perform rites to protect the community (Ph 244b). Such shamanic or priestess-led rituals are intended to protect the living from the forces of death, to bring back the mourner from the extreme limit of the known, or attempt to return the dead to the living. During the incantation the shaman enters a state of ekstasis or trance which may similarly affect the group. In direct contrast to the symbolism of Beethoven’s Ninth which evokes No-Man’s memories of the Holocaust, the shaman’s ritual death chant provides the catalyst for a series of moments of ekstasis. Bataille describes a similar ‘instant of transport’ in response to liturgical song paralleling No-Man’s experience: ‘The sacred nature of the incantation only made firmer a feeling of strength, made one cry out even more to the sky and to the point of rupture the presence of a being exultant in its certitude as though assured of infinite chance’ (GBIE 76). By terming the protective incantation a Threne (dirge, lament), the shaman’s rite is given a double social function (both lament and protection), highlighting the connection between this Amerindian rite and its inheritance in Rosario’s father’s funeral rites as, ‘primarily, a kind of desperate, defiant, almost magic protest at the presence of Death in the house’ (LS 118). Through the shaman’s ekstasis the sacred irrupts into the profane, turning the right to left sacred: a shift Bataille described in relation to the ritual process following Hertz (GB‘ARI’ and GB‘ARII’). A transition Caillois too articulates, noting that the priest ‘possesses the power and knows the means of turning the malign power of infection toward good, of transforming a threat of death into an assurance of life’ (RCMS 45). The shaman’s ekstasis carries this transformative function in the novel, altering, as will be explored, No-Man’s interaction with society and self.85 The social, theoretical and literary applications of this transition explicate Freud’s ascription of ecstasy as a method of release from anxiety caused by the reality principle in ‘the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer’.86 The tribes’ fear is abated (tension released) by the symbolic act of incantation which banishes death (bringing pleasure) and rebinds the group (renewal). The release in going beyond-the-self and experience of something ‘other’ is integral to Socrates’ descriptions of the ‘fine work’ accomplished by the priestesses experiencing the divine madness of Apollo and the ‘good fortune’ it brings, as it is to the Collège’s representation of sacred ecstasy and the novelistic examples of ekstasis or divin fou (Ph 244b, 245c). In this way the Threne reflects the Bataillean ‘ecstasy before the object’ which precedes ‘ecstasy in night’: as No-Man stands before the object (thing, person, place or event that is other, not self, unknown), he experiences the rite as a hierophany (GBIE 124). He recognises in the shaman’s phonic rhythm the juncture between incantation and song. This interpretation is filtered through his knowledge of Western musical forms, and as such is not the description of a ‘fourth world’ citizen, but is rather ethnographic and that of a neophyte: What I had seen confirmed, to be sure, was the thesis of those who argue that music had a magic origin . . . I had seen the word travel the road of song without reaching it; I had seen how the repetition of a single syllable gave rise to a certain rhythm; I had seen how the

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alternation of the real voice and the feigned voice forces the witch-doctor to employ two pitches, how a musical theme could originate in an extra-musical practice. (LS 180)

No-Man’s ability to recognise and appreciate the meaning of the primary sacred experience does not allow him to become one with Amerindian realities, only to interpret them into another lexis to tell of the rite that turns the left to the right sacred. Although the tribe and the travellers do not share a common language, and even though religious references may not be as transferable, the sacred symbol provides a global communicative medium. After witnessing the shaman’s ekstasis, No-Man states that for the first time: I could see beyond the dirge with which Aeschylus revived the Persian Emperor; beyond the rune with which the sons of Autolycus stanched the dark blood that flowed from Ulysses’ wounds; beyond the song designed to protect the Pharaoh Unas against serpents’ stings in his journey to the other world. (LS 179–80)

As a result of the incantation, No-Man is able to realise the sacred-social realities that underlie ritual or mythic symbols. In this novelistic ekstasis one sees an elaboration of the Bataillean view of ecstasy as ‘death’ and ‘new knowledge’, and Collègean ‘metamorphosis of being’ and ‘rebirth’. The ritual music which Carpentier presents as living myth reworks official surrealist presentations of ‘primitive’ ritual masks, objects, beliefs and music. This coherent understanding of the sacred aspect of music realises Bataille’s call for ‘living myth . . . which the dusty remains of intellect know only as dead and consider to be a touching error of ignorance, [but which] figures fate and becomes being’ (GB‘SA’ 22). Through the treatment of death in the novel Carpentier’s representation of modern American sacrality (in all its strata) effectively accepts and rejects, replaces and refashions the weight of Western European thought and surrealism. For Carpentier here, like Bataille, following Durkheim, the sacred function arises in the group’s ‘set of objects, places, beliefs, persons, and practices that have a sacred character’ which are external to the individual and exist in the social realm (GB‘ARI’ 106). Materiality is vital, but it is only a starting point if one is to experience ecstasy and ‘emerge through project from the realm of project’ (GBIE 46). The community must also validate this materiality, for ‘[e]cstasy itself is empty when envisaged as a private exercise, only maƩering for a single individual’ (GBIE 92, original emphasis). As Hegarty outlines, this specification allows Bataille to remove the sacred order from forms of totemic or iconographic religious worship of things or rules, to place it within the ephemeral, subtle and spiritual realm of the pantheistic and multifaceted nature of the object.87 Similarly critics also identify Carpentier’s engagement with the sacred through the material object, for example, Steve Wakefield relays Julio Ortega’s description of Carpentier’s use of ‘objects in the Platonic sense of representing transcendental values’.88 If one concedes that Bataille and Carpentier’s objects relay coherent sacred symbols, the connections between ancient realities and alternative surrealism become clearer. Carpentier’s representation of the sacred, then, not only extends official surrealist validations of the illogical and aesthetic creativity but does so in a way that gestures towards ‘primitive’

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and ancient ways of perceiving the object and reality. The changes No-Man experiences during and after such rituals, as will be detailed further, bring him closer to the primary sacred – which for the Shirishana means ‘[t]he real (visible and tangible) and the spiritual (abstract and ideological) are intricately woven into one colourful fabric’.89 He does not mimic or claim to reproduce this reality though, only to represent his reaction to its connection to ritual and objects as ‘symbolic analogies’ denoting sacred reality. * In The Lost Steps, No-Man’s figurative death in the US is followed by this Amerindian death rite depicting the sacred realities of the tribe. After this point, in ways that indicate its causal relation, a series of further non-symbolic affective renewals or rebirths occur. In the Collège and Bataille’s view, ecstasy derives from an extreme affective experience of stricture or anguish (basanos). In describing the role of death in society’s sacred rituals, the Collège’s theory attends to the affective component of identity transformation in the primary sacred and its function in the secondary experience of the sacred; and they are not always mutually compatible, as Eliade’s discussion on concretised and coherent symbols details. Just as values shape social identity, affects (as intrinsically related to values) are integral to the shaping and reshaping of identity, as noted by Stein.90 The shaman’s estado límite or ekstasis, witnessed during the protective incantation, symbolically banishes death’s forces from the group and therein renews its ontology, as stated. However, its non-symbolic social response is quite illuminating, for No-Man is altered too, and he begins slowly, for the first time, to emerge from the pall of death-in-life he carries with him from his US life. This awakening occurs in the Adelantado’s city through two further experiences of ekstasis. Particular critics have viewed No-Man’s reiteration of the vision of America created within European travel journals as separating him from indigenous reality, including the shaman’s ekstasis, which he can only view as an outsider or ethnographer. This criticism is offset somewhat following the events of the shaman’s ekstasis, after which time No-Man becomes increasingly open to a common component in sacred realities, communication with nature. This sacred connection with nature is central to alternative forms of international surrealism and it can be allied with the symbolic thinking present in Socrates’ description of ancient Greek Dionysian ekstasis. Dionysus’ traditional affiliation as the god of wine, pleasure and festivity has led to a narrow understanding of this symbolic figure as a licentious god of orgy and excess, an affiliation that the majority of Bataille’s routes to non-knowledge readily adopt and reflect and to which Carpentier no doubt is referring in the comment at Los Altos on bloody Dionysian ecstasy above. However, it is possible to propose an alternative to this common conception, one based on an understanding of Dionysus’ pathway to ekstasis as afforded by a connection with the divine through nature, animals, purification and non-lascivious rites: in the divine madness of ‘prayers to the gods and in worship, discovering mystic rites and purifications that bring the man it touches (“a person who is mad”) through to safety for this and all time to come’ (Ph 244e). Such an argument is substantiated

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through ancient descriptions of Dionysus as ‘being the promoter of civilization, a law-giver, and a lover of peace’ and ‘protector of trees in general, which is alluded to in various epithets and surnames given him by the poets of antiquity’.91 Dionysus’ divine madness, or ekstasis, can therefore be allied to a communication with nature. These images of Dionysus’ mystical rites offer a significant, if often elided feature of Dionysian madness. This presentation is quite unlike the god drunk on the products of nature that Bataille pictures, even in moments in which he concedes that ‘[b]eyond this drunken figure, it is true, we can discern an archaic agricultural divinity’.92 Rather, it is a presentation of Dionysus more in line with Caillois’s view which, Frank notes, differs from Bataille’s: ‘Caillois was closer, I think, to Ernst Bloch, who believed that the authentic Dionysus was hostile neither to the Enlightenment nor reason: “his conflict is only with the forces of permanence, being, established order and exclusion”’ (RCES 155).93 The ekstasis offered by the tree god Dionysus can be seen when No-Man’s openness to nature leads to a mystical connection: And when from seeing I turned to looking, strange lights sprang up and everything took on meaning. Thus I suddenly discovered that a Dance of the Trees exists . . . No human choreography can equal the eurhythmy of a branch outlined against the sky. I asked myself whether the higher forms of the aesthetic emotion do not consist merely in a supreme understanding of creation. (LS 189–90)

Such sacred connections with nature are central to alternative forms of surrealism, and to Carpentier’s ethnographic Marxism. It is in this light that one can interpret Fredric Jameson’s comment that Carpentier’s work is an authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself – not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived.94

This ‘poetic transfiguration’ of material reality coupled with moments of affective estado límite or ekstasis reveals an alternative surrealist questioning of empirical logic, and an interpretation of music and nature within sacred rather than ‘primitive’ realities. Although potentially presenting lo real maravilloso’s essentialism, and framed from the view of an outsider, the Dance of the Trees reveals, rather, a universal access to sacrality through nature. Expressing, like Eliade, that, ‘in the dialectic of the sacred a part (a tree, a plant) has the value of the whole (the cosmos, life) a profane thing becomes a hierophany’ (MEPS 324), thereby revealing the ‘more profound implication’ of lo real maravilloso observed by Handley, in which ‘that ethical experience between diverse human subjects and the natural world should remain intersubjecƟve’ and the boundaries of the ‘I’ ‘decentred’.95 This sacred connection with something ‘other’ than the self, fictionalised by Carpentier, and alluded to in ancient Greek mythic symbolism, is a reality that Bataille discusses: Within the felicity of inner movements, the subject alone is modified: this felicity, in this sense, has no object. The movements flow out into an external existence: there they lose

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themselves, they ‘communicate’, it would appear, with the outside, without the latter taking a determined shape and being perceived as such. (GBIE 117)

Sacred ecstasy, ekstasis, self-loss or a going beyond-the-self, enact an affectled communication with the outside world or ‘otherness’, for which nature is a prime exemplar: [E]ven while I was trying sometimes to find once again the bewildering path of ecstasy, sometimes to be done with it, to go resolutely to bed, to sleep. Suddenly, I stood up and I was completely taken. As I had earlier become a tree, but the tree was still myself – and what I became differed no less than one of the ‘objects’ which I had just possessed. (GBIE 127)

A key to reading alternative surrealist practices is offered by just such a presentation of nature as a sacred ganz andere (both fearsome and homoeopathic) surrealist force. First the shaman’s music releases fear as death is lamented and warded off. Then the Dance of the Trees awakens No-Man to an ekstaƟc communication with nature. The same night a further ekstasis occurs – a Bataillean ‘ecstasy in night’ (GBIE 124): I awoke with a strange feeling that something great had taken place in my mind: something like the ripening and coalescing of chaotic, scattered elements, senseless when dispersed, but suddenly, when ordered, assuming clear meaning. A work had been constructed in my spirit . . . What was happening to me now, in the darkness, the water dripping all around me, was similar to that other delirious [opium induced] elaboration; but this time the wellbeing was accompanied by awareness; the ideas themselves were seeking an order . . . all I had to do was wait for the dawn, which would bring the light I needed to make the first sketches of the Threnody, the title stamped on my imagination during sleep. (LS 190–91)

Waking from sleep, No-Man’s description of a ‘work . . . constructed in my spirit’ directly articulates lo real maravilloso’s ‘exaltation of the spirit’ leading to ‘estado límite’.96 No-Man is resuscitated from the symbolic death-in-life he endured in the US by ritual and nature, which leads to the Threnody: communicating the sacred semantics of the song of lament. Consequently, No-Man experiences the rejuvenation of his musical creativity. Once again this is an ekstasis given by the Muses, not that of Clio’s telling of history but rather Polyhymnia’s sacred song. No-Man’s Threnody expresses that ‘the subject alone is modified’ following his purification in the trials by nature and initiation during the shaman’s ekstaƟc incantation after which he is able to go beyond-the-self (GBIE 117). Psychoanalytically, this affective experience or recognition of the ‘other’ as the ‘self’ serves to spur and support ego development, as detailed in social psychology and as a social enactment of Lacan’s mirror stage. The name No-Man decides to give to the composition references the shaman’s ritual Threne and is read against the European Romantic writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley: I thought of working on the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley, the first act of which, like the third of Faust, Part II, contains a marvellous cantata theme. The liberation of the

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chained prisoner, which I mentally associated with my flight from there, conveyed a sense of resurrection, an emergence from darkness, most appropriate to the original conception of the threnody, which was a magic song intended to bring a dead person back to life. (LS 195)

No-Man’s new knowledge, gained during the Threne, leads him to see the sacred-social reality behind the mythic lament. Although No-Man interprets his experience through Western culture, which opens the text to criticism, his understanding of the living ritual meaning of song serves dialogically to show this European Romantic work in a new light, demonstrating also the interconnectivity of ritual experiences. This allows No-Man to distinguish what Eliade would term ‘camouflaged’ symbolism contained within Western genres and works: ‘At the memory of an authentic threnody, the idea of the Threnody revived in me, with its statement of the cell-word’ (LS 194). No-Man is then able to envisage a musical work which bridges the gap between the meaning of music in sacred-social ritual and its presentation in the ‘first world’, thereby merging Western and native cultures, in order to communicate the ganz andere. The first two examples of novelistic ekstasis – those symbolised by Clio and Apollo – exemplify community ekstasis through dramatisation, and speak of historical cycles of violence and death respectively. The second two examples of ekstasis – symbolised by Dionysus and Polyhymnia – demonstrate an inner experience of the affects of ekstasis, and how it changes one’s perception of reality. Such moments of narrative ekstasis provide a ‘symbolic analogy’ connecting the sacred to the profane and Bataille and Caillois’s descriptions of death and rejuvenation assist in decoding the use of such symbols in the novel: as ethnographic surrealism serves to decode its ethnographic Marxism. In a Bataillean reading, the ethnographic surrealist transformation is congruent with what Huggan describes in a postcolonial context, whereby ‘the embrace of marginality in this strategy is self-empowering, not just because it takes strength from opposition, but because it conceptualises the transformation of the subject’s relationship to the wider world’.97 The non-symbolic effect of this symbolism and the modern morality play Carpentier creates is a South American national imaginary gained through an understanding of the history of the country, the ghostly values of the colonial past and the deadening forces of neocolonialism. The cycle of death and renewal create a commentary on the affects and values constructing national ontology, the homeopathic qualities of narrative and the ekstasis that stands as a symbolic song of resurrection. These moments of narrative ekstasis and Bataille and Caillois’s descriptions of sacred ecstasy for the Collège reveal an appreciation of an altered state of mind that is akin to an ancient Greek philosophical approach to reason. This ancient reason reveals a rationale quite unlike modern definitions of ‘reason’. Keith Waldrop brings this vital point into focus: Among the ancients, the ideal of knowledge was always an intuition – knowing was seeing. Reason (nous), for both Plato and Aristotle, was immediate – though non-sensualapprehension. The discursive faculty, on the other hand (what we call ‘reasoning’) was

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a lower faculty . . . Kant, following the English empirical philosophers, turns this around: reason for him means the power of making judgements; knowledge gained by intuition is an inferior sort of knowledge and is therefore relegated to an inferior function of the mind, the understanding.98

Waldrop argues for a core theoretical validation of the symbolic, non-sensual apprehension shaping mythic narrative and its derivatives by presenting the idea that ancient wisdom values ‘intuitive reason’ over ‘discursive reason’. Such a view of reason validates divine madness, indigenous realities and sacred realities; it is expressed in everything considered ‘illogical’ by empiricism: prophecy, worship and sacralised nature. Surrealist manifestos unconsciously articulate ancient reason (nous) and the Collège bring this relationship to the fore through their analysis of the sacredsocial aspects of such reasoning. Alternative forms of surrealist literature that offer moments of narrative ekstasis present a coherent symbol of nous: moments decoded through the theory of the Collège which serves to cut the ‘jumping bean’. On this basis, it is possible to see that critiques of Western rationalism are undertaken through a number of vestiges of nous. By appreciating that the symbol and its use in myth speaks of ancient philosophical reasoning, the valuing and reclaiming of these ideas, its sociological expressions and its vestiges in surrealist literature become clearer.

SUMMA For Alejo Carpentier and the Collège, official surrealism’s focus upon individualism barred the way towards its wider social freedoms. Carpentier’s textual practice in The Lost Steps does not mimic official surrealism’s anti-colonial and antirational attitudes, its ‘primitivism’, le merveilleux, the oneiric or its focus on the individual unconscious, but adapts and appropriates, politicises and localises them to forward a critique of US, European and postcolonial social values. He answers the surrealist call of ‘poetry’ with a dissident answer of estado límite: a series of ekstaƟc moments which circulate around rhythms, recitation, dance and song to distort rationalism and chronology. However, Carpentier’s is not a mythic presentation. This marvellous reality is formed from an affective, experiential interaction with variegated geosocial temporalities that are traced with the ghostly values of the past, where a spatial journey can tell the histories of many cultures. In non-urban locales a closer relation to kairological time than chronological time is experienced: a feature also integral to sacred realities. The geotemporal rhythms of the two parts of the American continent contrast and conflict in the novel, exposing the social affects of mechanised and organic temporality. Carpentier achieves this complex image of the present through an analytical juxtaposition of the products of Western morality: those of the Holocaust, factitious existence in a US metropolis and the end point of colonial impositions illustrated in the political instability of a South American city. Drawing upon Spengler’s understanding of the birth and death cycle of civilisations, this

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presentation of unending cycles of historical violence demonstrates that the affective identity of a nation is determined from within and without, and through the past and present. The origins of the Holocaust, world wars and civil wars appear in microcosm in the actions and decisions of one man, Marco, who kills to defend the Adelantado’s city against an ‘other’. Here the products of contemporary Western morality are traced back to their origins in colonial ‘protective’ violence; each act of violence exposing a further doubt about the tenets of morality as endorsed by modern society. Such comparisons embrace the surrealist rejection of nostalgia or despair to envisage what can be created anew from the fragments of the past. The past and the ‘other’ then provide an analogy which alters one’s view of present social values. Carpentier constructs a diverse Hispanic American reality and polyphonic, prospective national identity in the novel he wrote whilst resistance against the Batista regime was beginning to gain momentum. The reality of The Lost Steps engages with a full appreciation of the sacralised natural environment. Its protagonist, No-Man, is a character who, following this logic of heterology, enacts a three-fold rejection: first of the ‘Galley Master’ or ‘Book-keeper’ at work in the US capitalist city; then of the North and South American artists’ emulations of European surrealism; and finally, unintentionally, of the doctrinal and legal assimilation of indigenous people and lands of the Pacaraima in the Adelantado’s ‘paradisiacal’ city. For Carpentier, though, this final rejection serves to reveal the illusions that each man holds regarding society: exposing No-Man’s dream of a life in ‘the Valley where Time had Stopped’ as untenable (LS 248). Carpentier’s use of the surrealist collage technique to conflate genres and chronotopes demonstrates a complexity that defies systematisation on many levels. Subsequently Carpentier’s novel emerges as ambiguous, polychromatic and ironically subversive as it inhabits and collapses a number of Western literary genres to reflect upon the values attached to present South American identity. The text appears in the guise of tragedy, a quest-narrative or a chronicle but it is not singularly any of these; rather, as a whole it suggests a morality play reshaped by a postcolonial and (ex)dissident surrealist view of the social role of myth and sacred rites. The allegorical function of the characters reveals NoMan’s moral dilemma, just as the novel’s ambiguous ending appears to pose the question of what the future might be if one were, like No-Man, to break the historical cycle of violence noted by Spengler. For Carpentier, the social role of sacred realities is vital, as are the antireligious and political aspects of the surrealist attitude. Jean Schuster outlined the latter further: ‘What is the system? It is an extremely complex collection of principles, institutions, laws, customs, prohibitions, myths, dogmas, ideas, and symbols which separate us from our own thinking.’99 By exposing the system’s flaws and identifying its origins in Western thought, Carpentier places himself within a cohort of ethnographical Marxists. Ekstasis is rejected by the rationale of Western empirical philosophy and its historical accompaniment, colonialism. Further, by revalidating sacred symbols and music he joins the cohort of alternative surrealists who explore methods of freeing the self and society through ekstaƟc experiences of the ‘other’.

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Eliade had warned the universalist theologian against an orientalist stance, and emphasised that living myth is not ‘primitive’ savagery or infantile (MEMR 2, 4). Similarly, Carpentier shows that indigenous spirituality is entwined with economic and historical perspectives, thereby accurately charting the steps between the surrealist merveilleux and lo real maravilloso, naƟvismo and the late Hispanic American avant-garde. Carpentier’s (ex)dissident postcolonial surrealism takes one step more towards an anti-exoticist stance than was possible for many official surrealists, who, as Jody Blake argues, for all their professed anti-rationalism, could not escape the traps of exoticism: ‘even the revolutionary modernism of the surrealists and their colleagues in the Clarté and Monde groups, cannot be so neatly extricated from the problematics of European cultural imperialism.’100 The concerns raised in The Lost Steps turn away from Breton’s slapping of corpses or Bataille’s bloodthirsty Dionysian delirium to express how the affects of estado límite, ekstasis or divin fou, can transform values, ontology and reality. In The Lost Steps the two estado límite, likened here to Clio’s and Polyhymnia’s muse-led ekstasis, suggest what Webb calls Carpentier’s ‘poetics of history’: one that can be seen to validate Eric Gould’s argument ‘that the problemsolving functioning of myth is a fundamental aspect of mythopoesis in modern literature’.101 By playing with differing societal symbols of ‘the isles of Paradise’, which Eliade designates a mythic theme visible in modern narrative, Carpentier reveals that history is not ‘fact’ but a biased and imaginatively constructed narrative, projecting cultural desires upon reality. The boundary between myth and history therefore collapses: if history is mythical, then myth can be historical. The estado límite of the shaman’s incantation ritual, likened here to Apollonian ekstasis, wards off both the potential disease of literal death and the symbolic disease caused by a deathly Western society. A fourth prefigured estado límite, allied to Dionysian ekstasis, of communication with nature in the jungle, reveals to the protagonist the sacred tellus tempuris in the ‘telluric symphony’ and Dance of the Trees of the mythical isles of Paradise. Each affective experience of the primary sacred, symbolised by Apollo, Dionysus and the Muses, presents the miracles and fé intrinsic to lo real maravilloso, through which Carpentier moves away from Western European official surrealism in ways similar to the dissident surrealist interest in the sacred-social.102 With criticisms of Carpentier’s own ethnographic exoticism noted, I have focused upon the complex renegotiation of modernity, the formation of community and interaction with the land, its history and its present at play in the novel. By fêting the estado límite of divin fou in this way the affective transformations of identity in this postcolonial novel reinforce those considered below in Western feminist and Eastern European rewriting and adaptation of official surrealist practices. In this way the parochial and provincial conventions of Hispanic American literature were questioned and reconfigured to meet the needs of the international condition of social construction.103 In the novel Carpentier engages with official surrealist images of objective chance without alteration. Unlike official surrealism he does not valorise the urban space,104 rather one sees myth-like descriptions of nature’s power such as the city Worm, trials in the interior and by the Code of the Rains, demonstrating

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that tropical nature or any natural space can overturn human authority. Therefore the symbolic language employed by myth and folklore in Carpentier’s hands shows a direct relation to social realities and national identity. This partly mythologising drive erases neither material reality nor the analogical connection symbols have with sacralised reality and its escape from chronological time. In this 1953 novel Carpentier offers an analysis of the social values that cause modern disenfranchisement and thereby situates the novel in the context of a rewriting of the surrealist image of the primitive to further postcolonial goals of self-recognition and enfranchisement. Carpentier’s contribution highlights the importance of fé in rectifying what was missing from official Parisian surrealism, a view which other international surrealists similarly confirm through images of divin fou. Carpentier’s appropriation of surrealist ideas and methods to discuss postcolonial realities qualifies The Lost Steps as an example of ethnographic Marxism. The latter has arisen from the anthropological strand of surrealism identified by Bell: ‘the Surrealist movement included a strong, and quite conscious, anthropological critique of Eurocentrism which Carpentier rather passes over in his account and it would be more accurate to say that he was developing this aspect of surrealism to a new level of self-critical complexity.’105 An appreciation of the connection between Carpentier’s own (ex)dissident surrealism, the Collège’s dissident surrealism and indigenous realities shaping the novel is vital to an understanding of Carpentier’s role within the history of Hispanic American modernism. Following Worringer and Jameson it has been proposed that surrealism’s nonnaturalism arises in reaction to the social stress caused by two world wars. In differing social contexts surrealism appealed to many writers: it was of interest in Hispanic America and the Caribbean where a long indigenous tradition of the marvellous had arisen, Irelmar Chiampi maintains, in response to ‘moments of historical crisis: the discovery, conquest and colonization, independence struggles, and post independence period’.106 This regional tradition frames Carpentier’s interaction with surrealism and postcolonial identity politics, and his unique articulation of such echoes the cults of liberation which Lanternari defined as reinforcing the ‘close ties between religious life and secular, political, and cultural life’.107 This aspect becomes visible in Carpentier’s reworking of the surrealist call for ‘poetry’ to reveal its origins in ekstaƟc rites that protect and reform group ontology. In The Lost Steps Carpentier presents the point at which Western categories collapse regarding civility and barbarity, faith and extreme states, myth and history, politics and society, thereby altering the very values and morality attached to Europe’s ‘other’ so that ‘myth reveals to us a meaning which transcends its ethnographic frontiers’.108

Notes 1

Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected WriƟngs, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179, hereafter GBVE.

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2

Dawn Adès, ‘Surrealism and Its Legacies in Latin America’, The BriƟsh Academy Lecture, 27 May 2009, (accessed 20 August 2010) examples this resistance to Carpentier as surrealist, and Rogers, Jungle, p. 156, indicates the reverse.

3

Carpentier, ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, pp. 85–86.

4

The manifesto is discussed by Rae, ‘Alejo Carpentier’, 375.

5

As a Sartrean symbol the stone indicates Carpentier’s interest in existentialism, a philosophy critical of surrealism; see Ian R. MacDonald’s ‘Magical Eclecticism: Los pasos perdidos and Jean-Paul Sartre’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 15, 2 (April 1979). Given the aim of this study I do not pursue Carpentier’s relationship with existentialism here.

6

For a discussion of errance, see Laxton, ‘The Guarantor of Chance’, 1–17. Denuding it of its surrealist overtones, Francis Wyers describes this as a ‘magical’ and ‘supernatural power’, in ‘Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos: Heart of Lightness, Heart of Darkness’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 45, 1 (June 1992), 85.

7

Mikics, ‘Carpentier’, p. 374.

8

As mentioned, Frye discusses basanos in Myth of Deliverance, p. 27.

9

Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of LaƟn American NarraƟve (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14n15.

10

André Breton, ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’, Point du jour, p. 9, cited by Hollier, ‘Shadows’, 125–26.

11

MacDonald points to this aspect in ‘Magical Eclecticism’, 100; as does Stephen D. Gingerich, ‘Culture and Anonymity: The Other Voice of Los pasos perdidos’, The New Centennial Review, 1, 1 (Spring 2001), 252.

12

Mikics, ‘Carpentier’, p. 395.

13

Stephanie Merrim notes: ‘The “strange occurrences” to which Carpentier referred, the wonders of Latin America’ in later magic realist texts ‘runs the risk of domesticating, de-ideologizing, and thereby neutralising in the public eye the urgent issues of his continent.’ ‘Wonder and the Wounds of “Southern” Histories’, in Look Away!: The US South in New World Studies, eds Deborah N. Cohn and Jon Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 325.

14

Rosemont and Kelley, ‘Introduction: Invisible Surrealists’, Black, Brown, and Beige, p. 6.

15

Steve Wakefield, CarpenƟer’s Baroque FicƟon: Returning Medusa’s Gaze (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), p. 76. Wakefield additionally stipulates that the novel is Carpentier’s farewell to naƟvismo. Carpentier’s own reference to Amerindian ritual is made in the note to the novel.

16

Elizabeth Sánchez, ‘Creative Questers: Remedios Varo and the Narrator of Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos’, South Central Review, 23, 2 (2006) 58–79, 69; Sokoloff, ‘Discourse’, 48.

17

John Silver, ‘After El Dorado: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps’, New FormaƟons, 6 (Winter 1988), 78.

18

See Deborah Cohn, ‘Retracing The Lost Steps: The Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, and Publishing Alejo Carpentier in the United States’, The New Centennial Review, 3, 1 (2003), 84.

19

Silver, ‘After El Dorado’; Wyers, ‘Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos’, 84.

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20

Christopher Warnes, ‘Avatars of Amadis: Magical Realism as Postcolonial Romance’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40, 7 (2005), 7–20.

21

The baroque is an important aspect of Carpentier’s style which is discussed by many critics, as indicated by González Echevarría who attributes Carpentier’s rendering of the Latin American jungle in baroque terminology to the Romantic journal; see Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in BriƟsh Guiana, 1840–1844, trans. and ed. Walter E. Roth (Georgetown, 1922); Pilgrim, pp. 175–80, 223; and Gordon Brotherston makes note of this borrowing in ‘Pacaraima as Destination in Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos’, The Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literature, 1, 2 (1993), 162.

22

Severo Sarduy, ‘El barroco y el neobarroco’, América LaƟna en su literatura, ed. César Fernández Moreno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977), 167–84. Translated by Michael Schuessler as ‘The Baroque and the Neobaroque’, in Baroque New Worlds: RepresentaƟon, TransculturaƟon, Counterconquest, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), this was cited by Celorio, ‘Baroque’. Cf. Wakefield, Baroque; and González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, pp. 22, 103.

23

José Lezema Lima, La expression Americana (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993), p. 50, cited and trans. in George B. Handley, ‘The Postcolonial Ecology of the New World Baroque: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, eds Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 123.

24

See Salvador A. Oropesa, The Contemporáneos Group: RewriƟng Mexico in the ThirƟes and ForƟes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 1, 12, 19–21, 31–36.

25

See Monika Kaup, ‘Neobaroque: Latin America’s Alternative Modernity’, ComparaƟve Literature, 58, 2 (Spring 2006), 128–52.

26

Ruth El Saffar, Rapture Engaged: The Suppression of the Feminine in Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 64–65.

27

MacDonald, ‘Magical Eclecticism’, 97–100.

28

‘The history of the gilded man belongs originally to the Andes of New Grenada, and particularly to the plains in the vicinity of their eastern side’, Alexander von Humboldt, Personal NarraƟve Of Travels to the EquinocƟal Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804, trans. and ed. Thomasina Ross, ch. 25, (accessed 1 September 2011).

29

‘Project’ for Bataille denotes the utilitarian, discursive world to which inner experience is opposed. As discussed above, the aim to explore the role of affects as an alternative surrealist practice here, separates it from the Bretonian constructivist approach outlined by Hedges, Languages of Revolt, p. 82. Such a demarcation, between an official and alternative approaches to surrealism, rests upon Rosenberg and Hovland’s psychological identification of three approaches to attitude shifting: affect, behaviour and cognition, in IntroducƟon to Social Psychology, quoted in Gross, Psychology, p. 407.

30

Alejo Carpentier, The War of Time, trans. Frances Partridge (London: Gollancz, 1970 [1958]).

31

Amongst others Celorio makes the connection between The Lost Steps and this short story in ‘Baroque’.

32

Sá, Rain Forest, pp. 70–71.

33

Jeannette Gaffney, ‘An Analysis of “The Highroad of Saint James” by Alejo Carpentier’, (accessed July 2011).

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34

Aníbal González, ‘Modernist Prose’, in The Cambridge History of LaƟn America, eds Roberto González Echevarría and E. Pupo-Walker, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 111–12.

35

John Speirs, ‘A Survey of Medieval Verse’, in The Age of Chaucer, ed. Boris Ford (London: Penguin, 1975 [1954]), pp. 59, 61.

36

L.A. Cormican, ‘Morality Tradition and the Interludes’, in The Age of Chaucer, ed. Boris Ford, p. 189.

37

Cormican, ‘Morality’, p. 187.

38

As mentioned in Chapter 2, ‘fourth world’ indigenous peoples exist within and across national borders.

39

Speirs, ‘Medieval Verse’, p. 61.

40

Georges Bataille, The UnĮnished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 22.

41

Champagne, Bataille, p. 103. Peter Connor debates a similar articulation of Bataille’s ethics and morality in ch. 3 of Georges Bataille and the MysƟcism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

42

Shoshona Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 102.

43

F. Alegría, Nueva historia de la novela hispanoamericana (Hanover: Ediciones del norte, 1986), p. 64, paraphrased by Niamh Thornton, ‘Where Cuba Meets Mexico: Alejo Carpentier and Elena Garro’, in Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture and IdenƟty, eds Aileen Pearson-Evans and Angela Leahy (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 259.

44

Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, CriƟcal Inquiry, 12, 2 (Winter 1986), 311.

45

Steve J. Stern, ‘The Tricks of Time: Colonial Legacies and Historical Sensibilities in Latin America’, in Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in LaƟn American History, ed. Jeremy Adelman (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 145.

46

Brotherston, Emergence, p. 53.

47

González Echevarría reads the conclusion as a failure and true return as impossible, Pilgrim, pp. 164, 271.

48

Silver, ‘After El Dorado’, 77; Webb, Myth, p. 79. My reading of the novel concurs at many points with Silver’s and specifically Webb’s analysis of this community and murder.

49

Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of LaƟn America: Society and the ArƟst (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1967]), p. 147.

50

Anibal Quijano, ‘Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America’, in The Postmodernism Debate in LaƟn America, eds John Beverley et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 212, quoted in Roque-Baldovinos, ‘Epic ‘, 80.

51

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El arte narrative y la magia’ (1932), in Discussión (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1966), pp. 81–92, quoted in González Echevarría, Pilgrim, p. 119. Translated as ‘Narrative Art and Magic’, in Borges: A Reader, eds Emir Rodriguez and Alistair Reed, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1981), pp. 34–38.

52

Stern, ‘Time’, pp. 135–50.

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53

It is of note that Desnos was a user of opium, and that Artaud took part in the indigenous American peyote (peyƃtl) ritual.

54

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Benjamin states: ‘But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illuminaƟon, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) This profane illumination did not always find the Surrealists equal to it, or to themselves; and the very writings that proclaim it most powerfully, Aragon’s incomparable Paysan de Paris [Peasant of Paris] and Breton’s Nadja, show very disturbing symptoms of deficiency’; Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, p. 209.

55

A contradictory view of this trend is forwarded in Elza Adamowicz’s exploration of nature in official surrealism, ‘Off the Map: Surrealism’s Uncharted Territories’, in Surrealism: Crossings/FronƟers, ed. Elza Adamowicz (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 197–216.

56

Frank, ‘From Spatial Form’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, p. 799.

57

Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York: Search Books, 1969), p. 12.

58

Bataille, ‘Un-Knowing’, 84.

59

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 198, cited in Borch-Jacobsen, EmoƟonal Tie, p. 107.

60

Carpentier, ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, pp. 84–85.

61

Rosenberg and Hovland, Social Psychology, cited in Gross, Psychology, p. 407.

62

J.A. George Irish, ‘Alejo Carpentier: Regionalist or Universalist’, Caribbean Quarterly, 18, 4 (December 1972), 59.

63

As discussed in Chapter 1, many of Bataille’s other routes of excess are not considered here due to a focus upon sacred ecstasy.

64

Recent texts on surrealist esotericism by Patrick Lepetit and T.M. Bauduin introduce new facets to this discussion, especially Lepetit, who considers surrealist affiliates and dissident surrealism. Both conclude that official surrealism utilises the esoteric for its own ends.

65

Tythacott, Surrealism, pp. 189, 197.

66

Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: CommodiƟes in Cultural PerspecƟve (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1986]), p. 28, cited in Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial ExoƟc: MarkeƟng the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 16.

67

Eliade, ‘Masks: Mythical and Ritual Origins’, in Symbolism, pp. 70–71.

68

Rogers, Jungle, p. 143.

69

Spector, Surrealist Art, p. 190.

70

Carpentier, El Nacional, 16 September 1945, rpd. Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas, ed. Virgilio López Lemus (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), 19–21, quoted in RoqueBaldovinos, ‘Epic’, 67.

71

Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the LeƩered City: LaƟn America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 165.

98

SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

72

Celorio, ‘Baroque’.

73

Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 561, 546n18; reference to Mass Observation does not appear in the previously cited 1981 version of this article but in James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’, The Predicament of Culture: TwenƟeth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 143n14.

74

Bataille, Nonknowledge, p. 206.

75

For example, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), which concurs with a Kristevian interpretation of Bataille’s left sacred visible in Powers of Horror: An Essay on AbjecƟon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). The dominant opinion in Bataille studies tends in this direction.

76

Comparing this ecstatic state of self-loss against Breton’s image of les vases communicant offers an interesting avenue of enquiry into the differing ways in which Breton and Bataille configured the surrealist experience.

77

Respectively, Lala, ‘The Conversions’, 241; Hegarty, Bataille, p. 75; Parvulescu, ‘Die Laughing’, p. 489.

78

Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) was accessible to the Hispanic American avantgarde through translations in Revista de Occidente. González Echevarría highlights the importance of Spengler’s ideas in shaping Carpentier’s distance from the frivolousness of official surrealism in Pilgrim, p. 63.

79

Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the TwenƟeth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 192.

80

The compulsion to repeat, identified by Freud in SFBPP as Fort-Da, attempts to master trauma using symbolic representations of absence.

81

Podestá, ‘Ethnographic’, 415–17.

82

Howard Sorkin, ‘Yanomami’, (accessed 15 September 2011).

83

Charlotte Rogers points to new material on Carpentier’s research in Caracas with the Servico de Investigación de Folklore Nacional (SIFN), Jungle, pp. 164, 202n26.

84

John Fred Peters, Life Among the Yanomami: The Story of Change Among the Xilixana on the Mucajai River in Brazil (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), p. 22.

85

Rogers too makes the connection between song and the healing rite as medicine, which signals a rejection of the ‘surrealist fascination with the irrational’; Jungle, pp. 144, 150.

86

Sigmund Freud, ‘Humour’ (1927), SEXXI (1961), p. 163: ‘note: see also Ch. 2 in CivilisaƟon and Its Discontents, p. 77 and the forms of defence in Jokes, SEVIII, 233.’

87

Hegarty, Bataille, pp. 75–76.

88

Wakefield citing Julio Ortega, in Baroque, p. 30.

89

Peters, Yanomami, p. 151.

90

Stein, Aīect, p. 174.

91

Sir William Smith, ed., A DicƟonary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1867), p. 1048. References: Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. P. Vellacott (London: Penguin), p. 420; Strabo, Geography, trans. Horace L. Jones, Vols 1–6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), x, p. 468; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Books 4–6, trans. C.H. Oldfather (London: Heinemann), iv, 4; and

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99

 Pausanias, DescripƟon of Greece, trans., W.H.S. Jones (London: Heinemann), i. 31.2, vii. 21.2. 92

Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989 [1961]), p. 74.

93

Quotation from Manfred Frank, Le Dieu à venir, trans. Florence Vatan and Veronika von Schenck (Paris: L’Actes Sud, 1989), pp. 15, 30, 46, paraphrasing Bloch.

94

Jameson, ‘Magic Realism’, 301.

95

Handley, ‘Ecology’, p. 126.

96

Carpentier, ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, pp. 85–86.

97

Huggan, ExoƟc, pp. 201–21.

98

Keith Waldrop, ‘A Reason for Images: One Key to Modernism’, Modern Language Studies, 15, 3 Photography and Literature (Summer 1985), 72–73.

99

Jean Schuster, ‘Les bases théoriques du surréalisme’, Archives 57–68 (1967), 146, cited in Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 145.

100

Jody Blake, ‘The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art Indigene in Service of the Revolution’, Oxford Art Journal, 25, 1 (2002), 58.

101

Webb, Myth, p. 21n6; Eric Gould, Mythical IntenƟons in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

102

Carpentier ‘Marvelous Real’, in Magical Realism, p. 86.

103

See Peter Beardsell’s excellent discussion on internationalisation, amongst others, in ‘Spanish America’, in Literature of Europe and America in the 1960s, eds Spencer Pearce and Don Piper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 122–25.

104

A contrary view of the official surrealist attachment to nature is offered by Adamowicz, ‘Off the Map’, in Crossings, demonstrating that any separation, such as that made here between official and dissident surrealism, evidences permeable boundaries.

105

Bell, Literature, pp. 184–85.

106

Chiampi paraphrased by Webb, Myth, p. 21.

107

Lanternari, Oppressed, pp. vi–vii.

108

Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 80.

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PĆėę III TčĊ MĆēĎċĊĘęĆęĎĔē Ĕċ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ďē BėĎęĆĎē Ćēĉ Ć SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĈĆđ DĎěĎē FĔĚ

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4 TčĊ BėĎĊċ MĔĒĊēę Ĕċ BėĎęĎĘč SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, IęĘ SĔĈĎĆđ Ćēĉ DĎěĊėČĊēę PĆęčĘ

While British modernist literature is prominent in scholarly research and higher education courses, its surrealist, avant-garde branch has remained a somewhat subterranean voice. In Britain there was both interest in and resistance to surrealism from 1924 as it filtered through via French- and English-language periodicals: The TransatlanƟc Review (1924), edited by Ford Madox Ford; This Quarter (1925–32), edited by Edward Titus; transiƟon (1927–38), edited by Eugene Jolas;1 and New Verse (1933–38).2 One example of this early presence appears in the September 1932 surrealist issue of This Quarter, for which Samuel Beckett translated work by Breton. In Britain two surrealist circles sprang up, one formed in Birmingham in 1935 and the other around the London InternaƟonal Surrealist ExhibiƟon in 1936.3 The membership of both groups was complex. Of the primary participants in the London group, David Gascoyne and Herbert Read spent time with the Parisian surrealist group during the mid-1930s and published texts outlining surrealist aims.4 Gascoyne, like the Dadaist Hugo Ball, turned towards mystical Christianity in 1937 and was expelled from the surrealist movement by Breton. Conflict arose early between the two surrealist circles when in 1936 the Birmingham group, represented by Conroy Maddox and John and Robert Melville, declined participation in the London InternaƟonal Surrealist ExhibiƟon due to its inclusion of non-surrealist artists. This feature was possibly the source of the group’s conflicts and post-war decline. Although the Birmingham group did not contribute to the exhibition, they did attend and in 1938 were mainly reconciled with the London group, which was now directed by E.L.T. Mesens, Breton’s Belgian emissary. From 1938 to 1940 The London BulleƟn was the official journal of British surrealism.5 Overall British surrealism tends to be seen as a minor event in literary history, and its impact is considered less significant than the developments in France. British surrealism, like Hispanic Caribbean or American and Romanian surrealisms, could therefore be seen to present a peripheral cultural setting

104 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

within the surrealist arena. The peripheral status of British surrealism was compounded or even caused by its foregrounding of indigenous traditions. The members of both British surrealist groups demonstrated particular characteristics that caused them to be labelled ‘neosurrealist’, meaning surrealism on British soil demonstrated curious affinities with the criticisms made of some forms of postcolonial surrealism. Critics Peter Nicholls and Francis Scarfe identify one aspect of the British surrealists’ non-alignment when they charge Read and Hugh Sykes Davies with effacing surrealism’s avant-gardism in favour of elements of Romanticism.6 As a result, their version of surrealism highlights British Romanticism’s sense of the gothic: its characteristic treatment of dreams and dream-like states,7 and its focus upon nature as a sublime source of poetic inspiration.8 As will be discussed, this undoubtedly British literary peculiarity is residually evident in Leonora Carrington’s early surrealist work, and her novel The Hearing Trumpet engages both with this British surrealist identification of nature with inspiration and a unique representation of nature as sacred.9 Another facet of British surrealism’s interest in nature was its ethnographic element. This was evident in the work of the Birmingham surrealist Desmond Morris, an artist, prominent zoologist and ethnologist, who joined the Birmingham group in the 1940s during his undergraduate studies. Other British surrealists also explored the arena of ethnography, but in ways similar to those of the Collège de Sociologie. For example, the surrealist member and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and journalist Charles Madge,10 joined by the radical ethnographer Tom Harrisson, founded the Mass-Observation social research organisation in 1937.11 Laura Marcus and Nick Hubble both draw attention to the importance of Freud’s idea of coincidences, deriving from surrealist concerns, in the aims of Mass-Observation;12 and in recent studies, ‘scholars in English and Cultural Studies departments have become drawn to Mass Observation’s surrealism’.13 Indeed this surrealist component increased when the surrealists Gascoyne, Julian Trevelyan, Diana Brinton Lee and Robert Melville assisted with Mass-Observation projects.14 As Jennings articulated, Mass-Observation sought the unconscious as it was revealed in ‘collective expression’, not in its ‘personal expression’, and the critic Jeremy MacClancy observes that Mass-Observation’s revisioning of surrealism ‘lay in their shift of surrealist focus from the individual to the social’, extending beyond the presentation of sexualised images liberated from the unconscious that dominated official surrealist expression.15 What is clear in MassObservation in 1937 is a desire to explore the social implications of surrealism outside the remit of Bretonian surrealism. Mass-Observation began as a bold surrealist investigation into society, devising a documentary-like reflection on the automatic verbal productions of society during festival periods.16 It is this interest in social ritual and festival, although not specifically sacrality, which crucially links this sociological manifestation of British surrealism to the Collège and sets it apart from official surrealism. Hubble keenly decodes their agenda as one of ‘social therapy’: In assessing exactly which changes in society can be attributed to M-O, whether independently or in conjunction with other social forces, there are a number of good

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reasons for agreeing with Alan Read that ‘. . . the formation of an idea of nationality, the everyday practices which make up “Britain” itself, owes something very distinctive to the work of the “Mass Observation” movement’.17

This surrealist phase of Mass-Observation was short-lived, for Jennings left the group within a year of its founding following methodological disputes with Harrisson. For MacClancy, Jennings’s break with Mass-Observation meant that ‘the surrealist promise of its original manifesto remained unfulfilled’.18 This is a sentiment which the critic Michel Rémy echoes: ‘Mass Observation could have provided surrealism with concrete anchorage in British society’s everyday life. But Tom Harrisson distanced his undertaking from the main surrealist propositions.’19 In contrast, other critics, like Rod Edmond, put forward a less critical view of Harrisson’s role in diffusing the surrealist potential of MassObservation,20 though Edmond does not focus upon Harrisson’s criticism that Jennings and Madge’s May the TwelŌh was more akin to the ‘documentary’ than ‘anthropology’.21 Such conflicts over the balancing point between rigour and creativity divided the founders of Mass-Observation, as it had official and dissident surrealism, and Bataille and Caillois in the Collège. Madge also left Mass-Observation, following disputes with Harrisson in the mid-1940s, and in 1950 was to take the first chair of Sociology at the University of Birmingham; Jennings went on to become an influential documentary filmmaker.22 The surrealist manifestations in Birmingham and London, and of MassObservation, demonstrate how different British surrealism was from official French surrealism as a result of its keen identification with the British Romantic period, Jennings’s sociological interests and other similar proclivities. These differences may also derive, as Rémy points out, from the fact that British surrealism was shaped mainly by students and dons, and was formed in a different cultural climate to that of rebellious, anti-establishment, Parisian surrealism.23 The London surrealist group was damaged by the Second World War interregnum and produced its final manifesto in 1947.24 However, as was the case in Hispanic America and the Caribbean, further waves of interest in surrealism arose over time, with a second wave starting in 1967 and lasting until 1981. A prime mover in this revival was Birmingham’s Conroy Maddox.25 * One British-born painter and writer who devoted her life’s work to surrealism was interestingly not a member of either surrealist circle in England but instead, after the London show, moved to Paris and became a second wave member of the official surrealist group until the onset of World War II. It is to her career that attention is given in the remainder of this chapter, and to her expression of a feminist revisioning of surrealism through the sacred in the following chapter. Although Leonora Carrington was primarily a painter, she also wrote short fiction, novellas, plays and novels. Carrington, as a British expatriate who left London in 1937, consequently is not fully identifiable with the developments of the British surrealist group that began at this time; however, she does share some of its characteristics. British surrealism’s adoption and adaptation of French surrealism in the late 1930s frames our appreciation of its further expression here.

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Surrealism’s arrival in Britain, over a decade after its inception in Paris, was timely for the 19-year-old Carrington, who was studying at a Cubist-influenced art academy in London. Around the time of the London show Carrington became romantically involved with Max Ernst and shortly after moved to Paris.26 Carrington, by relocating to Paris, missed the first full wave of surrealism in Britain and instead entered the Parisian surrealist movement during its second wave, just as it had begun to include a cohort of young women amongst its ranks. Carrington’s writing from this time, in a similar way to British surrealists based in England, is accented by a peculiarly British interpretation of surrealism and its concerns. Carrington’s involvement with the French surrealist group, however, led her to blend Parisian surrealist tones increasingly into her work. In 1940, as war swept across Europe and Ernst was detained by the Nazis, Carrington, unnerved and distressed, fled to Madrid. Carrington’s flight from Nazi-occupied France (and arguably a misogynistic surrealist milieu) left her separated from friends and unprotected from a horrific incident of rape, perpetrated by a group of Spanish soldiers.27 Carrington was then institutionalised in Spain for psychiatric illness but eventually escaped to Lisbon and entered a marriage (of convenience) with a surrealist affiliate, Renato Leduc. Along with other members of the decamped Parisian surrealist group, Carrington and Leduc relocated to New York City, spending a year there. After Spain, it is possible to see fundamental changes in her writing. For example, throughout the 1940s, the use of surrealist oneiric features is increasingly evident in the New York stories, in the story of her incarceration, Down Below,28 and in the Mexican narrative The Stone Door.29 In 1942 Carrington and Leduc moved from New York to Mexico, another active site of exilic surrealist activity. They divorced soon after and she remarried in 1946. Carrington, as a British surrealist, presents an interesting case, participating as she did in surrealism’s wartime tidal movement around the globe. During Breton’s visit to Mexico in 1938, he stayed with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and he, Rivera and Leon Trotsky produced the ‘Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art’, followed later by the formation of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI). Mexico left a favourable impression upon Breton and was highly regarded in Parisian surrealist circles. Breton, the Peruvian César Moro and Austrian Wolfgang Paalen organised an InternaƟonal Surrealist ExhibiƟon in Mexico City in 1940, which contained works by ex-European surrealists alongside Mexican authors and artists including Kahlo and Xavier Villaurrutia. A division existed, however, between the Mexican surrealists and the exiled European surrealists, both during the exhibition and after.30 The Mexican surrealists had been shaped by the Mexican Revolution and local political instability leading up to the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29) which marked a period where church and state came into conflict. These political events served as the background for Mexico’s avant-garde, its nationalistic estridenƟsmo (stridentism) of the 1920s, which was superseded, and occasionally challenged, by the surrealist and European-influenced Contemporáneos group (whose publication, a magazine edited by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, ran from 1928 to 1931).31 The Contemporáneos used the classical Spanish tradition to shape a new, ‘neobaroque’ poetry during the late 1930s and ‘prepared the way for

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the continuing presence of Surrealism in Mexico after 1950’, as José Quiroga reveals.32 The disputes between the two groups distinctly shaped the course of the Mexican literary scene and reflected the political realities of the time. Octavio Barreda’s journal El hijo pródigo (1943–46), to which Villaurrutia and Octavio Paz contributed, carried surrealist ideas, and during this period Paz became involved with Parisian surrealism, his work in turn influencing Mexican surrealist writers of the 1950s, such as Juan José Arreola and Jorge Ibargüengoitia.33 In Mexico the European surrealists formed two circles: the first around Paalen, who had arrived in 1939, organised the Mexican InternaƟonal Surrealist ExhibiƟon and published the journal Dyn (1942–44); the second around Benjamin Péret and his wife Remedios Varo, who arrived together in 1941.34 When Carrington arrived in Mexico she gravitated towards Varo and Péret whom she had known in Paris. Whilst Péret’s influence on Carrington’s writing is evident during this period, it was the collaboration with Varo that provided a catalyst for a period of intense individuation in Carrington’s surrealist expression.35 From this time her literary work began to reflect official surrealism’s own post-war interest in the occult which, Monnerot observed, affiliated ‘Gnostics and Surrealists’.36 Crucially, however, she attended to the esoteric in a new sense, as her writing began to consider the coherent sacred in ways akin to those expressed in the Collège and in indigenous beliefs, as discussed below. The relationship between the expatriate European surrealists and the Mexican surrealists remained strained, but during the 1950s there were collaborations with newer Mexican writers who had spent time in Paris. Carrington for her part contributed to Paz and Carlos Fuentes’s review Revista Mexicana de Literatura, and from 1956 to 1962 became involved in the theatre group Poesía en Voz Alta, formed by the Mexican surrealists, Arreola and Paz.37 Alongside Paz and Fuentes, Carrington also had connections with Juan Rulfo who became a literary figure as a result of his work during the 1950s.38 Moro translated some of her stories into Spanish and she was published in the Argentine surrealist journal A parƟr de cero, the Peruvian journal Las Moradas, and exhibited a ‘willingness to appreciate Mexico as a living community of people’.39 At this time Carrington’s work became inflected by Mexican indigenous views of sacred reality and the Mayan sacred text, Popol Vuh. In the early 1960s, Carrington spent time living with the indigenous Chiapas people in preparation for a mural commissioned by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.40 As Gloria Feman Orenstein observed: ‘In many of her paintings . . . a dialogue between animals or animal-human hybrids and humans’ is present, thereby echoing ‘Nahualism’. The latter, Raphael Girard has outlined, ‘embodies the belief that there exists between the person and the natural (animal or vegetable) a fully determined, intimate relationship.’41 It is this intimate relationship that Bataille’s expression of inner experience is alive to, as it is also an extended and sacralised version of the official surrealist image of the animalhuman (therianthropic) hybrid. * Over time a number of Anglophone literary critics have been drawn to Carrington’s prose fiction. A recent revival of critical interest in Carrington has

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been evident in the work of Susan Aberth, J.P. Eburne, V. Ferentinou, Ann Hoff, Bonnie Lander, Evans Lansing Smith and Natalya Lusty, supplemented by the art shows Angels of Anarchy at Manchester Art Gallery (2009), Surreal Friends at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2010) and Leonora Carrington: The CelƟc Surrealist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013). Early critical interest in Carrington dates from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and in general extrapolates the feminist meaning of her early and middle writing, discusses the role of the female and savage animality or reads her experience of madness in Down Below against the restrictive and patriarchal ideology of the surrealist group. Each scholarly trend reveals that surrealism’s questioning of social constructs in relation to work and organisation, objects and relations, is transferred by this female British surrealist writer into the arena of gender commentary. As Susan Rubin Suleiman notes: Since the women were generally younger and started producing later than the men who were associated with the movement, it is not unlikely that their version of Surrealist practice included a component of response to, as well as adaption of, male Surrealist iconographies and mythologies – this being especially the case in the realm of sexuality.42

At first surrealism appeared to offer many freedoms to women, though some female artists found limitations to this liberation, and one way forward was to extend and overcome these limitations if possible. Carrington was one of the female surrealists who successfully achieved such an adaptation. The critic Whitney Chadwick suggests that her successful negotiation of this barrier was due to her ‘commitment to linking psychic freedom with a specifically feminist political consciousness’.43 Criticism notes that Carrington takes the restrictive roles ascribed to the female surrealists – those of femme-enfant (child-woman),44 muse, or animalistic femme-sauvage (savage-woman, who is often an aspect of the chthonic muse figure)45 – and exorcises them through creative images of violence,46 ‘madness’47 and identifications with nature.48 Gaining validation by reclaiming these objectified concepts of female identity is the first step towards a positive re-articulation of women in surrealism. However, this is a complex process, as the images of women offered by male surrealists often appear to offer liberation from convention but served to circumscribe women.49 Although in her early work Carrington partially reclaims these concepts, an undercurrent of tension can be identified, for the work is caught in a double bind, which Rachel Carroll describes: ‘Carrington’s transgressive heroines resemble some of the female figures perversely celebrated by the Surrealists: the femme-enfant, the femme-sauvage and the hysteric. However, Carrington evokes the anguish, both physical and psychological, of alienation.’50 By inhabiting the subjective position in relation to these surrealist images of woman, Carrington’s early work, which is marked by strong elements of violence, can express in part, a constructive anger towards: female repression within society; the surrealist movement’s highlighting of woman’s physicality, monstrosity or sexuality; and obliquely to Breton’s call for men to be ‘masters of ourselves, the masters of women, and of love too’.51 Orenstein, Suleiman, Chadwick, Carroll, Alice Gambrell and, more recently, Lander have pioneered

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an extension of this criticism with an ecofeminist component connected to the issue of women’s madness and its relation to male surrealist figures, patriarchy and nature in Carrington’s work. Carrington’s fictional oeuvre fully embraces the hybrid figures that fascinated surrealism, but over time she offers an insightful exploration of surrealism’s fusion of contradictions by probing the semantic line between animal and human, woman and animality, reality and the oneiric, nature and acculturation. Her representation of hybrid characters changes at two marked points in her oeuvre. The first shift is occasioned by her breakdown and institutionalisation, from which time her work moves from a primary focus on bodily fusions and violence towards more peaceful oneiric fusions. As Gerlinde Rehberg details, from Down Below onwards, protagonist representations become increasingly positive: ‘Carrington has again inscribed the fear of her own aggression, and has developed textual strategies to defuse, transform and contain a negative self-image in order to recover a more integrated and nurturing female/maternal body, able to tolerate inner contradiction.’52 The subjective experience of trauma and madness has reshaped the aggression represented in her fiction, thereby allowing a more complex image of woman to appear. The second shift occurs following her emigration to Mexico. Matthew Gale, a curator at Tate Modern, observes that the importance of Carrington’s work ‘lies partly in that she – along with artists such as Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo – opened up a new, and more female, strand of surrealism’; and in Mexico that ‘Leonora and Varo dabbled in alchemy and the occult, and the work of both was rooted for a time in the magical and domestic elements of women’s lives’.53 It is in Mexico that the sacred becomes a central theme in Carrington’s work. There is then a shift away from her middle period ‘dream-texts’54 into the myths and folk forms of her early Mexico stories, culminating in The Hearing Trumpet, which Lusty calls a ‘lost Surrealist classic’.55 Humour is a fundamental aspect of Carrington’s surrealism and may offer the reason why she was successful at breaking surrealism’s circumscription of the female. Humour is the method by which she cuts through social conformities, engages with a surrealist decoding of rationalism, and revises surrealism itself. As was the case with the representation of hybrid characters, the tone of Carrington’s humour changes over time. In her early work her humour is predominantly macabre, supernatural and gothic in a residually British Romantic sense, and its satiric decoding of social mores conforms to the surrealist humour noir (black humour).56 In the middle ‘oneiric’ period, after Spain, her humour becomes wry, and uses a contemplative logic-inverting technique predicated on surrealist valorisation of ‘illogic’. In the later period, in Mexico, her humour becomes less concerned with making the abject a spectacle: rather she imbues it with sacred meaning. Carrington’s style has then made that transition, from the abject to the adject sacred.57 It is the surrealist prose work, The Hearing Trumpet, written in Mexico in English during either the 1950s or 1960s, that will provide the focus for the following chapter.58 This Anglophone novel was published in New York in 1976, London in 1977, and had previously been translated into French and published in Paris as Le Cornet acousƟque in 1974. From the late 1970s onwards, many

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critics have been drawn to the novel including Chadwick, Orenstein, Suleiman, Renée Riese Hubert, Marina Warner, Aberth, Helen Byatt, Carroll and Lusty, with a recent surge in criticism as part of a revivalist interest in the female voices of surrealism. The concept of nature as a symbol for female creativity explored by a number of female surrealists develops unhindered in Carrington’s Mexican writing, far from the official surrealist core. This leads to a unique surrealist sacralisation of nature and society in the novel, one resonant with the Collège’s dissident surrealist interest in ecstasy.59 In this novel the hybrid characters reflect a more familiar official surrealist undermining of Christianity and valorisation of alchemy, alongside a detailing of Celtic esoteric beliefs. However, these techniques present an affective sacred reality. Indeed, Carrington and Varo had a committed interest in theosophy and evoked a strongly feminist vision in their work, one clearly marked in the novel. Again Carrington’s use of the surrealist technique of humour undermines conventional thought, but now her deployment utilises sacred rituals and myths and the transformative features the sacred offers, thereby offering kinship with the affective transition from left to right sacred which Bataille discusses in the Collège. In the Collège, Bataille discussed the affective forces of repulsion and attraction in society and their vital role in the formation of the sacred nucleus, which is ‘primarily external to the beings who form the group because for them it is the object of a fundamental repulsion’ (GB‘ARI’ 106).60 As discussed, he also detailed, following Hertz, that the repulsive force of the sacred nucleus mediates between the ‘depressive’ character or ‘distress’ of the ‘left sacred’ and its transformation into the ‘right sacred’ ‘object of exaltation’ and ‘strength’ (GB‘ARI’ 111). Myth and ritual act, Bataille tells us in his Collège lecture ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, to ‘transform the face of the world’ (GB‘SA’ 23). It is in myth and ritual that the affective transition from left to right sacred, from ‘distress to strength’, mirrors ‘ecstasy’ to reveal the ‘impossible’ order of mythical ‘spirits’ and ‘the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing’ (GBTR 111, 36, 47). Indeed Borch-Jacobsen has detailed, above, that such rituals offer a method by which society reabsorbs the outcast or ill member and consequently rebinds.61 The late prose work, The Hearing Trumpet, differs from official surrealist practice on three counts: as a result of Carrington’s marginal British status, her decision to remain in Hispanic America after the war and for her feminist extension of surrealism. Astoundingly original and characteristically comic, it is a novel with a British (Mexican) feminist twist and a unique extension of official surrealist theory. Rather than presenting new material to Anglophone surrealist study here, a reframing of the points of existing criticism occurs through the lens of dissident surrealist theory and a sociological approach to the sacred – therein highlighting a comparativist sacred that deserves further attention outside the specific orbit of feminist, Celtic or official surrealist frameworks. At once present in official surrealist history as a result of her early work, Carrington’s case is a positive addition to our understanding of international surrealist expression, the penumbral, sacred aspects of surrealism, and to the relations between European surrealism and Hispanic American surrealism. Like Alejo Carpentier’s sacralisation of surrealist interests in myth and anti-colonialism in The Lost Steps, Carrington’s revisionist feminist approach to Breton’s descriptions of the

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muse and Goddess in the novel makes it possible to see that surrealist texts coming from outlying surrealist locations and perspectives can contribute to a wider and more comprehensive understanding of surrealist presentations of the sacred, when analysed in relation to ideas explored by dissident surrealists in the Collège de Sociologie.

Notes 1

Referenced by Michel Rémy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 29.

2

Cited by Rob Jackaman, The Course of English Surrealist Poetry since the 1930s (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), p. 91.

3

The Birmingham surrealists comprised Conroy Maddox, John Melville, Robert Melville, Emmy Bridgwater, Oscar Mellor and Desmond Morris. The London Group comprised Eileen Agar, David Gascoyne, Humphrey Jennings, Len Lye, E.L.T. Mesens, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, Toni del Renzio, Julian Trevelyan, John Tunnard and Simon Watson Taylor. These lists are indicative only. James D. Gifford links Gascoyne and Read, and a strain of British surrealism, to Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell of the Parisian Villa Seurat network; see ‘Anarchist Transformations of English Surrealism: The Villa Seurat Network’, Journal of Modern Literature, 33, 4 (Summer 2010), 57–71. The catalogue for the InternaƟonal Surrealism ExhibiƟon states that the organising committee comprised Hugh Sykes Davies, Gascoyne, Jennings, McKnight Kauffer, Rupert Lee, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read and Diana Brinton Lee (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1936).

4

Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935) and a ‘British Surrealist Manifesto’ published in Cahiers d’ Art, ed. André Breton (May 1935), and Read’s Surrealism (1936).

5

Jackaman, English, p. 93.

6

Francis Scarfe, Auden and AŌer: The LiberaƟon of Poetry, 1930–1941 (London: Routledge, 1942), p. xiii, cited in Nicholls, ‘England’, in Cambridge History, eds Marcus and Nicholls, p. 405.

7

For example see Read, ‘Introduction’ to the catalogue for the InternaƟonal Surrealist ExhibiƟon held in London, UK, 1936 (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1936), p. 13.

8

Rémy, Surrealism, p. 337, quoted in Nicholls, ‘England’, in Cambridge History, eds Marcus and Nicholls, p. 414n73.

9

Rabinovitch and Choudha have noted the spiritual dimension of surrealism; however, they apply a specific reading of the sacred which pursues a less sociological aspect than is discussed here in relation to the Collège’s surrealist practices.

10

Charles Madge was the author of articles such as ‘Surrealism for the English’, New Verse, 6 (December 1933), 14–18; and ‘The Meaning of Surrealism’, New Verse, 10 (August 1934), 13–15.

11

Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, New Statesman and NaƟon (30 January 1937), p. 155.

12

Laura Marcus, ‘The Optic of Mass Observation’, Mass Observations Anniversaries Conference, University of Sussex, 4–6 July 2012, (accessed 12 September 2014); Nick Hubble, Mass ObservaƟon and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 [2006]), pp. 108–09.

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13

Anon., ‘Future Meetings’, Oral History, 40, 1 (Spring 2012), 5.

14

Rémy, Surrealism, p. 103.

15

Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Brief Encounter: The Meeting, in Mass-Observation, of British Surrealism and Popular Anthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological InsƟtute, 1, 3 (September 1995), 496–97, 508. Cf. Kevin Jackson, ed., The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004).

16

See Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, eds, May the TwelŌh: Mass-ObservaƟon Day Surveys 1937 (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).

17

Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 70, cited in Hubble, Mass ObservaƟon, pp. 12–13.

18

MacClancy, ‘Encounter’, 506.

19

Rémy, Surrealism, p. 102.

20

Rod Edmond, ‘Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides and Bolton’, in WriƟng, Travel and Empire: Colonial NarraƟves of Other Cultures, eds Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 197–220.

21

Harrisson, quoted by David Francis Pocock, ‘Afterword’, in May the TwelŌh, eds Madge and Jennings, p. 418, in James Buzard, ‘Mass-Observation, Modernism, and AutoEthnography’, Modernism/modernity 4, 3 (1997), 102.

22

Ben Highmore, ‘Hopscotch Modernism: On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science’, Modernist Cultures, 2, 1 (May 2006), 71.

23

Rémy, Surrealism, p. 32. One source of this academicism is Cambridge’s Trinity College group Experiment, which included the future surrealists Jennings, Trevelyan and Sykes Davis.

24

Nicholls, ‘England’, p. 415.

25

See Rémy, Surrealism, pp. 305, 325–31.

26

Ali Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Penguin, 2005 [1974]).

27

On surrealism’s misogynistic milieu see Gloria Feman Orenstein, ‘Reclaiming the Great Mother: A Feminist Journey to Madness and Back in Search of a Goddess Heritage’, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 36, 1 (Spring 1982), 45–70. For a counter-analysis see works by Alyce Mahon. Rachel Rickard Straus and Ruth Maclean refer to the little-discussed matter of rape, in ‘Interview: Nazis, Nannies and Hair Omelettes: Leonora Carrington, the Last Living Surrealist, Looks Back on Her Extraordinary Life and Times’, The Independent, Sunday, 23 August 2009, (accessed 20 August 2010).

28

One could consider a connection between Carrington’s titling of this work and its proximity to J.K. Huysmans’s novel, Là-bas (Down There) (1891).

29

The New York stories ‘White Rabbits’, ‘Waiting’ and ‘The Seventh Horse’, and the Mexican novella The Stone Door can also be found in Leonora Carrington, The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, trans Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan (London: Virago Press, 1989), respectively pp. 55–71, 75–141, and Down Below is present in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Marina Warner (London: Virago Press, 1989), pp. 163–214.

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30

Susan Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2004), p. 59, with reference to Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1988).

31

Arturo Reyes, ‘Surrealist Influence in Latin-American poetry’, (accessed February 2010); and Wilson, ‘Coda’.

32

Quiroga, ‘Poetry’, pp. 332–33, 338.

33

Jorge F. Hernández, ‘Introduction’, in Sun, Stone, and Shadows, ed. Hernández (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2008).

34

Tythacott, Surrealism, pp. 182–83.

35

See Bonnie Lander’s ‘The Modern Mediatrix: Medieval Rhetoric in André Breton’s Nadja and Leonora Carrington’s ‘Down Below’’, Colloquy: text theory criƟque, 13 (2007), 51–72.

36

Jules Monnerot, La Poésie moderne et la sacré, p. 98ff, quoted in Ferdinand Alquié, The Philosophy of Surrealism, trans. Bernard Waldrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 116.

37

Raymond Williams, ‘Fuentes the Modern; Fuentes the Postmodern’, Hispania, 85, 2 (May 2002), 210; Kirsten F. Nigro, ‘Review: Recent Works on Latin American Theater’, LaƟn American Research Review, 9, 1 (1984), 275.

38

Pablo Weisz-Carrington, (accessed 2 July 2010).

39

Nicholson, LaƟn American, pp. 129–31; cf. 22–46.

40

Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 20, quoted in Tythacott, Surrealism, p. 184.

41

Gloria Orenstein, ‘Hermeticism and Surrealism in the Visual Works of Leonora Carrington as a Model for Latin-American Symbology’, Proceedings of the 10th Congress of the InternaƟonal ComparaƟve Literature AssociaƟon, New York, 1982, Vol. 2, ed. Anna Balakian (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 570, citation Raphael Girard, Esotericism of the Popol Vuh: The Sacred History of the Quiché Maya (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1979), p. 173. To which one could add a consideration of anima mundi.

42

Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the AvantGarde in France’, Yale French Studies, 75: The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in French Literature (1988), 165.

43

Whitney Chadwick, ‘Leonora Carrington: Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness’, Woman’s Art Journal, 7, 1 (Spring–Summer 1986), 37.

44

‘Surrealist Women’, Surreal Friends ExhibiƟon, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK, June–September 2010, (accessed 20 April 2010), now (accessed 10 July 2011).

45

Rachel Carroll, ‘The Return to the Body in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, and Flannery O’Connor’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996), p. 141.

46

Carroll, ‘Return’, p. 145. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage brings our attention to the role of biting evolving into toothlessness in HT, ‘The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour’, in Surrealism and Women, eds Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 83.

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47

Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 13; and Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness, cited in Orenstein, ‘Reclaiming’, 47. Also see the more recent study by Bonnie Lander comparing the medieval clergy’s treatment of female saints to that of male surrealists’ treatment of female surrealists, ‘The Modern Mediatrix’.

48

Chadwick, ‘Leonora Carrington’, 38. Carrington’s animal imagery is discussed by Rachel Carroll, Georgiana M.M. Colvile, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, Bettina Knapp, Annette Shandle Levitt and more recently by Natalya Lusty.

49

Anna Watz draws our attention to the fact that Angela Carter undertook a translation of Gauthier’s feminist text on surrealism in 1972, in ‘Angela Carter and Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité’, Contemporary Women’s WriƟng, 4, 2 (2010), 114–33.

50

Carroll, ‘Return’, p. 141.

51

Orenstein, ‘Hermeticism’, 565–75; Breton, ‘Manifesto’ (1924), p. 17, quoted in Nancy B. Mandlove, ‘Humor at the Service of the Revolution: Leonora Carrington’s Feminist Perspective on Surrealism’, PerspecƟves on Contemporary Literature, 7 (1981), 119. The sacrificed female in surrealism is discussed in relation to Carrington’s writing by Lander, Carroll and Christenson.

52

Gerlinde Rehberg, ‘Treacherous Mirrors and the Quest for the Self in the Work of Leonora Carrington’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia, 1996), p. 281.

53

Joanna Moorhead, ‘Interview with Matthew Gale’, quoted in ‘Leonora and Me’, The Guardian, Tuesday, 2 January 2007, (accessed 22 March 2010).

54

Julia Cabañas Salmerón, ‘“Errant in Time and Space”: A Reading of Leonora Carrington’s Major Literary Works’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hull, 1997), p. 202.

55

Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 49.

56

Carrington, ‘The Debutant’, in Anthology of Black Humour, ed. André Breton, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997 [1939]), pp. 335–40.

57

Ad-ject: when forces of attraction are stronger than repulsion, constituting the opposite of abject/ion.

58

Dating varies, referencing the first draft from the 1950s or the recovered and rewritten 1960s MS. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, p. x.

59

Carrington’s 1950s and 1960s plays are not considered here and may reveal other trends.

60

Tiina Arppe considers the accursed part of affectivity in Bataille’s work in AīecƟvity and the Social Bond: Transcendence, Economy and Violence in French Social Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

61

Borch-Jacobsen, EmoƟonal Tie, pp. 107–09.

5 MĔĉĆđĎęĎĊĘ Ĕċ ęčĊ FĊĒĆđĊ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę: TčĊ TčĊėĎĆēęčėĔĕĊ Ĕċ ęčĊ SĆĈėĊĉ QĚĊĘę Ďē LĊĔēĔėĆ CĆėėĎēČęĔē’Ę TčĊ HĊĆėĎēČ TėĚĒĕĊę

SURREALIST NARRATIVE The only obstacle in this way of seeing (moreover, of an unequalled profundity – in some ways, inaccessible) is what, in man, is irreducible to project: non-discursive existence, laughter, ecstasy, which link man – in the end – to the negation of project which he nevertheless is – man ulƟmately ruins himself in a total effacement – of what he is, of all human affirmation. Such would be the easy passage from the philosophy of work – Hegelian and profane – to sacred philosophy. Bataille, ‘Blue of Noon’ (1936), GBIE 80, original emphasis

Leonora Carrington’s Le Cornet acousƟque (The Hearing Trumpet), published in 1974, is a later addition to the surrealist corpus. As with The Lost Steps, it is a novel in which a collage of genres are represented and, in addition, an extended collage of myths and beliefs is visible. A welcome incursion in the trends of Carrington scholarship is Susan Suleiman’s consideration of this intertextuality and deployment of narrative collage, through which the playful and destabilising nature of the surrealist narrative is revealed.1 The Hearing Trumpet begins with the presentation of a hearing trumpet to the 92-year-old protagonist Marian by her friend Carmella. Although still very much a surrealist object, this gift is not just a curiosity, but rather its value lies in its restorative function and, as such, it is termed a ‘miracle’ (HT 5). Marian is now able to hear once again and with comic aplomb she surreptitiously hears that her family intend to place her in an ‘Institution’ for old ladies ‘run by the Well of Light Brotherhood . . . [and] financed by a prominent American cereal company (Bouncing Breakfast Cereals Co.)’ (HT 10).2 Begrudgingly she accepts the move, which, as it transpires, sets her on

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a sacred quest leading to the alchemical Grail: a quest interpretable through the theory of the Collège. The Well of Light Brotherhood Institution, located on the site of ‘an ancient Indian-Spanish village’ in the suburb of Santa Brigida, offers a surrealistic tableau where residents, ‘aged over seventy and under a hundred’, are housed in a variety of funfair domiciles (HT 23, 30). However, this sense of play is juxtaposed with the regulating authority of Dr and Mrs Gambit, who enforce an ‘Inner Christianity’ based upon concepts of ‘Self Observation’ against the seven sins, ‘Self Remembering’ and a rigid ‘Work’ ethic (HT 47, 28–33). With varying degrees of submission and resistance the residents spend their days abiding by the rules of the Institution, which could be aligned with the Protestant work ethic. The monotony of institutional life is punctuated for Marian by the internal rivalries between inmates and by the embedded biography of an eighteenthcentury Abbess. The trompe l’oeil defines a variety of situations at Lightsome Hall as appearances are not as they seem: in Marian’s tower, which resembles a ‘lighthouse’, most of the furniture in the room is, in fact, only a painting of each item; Natacha, a lauded mystic is unveiled as a murderer, and her victim, ‘Maude’, is in fact a man in disguise (HT 24). However, the greatest illusion is revealed by the Abbess’s biography which shows that for millennia Christianity has suppressed indigenous worship of the female deity and demonised her stagheaded consort as the devil. The central narrative in the novel is set in the twentieth century, but it is interspersed with the subsidiary narrative of the eighteenth-century Abbess’s biography, comprised of documents and letters. The divergent tone and mythic content of the embedded narrative progressively transforms the main narrative until they fuse, and a mythic figure from the subsidiary narrative irrupts in the central narrative. Through information contained in the Abbess’s biography, Marian sets out to continue the Abbess’s quest to return a cup (Grail) and its contents (the pneuma) to the Goddess. Compared to her earlier works the surrealist expression of myth in this novel is far greater. In the novel the reader is offered a mature vision of the alchemical world and myth’s ability to cause affective changes in ontology. It is a novel that turns the official surrealist object of dream woman into a surrealist subject as the living myth of the woman as goddess. It is, however, deeply surrealist in mode, style and intention despite its divergences from the formal line. It contains elements of dreams, myths, quest, fictionalised autobiography, transformations and, at core, a humorous take on a new surrealist altered state of consciousness proposed by Carrington. In the novel Carrington engages fully with the surrealist use of myth, unlike Carpentier’s non-mythic postcolonial representations in The Lost Steps. Surrealism’s interest in altered states of consciousness, such as clinical insanity, childhood or femme-enfant naivety, the oneiric, primitive, amour fou, as expressions of the merveilleux all aim to expose the limitations of conventional thought and to heighten the role of creativity. The social tone of this comes to the surface in dissident and alternative surrealist expressions of an altered state of sacred ecstasy wherein a ‘loss of self’ in external communication with the unknown occurs through coherent rituals and rites as well as symbols (GBIE 140). The Collège’s analysis of coherent sacred sociology reflects the

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surrealist interest in the esoteric in a different manner to official surrealism where, as mentioned, ‘the majority of surrealists simply took possession of traditional symbols and images for use as their prime matter, without the spirituality that goes with them’.3 Although Bataille and the Collège’s theories imbue surrealism’s vision with increasingly sociological tones, they remain loyal to the surrealist view of myth, as Richardson outlines: [T]he profound sense of surrealism lay in the fact that it recognized the falsity of rationalism’s ideological claims to define what is ‘real.’ Such a concept destroys the notion of myth, just as it becomes itself what it denies: reality is a myth. A society that denies its mythical basis therefore denies part of its essence, and is living a lie . . . The thrust of Western civilization has been to deny this mythical basis, and to posit reality as an ontological given that can be located and conquered. (‘Introduction’, GBAM 14)

At a conference in 1948, Bataille discussed the role which myth played in surrealism, interpreting it as being ‘connected to one meaning of the word religious’ (GBAM 75). Caillois sees myth not as ‘prelogical’, an escape, or a result of censorship, but rather, ‘a powerful investment of emoƟon’ in which the affective nature of living myth serves to produce the ‘collective ecstasy’ that surrealistically ruptures reality (RCES 120; RC‘BC’ 152). The dissident work of Bataille and the Collège enacts a rigorous theoretical investigation of surrealist ideas that is a vital part of surrealist history. Caillois, following Durkheim, cites group actions during festivals as a primary sacred infraction of ‘intense emotions’, moving between ‘ecstasy and self-control’ to release tensions, rejuvenate and rebind the group (RC‘F’ 282, 302). Caillois and the Collège’s concern with festival ritual derives from and changes, one can argue, the official surrealist concern with what Sarane Alexandrian terms the ‘festivals of imagination’ which shaped surrealism.4 This demonstrates how the work of dissident surrealism grows from official surrealism and indicates the permeability of the line separating official and dissident surrealism. Caillois’s description of the festival ritual illustrates Bataille’s heterology, which highlights and recovers what is repulsed from bourgeois society. Interestingly, Tiina Arppe identifies that the heterogeneous is the social counterpart/analogue of the unconscious, whereas ‘heterology’ would correspond to its theory with the same difficulties concerning the possibility of getting a grip of the unconscious (this can only be done through its symptoms, that is, its effects in the consciousness). Bataille himself refers to this.5

The social aspect of sacralisation is integral to an alternative surrealist exploration of the unknown and constitutes a method of enacting the official surrealist recovery of what is excised by rationalism. Eliade stipulates that to sacralise something or someone is to give a very specific affective value to it by connecting it to cosmic/primordial time (illud tempus) and it is just such revaluing that occurs in the sacred ritual (MESP 167, 87, 195). Bataille describes moments of sacred ecstasy as communication, and in the work of the Collège one sees this in the affective forces of power, myths and sacred rites in society. As noted, this version of dissident surrealism does not rupture ‘reality’ through

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the individual unconscious, as in official surrealism, but by the affects of heterogeneous ecstasy. In The Hearing Trumpet Carrington utilises the myth of the Grail quest contained in the Arthurian cycle by Sir Thomas Malory (1485).6 In doing so she expresses the return of the mythic themes of ‘the quest of the Holy Grail, of heroic and mystical initiation’ in surrealism described by Eliade (MEMDM 35), and confirms J.H. Matthews’s observation that ‘surrealist novelists avail themselves of certain myth patterns, like that of the Grail’ and the ‘search for selfknowledge’.7 Carrington outlines Christianity’s suppression of Goddess worship and overwriting of the alchemical Goddess cup with the quest for the Holy Grail and, in doing so, inverts its authority (HT 92). At this point in her fictional oeuvre, Carrington begins to participate in an alternative strain of surrealism that turns from the surrealist merveilleux and the individual unconscious toward a surrealist ekstasis induced from without: through sacred ritual dance and engagement with living myth and illud tempus. The impact of this conceptual shift was profound, giving surrealist ruptures to the real a social meaning far beyond that which had been presented in official surrealism. Although the Collège’s studies provoked anxiety as a result of its alleged proximity to fascist ideology, its focus on social bonding was motivated by the avant-garde and surrealism rather than right-wing politics. It is through these ritual acts, trances and myths that the quest for social ontology and rebinding can be understood and can illuminate the alternative surrealist narratives discussed. British surrealism favoured the Romantic gothic genre and Carrington exhibits this feature in many of her early short stories, as discussed. In this late novel, though, these gothic elements appear only as a subsidiary style and are primarily allied with the Abbess narrative. Carrington draws upon the gothic device of the found manuscript when Marian is given an old manuscript of the Abbess’s biography written by her unsympathetic ‘confessor’, as instanced in Horace Walpole’s gothic novel The Castle of Otranto: ‘The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England.’8 The castle or stately house common to the gothic novel appears in The Hearing Trumpet in the form of a lavishly decorated convent – which the Abbess gained through ‘incantations’ and ‘black powers’ (HT 76–77). Before reading the Abbess’s biography, Marian encounters a painting of the Abbess in the dining hall. The generic style, both of the biography and its introduction into the main narrative, is gothic. The blending of the affects of attraction and repulsion to create an abject tone characterises the gothic genre, and reality is rendered uncanny through the terror induced by the supernatural. However, this terror is that of a ‘melodramatic, stagey sort’.9 Indeed the Abbess’s picture creates this ‘stagey’ atmosphere as the supposedly saintly Abbess is given the unnerving attributes of ‘mockery and malevolence’ (HT 29). The gothic technique of defamiliarisation is created through the device of the supernatural dream and the meeting point of the beautiful and the terrifying, both of which indicate why this genre appealed to surrealists. British surrealism’s particular identification with the gothic in some cases occurred even before the appropriation of surrealism’s more avant-garde features.10 The overemphasis on such stagey features potentially negated surrealist elements and exoticised its esoteric

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beliefs. A prominent example of this is the novel Goose of Hermogenes (1961) by the British female surrealist Ithell Colquhoun. In contrast, Carrington’s use of the gothic genre in the Abbess’s story adds productively to her generic collage, and contributes to her particularly British surrealist identification of the surreal with gothic aesthetics and literary devices.11 The gothic style of the biography sets the narrator, Marian and the reader in a specific relationship to its subject. However, once one learns that the Abbess is in fact on a quest for the Goddess’s cup and is aligned with Mary Madelaine, who is ‘a high initiate of the mysteries of the Goddess’, her actions can be interpreted from a new perspective (HT 75). Various forms of verbal play are common within surrealism, serving to unfix meaning from its routine formulations. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron discusses this feature, noting Jean Paulhan’s comments on altered proverbs in Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret’s 152 proverbes mis au goût du jour (1925) which ‘disturbs the functioning of mental habits and exposes the true realities of the world’.12 A similar role is given to the use of pun in Carrington’s text, as Hubert highlights: ‘While sharing with Ernst and other surrealists a penchant for subversion, for surreptitious intrusion and puns, [Carrington] thrusts these devices into a new space, where the simultaneity of many legends, far from leading to inner contradictions, stimulates new vibrations, new impulses, new illuminations.’13 Carrington’s use of the verbal pun is exampled in the name of the resident, Maude: for Carrington, using a gender-disguise plot device common to Shakespearean comedy, posthumously reveals that ‘Maude’ is really Arthur. The dual name of Maude-Arthur puns on Morte d’Arthur, from Malory’s Grail quest, as observed by Lusty.14 Furthering this verbal play Carrington’s Grail quest also includes the character Galahad, Marian’s son, who dispatches her to the Institution, Christabel, a resident and an initiate into the Goddess’s wisdom, the name a pun on Christ-Abel, Mary Madelaine for Mary Magdalene and possibly Carmella for the gothic character Carmilla.15 To construct the quest narrative Carrington draws on fragments from numerous theosophical traditions, syncretically arranging them into a surrealist collage. The Goddess in question is linked to nature worship, the Mother-Earth divinity, and is referred to in the text variously as Venus, the Greco-Roman threefold Goddess Hecate and Barbarus.16 The chalice is described as that ‘which held the elixir of life [the pneuma]’, belonged to Venus, and fell to earth where it was held by the Goddess Barbarus until commandeered by Christianity and named the Holy Grail (HT 91–92). Pneuma, ancient Greek for soul or spirit, denotes ‘the life force’, akin to Sanskrit prana, linking ‘breath and life’.17 In the novel, Cupid’s prenatal imbibing of the pneuma sacralises him, transforming him into a God. Orenstein suggests that in Carrington’s vocabulary the pneuma is ‘our interconnectedness with non-human nature’ (HT 91).18 The search for something non-human, for some sacred ecstatic experience beyond-the-self, or ancient ekstasis, is an integral aspect of the pre-Christian Grail legend, a quest which Marian sets out to fulfil and, in the process, overcomes a hunger strike, a sphinx-like riddle game and a mythical explosion. Marian is aided in the quest by various residents from the Institution, a bard turned postman called Taliessin, her old surrealist friend Marlborough and his sister Anubeth, a Hungarian pregnant human-wolf therianthrope.

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Through her connection to the Goddess quest, as mentioned, the Abbess’s actions become recast in a more positive, if still suspect, light. The Abbess commits murder in order to acquire ‘the precious flasks of Musc Madelaine, the ointment said to have been . . . found beside the mummy of Mary Madelaine’ which are purported to have magical properties that cause levitation and orgies (HT 78). However, it is not until her later identification with Marian and the Giant Bee Goddess manifestation, that this gothic aspect of the Triple Goddess could be said to fully become part of the adject sacred. It is during this transition from abject to adject that the pneuma comes into being through the creation of a sacralised, mythic therianthrope. In quest of the Goddess’s cup, the Abbess, disguised as Don Rosalendo de Tartaro, travels to Ireland to infiltrate the stronghold of the Knights Templar where the Grail lies. The Abbess’s biography at this point is supplemented by two further documents, a Hebrew and a Latin scroll, and begins to take on mythic proportions (HT 94–98). The first is a prophecy in Hebrew which reveals the identity of the cup’s divine protector: [T]he [female] Foreign Stranger [otherwise translated as Bar-bar-a] Who shall once more replenish the Cup with Holy Pneuma by [a] ritual joining to the yellow [or golden] Horned God, Keeper of the Most Holy Vessel. At the beginning the two spirits which are known as Twins are the one Female and the Other Male. They established at the beginning Life, the Pneuma and the Holy Cup to hold the Pneuma. And when these two Spirits Met such was the manner of the birth of the Winged One [or the Feathered Hermaphrodite, Sephirá]. (HT 94 as original)

This document retells the illud tempus origins of the pneuma and cup. The alchemical overtones of this description recall the official surrealist factor, described by Jean Snitzer Schoenfeld, of Breton’s attention to the philosopher’s stone, as a ‘coniuncto, the joining of the masculine [gold and sol] and feminine [silver and luna] principles and of man with his lover, which will form the hermaphroditic “bloc de lumière” [Philosopher’s Stone] . . . that can change the world.’19 In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism Breton cites the philosopher’s stone as a symbol for the imagination.20 This official surrealist identification with alchemy is evident in the formulation used here, but so too is an alternative surrealist identification with the affects of ekstasis, as will be discussed. The Latin document also contains a prophecy that speaks of a Horned God who kills any man attempting to view the cup: Taliessin sings that only a lady may enter the presence of the Horned God and come to no harm. An unknown stranger from the nether world is to come and replenish the cup . . . Taliessin sings a curious roundelay which sounds like advice for Don Rosalendo . . . He then refers to something feathered to be born. (HT 97)

Jointly the documents detail that the Abbess will replenish the Goddess’s cup with holy pneuma by joining with the Horned God and procreating. These two references to the Horned God echo an earlier reference to the Abbess’s hidden worship: ‘by the time the Cardinal arrived she had put all the statues of the saints

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the right side up and caused the goats’ horns to be removed from the top of the Holy Tabernacle’ (HT 86). The horns suggest three different but interrelated preChristian figures: the Greek deity Dionysus, whom Graves describes as horned, and the Celtic Horned God21 allied with the stag god of the woods, the Green Man, thereby creating a symbolic triptych.22 The sacred figures, Dionysus, the Horned God and the Green Man were transposed by Christianity into the symbol of the horned devil during its systematic stigmatisation of indigenous pagan beliefs and nature worship. The pneuma (spirit or soul) issuing from the union of Goddess devotee and God is, in this case, a mythic feathered and winged therianthropic offspring. Although the Abbess remains unsuccessful in her attempt to acquire the actual cup from the Knights and return it to the Goddess, the prophecy is fulfilled as the pneuma, created in her offspring the Sephira (a Cabbalistic term for multiform divine manifestations), fills the cup. It is evident here that Carrington’s use of animal symbolism has reached a highly developed stage. The novel reflects not only Nahualism but in addition a Bataillean stance on sacred communication between the human and the realm of nature (GBTR 13). As Orenstein relates, ‘[f]or Leonora Carrington, in rejecting our animal-nature, in renouncing our interconnectedness with non-human nature (the Pneuma), humans have assumed an arrogant superiority to all other species, which has led to the destruction of many life-forms as well as to the poisoning of the Earth.’23 To deny this connection is to deny myth, a denial presented in the novel through Christianity’s suppression of the pre-Christian Goddess and an overwriting of the quest for the Goddess cup with the quest for the Holy Grail (HT 92). Of the two therianthropic hybrids present in the novel, the first, the Sephira, is overtly sacralised. The second is the matriarch Anubeth, Marlborough’s humanwolf sister, who offers aid to the Goddess (HT 156). The Sephira appears at two points in the novel, first in the embedded narrative of the Abbess’s biography where his birth is recorded and also prophesied in the Latin and Hebrew texts, and second in the final stages of the main narrative. The symbolism of this therianthropic mythical creature does not appear to be discussed fully in critical studies. In order to understand the level of sacred meaning at work in Carrington’s syncretic modern myth, it is paramount that this figure be decoded: his birth, his suppression and the liberating, rebellious affects causing the dance that brings his return. The sacred ecosociological turn Carrington has taken in forming this therianthrope differs greatly from her earlier work and serves to extend the symbolism of the official surrealist therianthropic hybrid.24 Here, the sacred import of the figure and its role within the quest, and the elective community, partake in what could be called ecomythic symbolism.25 The birth of the Abbess’s therianthropic child is detailed by the confessor, who relates that the Abbess exploded after giving birth to ‘a boy, no bigger than a barn owl, luminously white and winged, that fluttered near the ceiling. He bore a bow and arrows’ (HT 99). The bow and arrows suggest Cupid and consequently recall Carrington’s earlier comment that Venus ‘is said to have quaffed the magic liquid [the elixir of life from the original chalice] when she was impregnated with Cupid, whereupon he leapt in the womb and, absorbing the pneuma, became

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a God’, and similarly the Abbess’s boy is born after contact with the cup and its protector (HT 91). Thereby the figure of the Abbess’s boy Sephira echoes that of Cupid and the Sephirá born of the Twins in illud tempus. These three events recall one another, but are crucially different and, as such, the tripling of these sacred images creates a temporal spiral in the narrative’s symbols leading from the present to myth to illud tempus (a spiralling also evident in the rhetorical features of the novel, as Salmerón notes).26 This quest to recover the Grail, revealed by the Abbess’s gothic biography to be incomplete, is resumed in the main narrative by Marian. The eternal return of the Goddess quest, symbolised in the novel through her triptych devotees Mary Madelaine, the Abbess and Marian, further reinforces this spiralling effect in the narrative. If the Abbess’s biography and character are rendered in a gothic style which turns increasingly mythic, then the Marian narrative begins realistically, quickly turns surreal and then mystic when, in the main narrative, sacred moments begin to fracture the already surrealist reality of Lightsome Hall. It is when the Sephira erupts from the subsidiary narrative into the main narrative that the mythic and the mystic strands collide and merge. Although The Hearing Trumpet appears naïve, partly due to the mythic mode and temporal spiralling effects, and has been identified as presenting an unrealistic feminist utopia,27 in fact it offers a complex analogical use of surrealist techniques. The Goddess symbol not only foregrounds a positive identification with the female aspect of this deity, but, when decoded, it primarily relates the failure of humanity to safeguard the earth as sacred.28 The quest for the Goddess cup draws its sacred symbolism from a variety of sources and, through the reactivation of these mystic symbols and mythical deities, Carrington represents social rites of self-empowerment and rejuvenation. This gendered, alternative surrealist statement on Celtic, indigenous, pagan or Goddess worship in the novel is a part of emergent feminist, ecological discourses of resistance to patriarchal social structures in the 1960s and 1970s, made on the ground of the sacred. When reading the novel through the lens of the Collège, this surrealist use of sacred and esoteric symbolism serves to reveal that myth as lived reality differs from the boundaries set around the surrealist merveilleux.

THE EKSTATIC RITUAL Without the sacred, the totality of the plenitude of being escapes man; he would no longer be anything but incomplete . . . In the paragraph devoted to the effects of atomic energy, Caillois concludes: ‘The festival . . . was the creation of the imagination. It was facsimile, dance, and play. It pantomimed the destruction of the universe . . . It would no longer be the same. The day in which energy was liberated in a sinister paroxysm . . . would definitely break the equilibrium in favour of destruction.’29 Bataille, ‘Poetry’ (1950), GBAM 122

Although analyses of The Hearing Trumpet often point to its presentation of a feminist utopia, Carrington also places centre stage the conflict between women

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and in doing so defends against an uncritical representation of female bonding. The negative side of female society is demonstrated in the novel not only through the character of Mrs Gambit who enforces the rules of Inner Christianity but also through two residents, the ‘mystic’ Natacha and Mrs Van Tocht – both devotees of Inner Christianity – who attempt to poison a third resident, Georgina, accidentally killing Maude-Arthur instead (HT 68–70). Retrospectively, Marian realises that she witnessed the preparations for the murder and knows its perpetrators. In protest against the female murderers the women stage a hunger strike, which marks the beginning of collective action on the part of the female residents, not only against the perpetrators but also against the rules of the Institution itself (HT 112). The critique of the Institution’s Protestant ‘Work’ ethic presented in the novel can be aligned with a surrealist opposition to labour, a feature Bataille specifically theorised in his critique of the utilitarian values of project and the ‘order of things’ which dominate the ‘intimate order’: ‘If the polite, calmed manners and the emptiness of project prevail, life no longer puts up with idleness. In a similar way, consider the boulevards on a Sunday afternoon. The worldly life and bourgeois Sundays bring out the character of ancient festivals, the forgetting of all project’ (GBIE 48). Bataille expresses here the Collège’s specific focus on social and religious regulation and the deregulating release from this empirical logic provided by primary experiences of sacred ritual. Richardson further points to the connection Bataille makes between religion and work: ‘Bataille thus defined the Christian God as representing nothing but a “hypostasis of work”.’30 If the deregulation offered by ancient sacred rituals drives this manifestation of dissident surrealism, Alexandrian offers a way to describe the non-sacred deregulation driving official surrealism, through the ‘festival of the imaginary’ evident in art exhibitions.31 In The Hearing Trumpet, it is exactly the rebellious irruption of the ‘character of ancient festivals’ and their sacred-social ritual affects that rupture the work ethic and doctrine of Inner Christianity. One can see then, the representation of not only a feminist or Celtic version of the surrealist revolt against Christianity, both of which are deeply valid readings, but in addition a coherent comparativist sacred version, establishing a connection with not only the Collège’s dissident re-theorisation of this surrealist revolt but alternative strains of international surrealism. Humour was one of the most effective methods employed by surrealism to overturn the rules of the establishment, and Carrington extends this use by laughing at the logical premises of those restrictive forces binding the characters and guiding their narrative figuration.32 She does this in ways that are akin to Bataille’s heterology, as will be detailed. Carrington’s sophisticated use of surrealist humour in the novel contains traces of her earlier official surrealist humour noir, now a minor feature overlaid with newer festival ritual elements evocative of sacred laughter or the saturnalia.33 Humour and the sacred have long been allied in an assortment of religious laughters, ranging from Protestant suppression of laughter because of its association with a body constructed as dangerous, to therapeutic laughter that is grounded in the interpenetration of religion and medical science, to several strands of traditions of Buddhist and Zen laughter: . . . joke-telling as spiritual exercise.34

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In this way the liberating effects of humour in the psyche can be connected to the liberating role of humour in the sacred-social where one moves adjectly from the sacred as regulation to that of the sacred as deregulation: to excess and release. Betina Knapp and Warner similarly see Carrington’s use of humour, which questions the parameters of regulating logic, as intimately connected to the sacred.35 Knapp details: By endowing such a nonsensical object with numinosum, [Carrington] places the reader into a new and higher frame of reference. Like the koan, a device in Zen Buddhism that points to the limitations of the thinking function by ridiculing it, she disarms the participant, thus giving him entry into an acausal realm of whimsy.36

One sees how the Buddhist kƃan is a pedagogical tool within sacred reality that is akin to this use in surrealist narrative. Bataille describes the role of laughter in society as a mode of expenditure, in a series alongside non-discursive existence and ecstasy (GBIE 89–90, 80). Although Bataille does not definitively connect laughter to the sacred, it stands behind the need for the periphery to laugh back at the centre in ‘the saturnalias or festivals of madmen [that] reversed the roles’ (GBIE 90). Both Bretonian and Bataillean surrealism were interested in witchcraft and Satanism, as illustrated by the allure of Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862), J.K. Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891), Jules Bois’s Le Satanisme (1895) and the admittance of the cleric/Satanist, Ernest de Gengenbach (1903–79) to the movement in 1925.37 Mahon details that ‘Michelet . . . described the habitats of witches in terms of greenery and wild landscapes such as forests, woodlands, and “old Celtic cromlech[s]”.’38 This early interest in the esoteric again rose to prominence approaching the post-war period, as Breton looked to Romanticism, the alchemical, the magician-artist and the femme-sorcière (sorceress) in his texts Arcane 17 (Arcanum 17, 1944) and L’Art magique (1957).39 Esotericism was an important feature for many female surrealists as well as male surrealists, amongst them Valentine Penrose, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonor Fini, but, perhaps in the more official surrealist sense defined by Lepetit and Bauduin, as form ‘without the spirituality’.40 It is possible to read Carrington’s turn to the Goddess and the Celtic magic of the female protagonists in The Hearing Trumpet, through the official surrealist images of sacred women in Breton’s Arcane 17. Breton’s title refers to the seventeenth card (arcanum) of the tarot, the Star, and the text deals with the figure of the femme-sorcière and a re-evaluation of the sacred feminine, via the figures of the Celtic fairy Mélusine, Egyptian Isis and the Star, as offering hope for the reconstitution of man. Although in dialogue with the supplementary/mediator position of the Goddess and sexualised femmesorcière offered by Arcane 17, it is generally accepted that Carrington’s novel extends official surrealist practice,41 as Mahon details: Carrington’s portrayal of woman in text and image involved a clear dialogue with Surrealist theories on desire, alchemy and mythology and woman’s seminal role in each . . . Her consciousness of the need for all to be equal between the sexes is all the more powerful when viewed within the broader frame of Surrealism’s history and when appreciated as subverting its discourse from within.42

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In her novel Carrington subverts official surrealism by refusing to place woman as mediator, instead making her a subject and gifting the femme-sorcière a new positionality through what, arguably, can be seen as the Bataillean mystical sorcerer’s apprentice, gifted with the forces available to the masculine subject. Indeed it is not Mélusine, Isis and the seventeenth arcanum, the Star,43 that are reproduced in the novel but an alternative myth of the Celtic Epona,44 the Greek Hecate and the second arcanum, the Priestess. It is in this sense that Lusty draws the novel into relationship with Bataille’s pornographic novel, Story of the Eye, to show how both attempt to push beyond the limits of the aesthetic and political boundaries that came to define Bretonian Surrealism throughout the 1920s and 1930s . . . [using] parodic strategies and inverted significations that mark these texts as insider/outsider works. . . . But while it is easy to see a certain reworking of Bretonian Surrealism in these texts . . . they are in striking ways also indebted to the critical momentum that inaugurated the aesthetic and political concerns of the first Surrealist manifesto [and] offer an implicit critique of a Bretonian transcendent vision, defined in The Second Manifesto as the ideal point at which all contradictions cease.45

Lusty identifies Carrington and Bataille’s dialogue with surrealism as one of supporters of its overall aims and motives, and that they, as insiders/outsiders, both reflect and analyse surrealism. Although official and dissident/alternative surrealism are separated more clearly here for the purposes of this investigation, they are, as Lusty demonstrates, always connected and in dialogue. I echo Lusty’s move in placing Carrington in relation to Bataille, but a very different Bataille: the sociologist of the Collège. Looking at the novel through the lens of the Collège, one sees other elements alongside the Celtic, feminist and alchemical: the informé (void), affect-led divin fou (ecstasy) and the sociological sacred. It is this difference that separates a sensationalised gothic or witchcraft, the madness Socrates describes as arising from human illness, and the erotic esoteric of Bretonian surrealism (an eroticism that also concerns Bataille’s fictional writings – serving to again allude to the permeability of the line between Bataille and Breton’s surrealism), from the sacred reality studied by the Collège, the divine madness Socrates details and the concerns of the sacred-social in alternative surrealist novels. The Collège’s dissident surrealist view of the sacred ritual which serves to fracture the real is given in one instance by Caillois’s paper ‘Festival’. Here the social rhythm of primary experiences of the sacred as release and secondary experiences of sacred tension alternate.46 Utilising Freud’s tension-release model and principles in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as indicated by Hollier above, the Collège continued the surrealist aim to negate conventional attitudes, not only by rejecting religion and embracing primitivism, but by taking the step to critically analyse the social movement of the sacred in their own locale, and by implication to analyse surrealism as a mode of release from conventional attitudes underpinning the regulatory forces of society.47 These ideas are also given in Bataille’s paper, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, which elucidates such social use of myths and rituals, and perhaps identifies why official surrealist use of the esoteric is presented ‘without the spirituality’: ‘Hence

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a myth cannot be compared to the scattered fragments of a whole that is broken apart. It is dependent on a total existence’ (GB‘SA’ 22). Carrington’s protagonist more closely evokes Bataille’s sorcerer’s apprentice who resists servility then, than Breton’s mediator or sexualised femme-sorcière. According to Benjamin Noys, it is Bataille’s sorcerer’s apprentice who ‘releases energies that [s/]he cannot control’, and which Bataille demonstrates the system cannot control in The Accursed Share (1949).48 Energies, such as the ecstasy of divine madness, that the system cannot control, and so represses to create a ‘dissociated life’ broken into three: ‘The renunciation of life in exchange for a function is the condition consented to by each of them [scientist, artist, politician]’ (GB‘SAi’ 227). It is not just the unification of the three elements but the ‘total’ person (greater than the sum of its parts) that Bataille claims will offset such repression. It is this totality that is visible in the triple images of the Goddess, which Carrington has her narrator recognise as unified in sacred reality, and which evokes the mythic symbol of the White Goddess, alongside the three images of the horned deity and three images of the sacred offspring. These affective connections to the sacred through tripartite images and moments of what Caillois would call the ‘sacred as infraction’, shaped by the unbinding force of the death drive, in rituals or other mystic rites constitute the collective experiences of Durkheim’s primary sacred, which may provoke ecstasy.49 Such rituals utilise symbolic analogies, described by Eliade as comparative applications of the axis mundi (sacred axis connecting higher and lower, exampled by a tree, ladder and so forth, L. axis of the world) and imago mundi (delineation of a sacred space, L. image of the world), to convey the fracturing of the profane with the sacred. The Collège would be able to fully appreciate the sociological function of the ‘ancient festivals’ (GBIE 48) which, Dodds notes, are the release from restraint central to the cult of Dionysus which aims to achieve ‘ecstasis’ in order to ‘satisfy and relieve the impulse to reject responsibility’.50 The sacred ritual is both a diversion from the ‘sacred as regulation’, and a potential source of collective ecstasy or mystical ekstasis leading to ontological metamorphosis. The abject, visceral or sexualised features which often characterise surrealist narrative and which are amplified in the majority of Bataille’s theory and fiction, through the sexualised images of Dionysian festivals and the (non-sacred) routes beyond-the-self that he details, do not take centre stage in The Hearing Trumpet. It is indeed reflected in the Abbess’s sexual and violent ‘orgies’ but does not provide the main focus of the surrealist social release (HT 77–79). Instead, this comes as the women arrange the details of their strike by moonlight, and their meeting culminates in a ritual dance in which – rather than the male magicianartist or the femme-sorcière – the uncontrollable energies of the sorcerer’s apprentice appear:51 ‘Soon we were dancing round and around the pond . . . We seemed inspired by some marvellous power, which poured energy into our decrepit carcasses. Christabel began to chant’ (HT 117). Christabel officiates over the ritual and leads the chant; it is in this sense that she symbolises the female surrealist reclaiming of the tarot’s second arcanum, the Priestess, which replaces the Star of Breton’s Arcane 17. In The Hearing Trumpet the ritual mystic dance repositions the marginalised participants into a cohesive group, just as in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps the

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shaman’s protective incantation banishes death’s forces and ontologically renews the group, including No-Man himself. But it is not Apollo’s madness here, for the group enact the ritual and therefore recall Dionysian madness and its ancient association with dance. In the Phaedrus, Dionysian divine madness comes through such ‘worship, discovering mystic rites and purifications’ (Ph 244e). And the energy the women experience echoes that of the Bacchants who worshipped Dionysus and ‘gained miraculous abilities when possessed by the madness of their god (Ion 534a)’ (Ph 253an108).52 As mentioned, Dionysus is viewed in the form of ‘promoter of civilization, a law-giver, and a lover of peace’ and ‘protector of trees in general’.53 Therefore Dionysus’ mystical divine madness, or ekstasis, referenced in the Phaedrus, can be allied to communication with nature, such that the intoxication or ekstasis of the women is not that of prurient festival coupling but the mystical ‘power of nature’.54 The critic Helen Cullyer details that such dances of reintegration, acceptance and the purification of illness are identified symbolically with Dionysus in ancient Greece: The fifth stasimon of Sophocles’ AnƟgone is a kletic hymn to the god Dionysus . . . asking him to return to the city of his birth to cleanse it from disease with his purifying foot (1143) . . . The katharsis is to be effected by ecstatic Dionysiac dancing (hence the emphasis on ποδί at 1143) . . . the word ποδί suggests ecstatic Dionysiac dancing, which, in several fifth- and fourth-century texts, is conceived of as a homeopathic cure for madness and mental distress.55

Sophocles’ reference to the purificatory role of Dionysian ecstasy in AnƟgone parallels Socrates’ description in the Phaedrus, and both texts highlight an aspect of this mystical ecstasy that is often obscured by more salacious Dionysian imagery. The transformation of the city from that of diseased abject to purified adject, from left to right sacred, through ekstaƟc dance effects the ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ that Caillois, following Durkheim, attributes to the sacred ritual. Durkheim, Michèle Richman observes, ‘underscore[d] the extraordinary transformative capacity of such gatherings to project participants into another – superior – dimension of social and moral being’ which has a regenerative effect upon society.56 This is the sacred-social (surrealist) state of consciousness I propose as the foundation of the dissident and alternative surrealism considered here, one which grows directly out of official surrealist concerns with creative and therapeutic altered states of consciousness. The release offered in ritual dance binds and rejuvenates the group. Supporting a reading of the women’s dance as ritual, Carmella, Marian’s friend, describes dance as a symbol of occult power, a definition that gains validation when Christabel accompanies the women’s dance with a chant invoking the triple Goddess, Hecate (HT 111, 117). The invocation leads to the hierophany of the Goddess as a gigantic Queen Bee: ‘a cloud gathered over the round pond . . . Then it seemed that the cloud formed itself into an enormous bumble bee . . . All this may have been a collective hallucination’ (HT 117–18). The dance ritual and its ekstaƟc intoxication occurs three times and on its

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last occasion the hierophany manifests once more: ‘The air was filled with a humming and a drumming of wings, and millions of bumble bees gathered over our heads and formed a great female figure over the boiling cauldron. . . . The Goddess hummed with a million voices and drops of honey fell like manna’ (HT 156). Carrington’s identification of the Goddess and the bee draws upon an ancient affiliation: ‘The connection between the Great Goddess and bees is archaic, primordial in fact. Aphrodite was called Melissa, or Queen Bee, that honey was involved in burial rituals . . . Several of the dancing priestesses and goddesses of the Cretan-Mycenaean rings excavated by Sir Arthur Evans look like wasps or butterflies.’57 This divinity–animal hybrid underscores nature as a symbol for the sacred; and its honey, which appears in the hierophanies of the Queen Bee and filling Diana’s cup in Maude-Arthur’s vision, intoxicates the senses and dually serves as a symbolic analogy in the novel for the pneuma held in the Holy Cup.58 Through the ritual dance the secondary sacred doctrine of ‘Self Observation’ and ‘Work’ is punctured by a mystical primary sacred experience in which the self opens to the other. This Dionysian dance ritual rebinds and transforms the group through the re-enacting of myth. As Bataille describes in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’: Myth alone returns, to the one who is broken by every ordeal, the image of a plenitude extended to the community where men gather. Myth alone enters the bodies of those it binds and it expects from them the same receptiveness. It is the frenzy of every dance; it takes existence ‘to its boiling point’: it communicates to it the tragic emotion that makes its sacred intimacy accessible. For myth is not only the divine figure of destiny and the world where this figure moves; it cannot be separated from the community to which it belongs and which ritually assumes its dominion. It would be fiction if the accord that a people manifests in the agitation of festivals did not make it a vital human reality. Myth is perhaps fable, but this fable is placed in opposition to fiction if one looks at the people who dance it, who act it, and for whom it is living truth. (GB‘SAi’ 232)

Both the Collège’s theory and Carrington’s novel explicate this group ritual that serves to ‘cleanse . . . disease’ in the transition from left to right sacred.59 Charles Brenner, in focusing on the role of affects and Freudian drives in ego development, outlines how affects – defined as sensation-ideational content in arbitrary relation – relate to ego development through the process of identification. For Brenner, the change from a negative affective value attached to an idea to a positive value (or vice versa) provides a catalyst for ego development.60 As Frank observes: Caillois’s study of myth likewise notes the post-Enlightenment repression of Dionysian effervescence, which is vestigially present, he claims, among individuals utterly alienated from the social order. How such ‘instinctual and psychological potentials’ should be effectively resocialized, and in a way proper to myth’s coherence and logic, is a possibility Caillois merely raises; it is not one for which he provides any blueprint. (RCES 111–12)

Ritual dances when viewed in this way perform a psychotherapeutic function within the community, much as does the social effect Eliade attributes to myth, and the psychoanalytic role Desoille gives to mythic symbols (MEMDM 117).

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One can see this at work in Lacan’s mirror stage in relation to the self and the object. For Lacan, the crucial stage in the development of the ego takes place at the cross-section between the Imaginary and the Symbolic planes of existence, subtended by the real, when the ego identifies the specular image as self (or, rather, misrecognition in the mirror stage), and as a result the ego sees itself reshaped.61 This cognitive identification is also an affective identification, for it changes the affects attached to the ‘O/other’ potentially from negative to positive such that aspects of the ‘O/other’ are recognised as ‘self’. In this way the boundaries between self and ‘O/other’ are redefined and lead to ego alteration in much the same way as sacred ritual and Bataille’s theory of heterology details.62 In group settings, the identification of the ‘other’ as ‘self’ demonstrates the effects of Lacan’s mirror stage at work on a social plane, but through sacred symbols the negative connotations Lacan details and which surface when the self is repressed, are transformed and the affective content repolarised. The result is a liberating reshaping of the ego in the social imaginary through sacred infraction. Similarly in the Dionysian dance, community recognition purifies and bonds the outsider into the new image of the group. The social position of the outsider turns from that of repulsion to attraction, from left to right sacred. This process has been seen in action when Carpentier, in The Lost Steps, engages with the symbol, its identification and ego change in relation to the telling of history and its role in the construction of identity. It is also present in dance rituals of social reintegration, such as the Anastenaria, common to parts of Thrace in Greek Macedonia, which allow the participants (mainly women) who have been rejected by society to be accepted within the group, thereby transforming, or curing, their ‘illness’: so the occulted becomes socially embodied.63 The Anastenaria – a concrete example of pre-Christian ritual dance surviving in an orthodox Catholic region – is an example of the type of indigenous dances that would have inspired Carrington’s representation of ritual dance in The Hearing Trumpet. One can then see how symbols contained in myth may facilitate the same process of identification and ontological development in the social imaginary. Brenner’s discussion of ego psychology, Lacan’s theory and Danforth’s study of sacred ritual each suggest that affective identification with the ‘O/other’ enables change within the self and group, either through affective shifts in ego psychology, the specular image or group recognition. In Carrington’s novel, the ‘illness’, the ‘other’ and the locus of ‘socially unacceptable behaviour’ is female senescence which has served to expel the residents from society. Indeed the resident Georgina identifies: ‘Although freedom has come to us somewhat late in life, we have no intention of throwing it away again. Many of us have passed our lives with domineering and peevish husbands . . . [then] chivvied around by our sons and daughters who not only no longer loved us, but considered us a burden and objects of ridicule and shame.’ (HT 122)

These words point to the need for sacred ritual and myth to witness the very real social positions of those expelled from the centre: of older women who are doubly negated. For Nancy B. Mandlove and Suleiman, it is the refutation

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of women’s prescribed malignity and the humour expressed in the novel that define its revolutionary social nature: Those who remained faithful to the original surrealist canons may have been revolutionary with regard to aesthetics or even morality, but their visions remained largely private and unconcerned with positive social change. Laughing at both the surrealist myth of woman and traditional society’s view of woman, Leonora Carrington places, perhaps for the first time, humor and surrealism truly at the service of the revolution.64

Positive social change does come as a result of the mystic dance ritual and hierophany which serve to bond collective action. Following the first ritual dance, ‘[t]he weather had suddenly turned so cold that haw frost glittered over the garden every morning. This was a strange occurrence for a country beneath the tropic of Cancer’ (HT 118). From this point, the narrative begins to be configured using winter festival images, marking the turn in the main narrative from mystical or esoteric knowledge bringing purification, towards initiation into the myth of the Goddess. In the pre-Christian festival calendar, winter was a time to embrace death by reversing conventional order and celebrating the resulting renewal. Such features of saturnalia are apparent in Shakespeare’s TwelŌh Night. As M.M. Mahood observes, civil misrule, disguise and deception are used in the ‘saturnalia to invoke festive virtues and exorcise the killjoy powers’: TwelŌh Night was ‘conceived for a time of pleasure . . . [as part of the] tradition of winter feasting [which] was older than Christianity’.65 Carrington’s use of gender disguise, winter images and comic toppling of authority in the novel echoes Shakespeare’s play. Yet, unlike it, the socially liberating forces of ritual and its humour are utilised specifically to invert the logic and authority of the Christian God and, like the Collège’s comments on ritual, to speak of a non-Christian sacrality here through the renewal of worship for the Goddess. The winter symbolism and the women’s celebratory reaction to winter embraces the festivity of the saturnalia and its overturning of the repressive forces in society, gesturing towards what Eliade terms the eternal return to the illud tempus, and recapitulating Caillois’s observation that the festival ritual is ‘a return to the creative chaos, to the rudis indigestaque moles, from which the organized universe was born and will again be born’ (RC‘F’ 300). One could propose that it is the mystical purification, invocation and hierophany that cause the world to turn on its axis, bringing winter to the Southern hemisphere and plunging the world into the chaos of saturnalia, if Carmella were not to state: ‘It is all the fault of that dreadful atom bomb’ (HT 126). Here, Carrington undercuts any tendency to overplay sacred mythic reality with a humorous pragmatism by pointing not only to a mystical but also to a human ecological source of climate disaster, a fact that makes her presentation of sacred meaning all the more affective. In the third and final ekstaƟc dance, the Goddess Hecate manifests as a swarm of bees and, invested with the energy of the nature god Dionysus or that encountered by Bataille’s sorcerer’s apprentice, the women are spurred to storm the Archbishop’s palace to retrieve the Goddess’s chalice (HT 155–58). Similarly, Patricia Allmer, the curator of ‘Angels of Anarchy’, draws attention to female

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surrealist images of ‘women as warriors’.66 By living the myth of the Goddess quest and experiencing the human-divine connection, the old women find value in participating in a radical revolution that overturns repressive forces in society, thereby repositioning and renewing their social identity. The communication between the sacred and profane, and the turn from distress to strength indicate the homeopathic, cathartic capacity of sacred ritual and myth. In ritual collective ecstasy, in the Anastenaria, in Socrates’ description of Dionysus’ divine madness in the Phaedrus and Sophocles’ AnƟgone, purification and catharsis can be found – one echoed in ekstasis of the ritual dance and living myth in The Hearing Trumpet. In this reading, Carrington’s surrealist practice and presentation of surrealist liberation has been reinterpreted through the alternative guise of divin fou. To do this, the sacred role of ritual has been perceived as allowing ontological and egoic metamorphosis to take place in The Hearing Trumpet. In the following section the role of initiation in such transformations will be considered.

EKSTATIC FLIGHT, THE CRUCIBLE AND SPIRAL CONSCIOUSNESS The very movement in which man negates Mother Earth who gave birth to him, opens the path of subjugation. Bataille, ‘Blue of Noon’ (1936), GBIE 78 [I]t was necessary for rationalism to lose the profundity of modes of thought that shackled it. But if we now seek what is possible before us . . . we no longer have any need to construct rational thought, which is effortlessly arranged for us, we are again able to recognise the profound value of the modalities of lost thought. Bataille, GBAM67

The series of sacred dances, the communication it entails and consequential development of community in Carrington’s novel offer an insight into what, as noted above, Eliade describes as a ‘break in plane . . . mak[ing] possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another’ (MESP 63). Events in the novel reveal two further moments of release and renewal indicative of this passage. At first Marian is set at a distance from the mythic events in the Abbess’s biography, but myth begins to irrupt into reality when the earth’s poles turn and winter descends. The women’s positive reaction to this mythic turn of seasons reveals a surrealist attitude towards forces of social destruction and apocalypse. The sacred nature of this apocalyptic polar shift indicates a turn towards the chaos of the illud tempus, of rudis indigestaque moles and the rebirth of the universe. The return of pre-Christian sacrality signalled by the cataclysm is celebrated by the group for the transgression of authority it causes. Carmella expresses this sentiment when she comments: ‘“Let’s hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves,

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instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen and parliaments”’ (HT 126). In addition, the group delight in the rise of communication with animals and demise of technology, both at the Institution and in wider society, brought about by this unusual winter (HT 118–31). It is in this context that Christabel sets Marian three riddles (HT 119–20). A common device in quest narrative, the riddle serves to test the protagonist’s worth by wit, acumen or mental agility. The first riddle is solved with the help of Carmella, when Marian realises the earth has turned on its axis, and the second when the women find scientific proof to support this belief (HT 124, 133). The moment Marian solves the second riddle an earthquake releases the Abbess’s mythic child from the tower: The great stone tower swayed from side to side, then the air was rent with the wound of a mighty crackling and the walls split open like a broken egg. One tongue of flame shot out from the crack like a spear, and a winged creature that might have been a bird emerged . . . It shone with a bright light coming from its own body, the body of a human being entirely covered with glittering feathers and armless. Six great wings sprouted from its body and quivered ready for flight . . . the six-winged Sephira. (HT 133–34)

Carrington’s construction of the Abbess’s child, the Sephira, fuses a number of sacred images: at the ‘boy’s’ birth he recalls Cupid, and his name echoes the Sephirá born to the divine Twins; his feathered and armless body is also reminiscent of the Toltec, Aztec and Mayan feathered-serpent deity, Quetzalcóatl or Kukulcán (HT 94–99).68 The release of the Abbess’s feathered child from its tower prison in the main narrative acts as a hierophany in the novel, offering a second hierophany to that of the earth Goddess symbol of the Giant Queen Bee. With the appearance of the Sephira, sacred reality again irrupts mythically and mystically into the protagonist’s living reality. The breaking tower and the release of the child are dehiscent symbols with twofold meanings. First, as an esoteric symbol, the collapsing tower is that of arcanum 16 of the tarot, which betokens the destruction of established values and beliefs. As Lepetit points out, this is a figure used by Breton, for ‘[i]n L’Art magique, with the complicity of Gérald Legrand, he analyses the highly potent sixteenth arcanum, the House of God, which features a crenellated tower in which he saw a depiction of the “mythical Tower of Babel”.’69 As such, it offers a fitting official surrealist symbol for the downfall of Christianity but in Carrington’s novel it is not Babel that is presented but the new ground upon which the Goddess quest can be born again as living myth. To decode its second meaning it is necessary to detour slightly and consider the residents’ abodes, for it is here that Carrington’s development of the surrealist object can be seen to engage with alternative surrealism through the comparative sacralised reality and mythic symbolism of the tower’s destruction. As the novel begins, Marian, confronted with going into an old people’s home, states: ‘Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood stream . . . I have a death grip on this haggard frame . . . This is true of the back yard and the small room I occupied at that time.’ (HT 13)

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Marian’s identification of herself with the house – so that there is little separation between the external frame of the house and the frame of her body – implies a transference of her ontology from the internal self to incorporate the external other. As a result of the strong affective identification between body and house, Marian is afraid that a separation will threaten her identity. This presentation takes the surrealist interest in the relation of the self to the object in an alternative direction. This body-house connection turns humorous when Marian arrives at Lightsome Hall to find that each resident is housed in a ‘pixielike dwelling’ that in some senses indicates their identity (HT 24). Veronica Adams, a blind artist, is the old lady who lives in a ‘boot-shaped hut’ and Georgina Sykes, who has a comic grasp of the absurd and dresses extravagantly, lives in ‘a circus tent, or rather a cement representation of a tent’; the French Marquise, Claude la Checherelle, who tells fanciful war stories lives in a ‘red toadstool with yellow spots’, a body-house coupling which evokes Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar sitting on a psychotropic amanita muscaria mushroom in Alice in Wonderland (HT 31). Natacha Gonzalez, the murdering fake mystic, is out in the cold in an ‘Eskimo’s igloo’; Maude-Arthur Wilkins and Veta Van Tocht share a ‘double bungalow which must have once been a birthday cake’, even though both appear to be dour followers of the teachings of ‘Inner Christianity’; and Anna Wertz, who talks constantly of overwork whilst rarely working, lives in ‘a cuckoo clock’ house (HT 31). Marian is placed in a tower, resembling a ‘lighthouse’ or ‘Lookout’ (HT 24, 113). Pertinently, a description of the enigmatic Christabel Burns’s house is held back, an omission that allows her character to remain somewhat undefined until later in the narrative, and one abode apparently lacks an inhabitant, as Marian comments: ‘I knew everybody and the huts allotted to them; everybody, except the person who lived in the tower’ (HT 31). It is the Abbess’s son, the Sephira, who is immured within the tower of established beliefs, the destruction of which is a positive event. These body-house connections serve to present the residents’ identities to the reader. However, this disarmingly simple narrative device contains a deeply sacred-symbolic meaning. In many sacred belief systems the human body is associated with the house and the cosmos, as Eliade details: ‘The human body, ritually homologized to the cosmos or the Vedic alter (which is an imago mundi), is also assimilated to a house’ and ‘[t]he “house” – since it is at once an imago mundi and a replica of the human body – plays a considerable role in rituals and mythologies’ (MESP 173, 179). The ‘body-house-cosmos’ relation is a prominent example of how symbolic analogy is used to convey a difficult-to-explain sacred reality (MESP 172). Such connections Eliade terms ‘anthropo-cosmic homologies’ and describes that, through a symbolic micro-macro analogy, they break the plane between the sacred and profane, causing a change to ontology as instanced in the imago mundi (sacred space) and axis mundi (sacred axis) (MESP 169). Once the sacred correspondences between self, house and cosmos, or any anthropo-cosmic homology, are appreciated, the symbolic analogies shaping ritual and mythic narratives appear more coherent. For example, if a ritual calls for a change of ‘house’ – as many initiation rites do – it symbolises a transformation of the self and the group towards a new state of being. Given Carrington’s later description

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of the tower, Marian’s identification with the house gestures towards this sacred concept of the self and object leading, upon its change, to a fundamental ontological alteration. When the tower breaks, releasing the mythic child, it echoes what Eliade refers to as a ‘flight from the house’, which he suggests derives its sacred meaning from the body-house-cosmos homology: It is noteworthy that the mystical vocabulary of India has preserved the homology manhouse and especially the assimilation of the skull to the roof or dome. The fundamental mystical experience – that is, transcending the human condition – is expressed in a twofold image, breaking the roof and flight . . . These vivid formulas are capable of a twofold interpretation: on the plane of mystical experience there is an ‘ecstasy’ and hence the flight of the soul through the brahmarandhra [the top of the skull]; on the metaphysical plane there is abolition of the conditioned world. (MESP 175)

Eliade’s interpretation deserves special attention in the context of this present inquiry, for he relates the body-house-cosmos homology to the soul’s flight as ‘ecstasy’, in a way that is not only akin to Socrates’ description of divine madness and soul flight but also to the mythic framework of Carrington’s narrative. The mythic child whose birth ‘replenished the Cup with Holy Pneuma’ takes flight from its house, the tower, and therefore parallels the ecstatic flight of the soul from the body (HT 94). The mystical aspect of this ekstasis aligns it with the rites of Dionysus described by Socrates, as opposed to other pathways by which ekstasis can be reached (Ph 265b). In the Phaedrus this symbol of flight and its indication of (metaphysical) reality is present when the initiate is figuratively given wings through divine madness as a ‘recollection’ of sacred reality: ‘That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was travelling . . . when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head . . . For just this reason it is fair that only a philosopher’s mind grows wings’ (Ph 249c). Further, Socrates maintains that by using ‘reminders of these things correctly’ a ‘level of initiation’ into the divine mysteries is gained that sets one ‘outside’ the profane reality of ‘human concerns and draws [one] close to the divine; [so] ordinary people think he is disturbed and rebuke him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god’ (Ph 249c–d).70 The meaning of this ‘mythico-ritual theme “bird-soul-ecstatic-flight”’ is described by Eliade as follows: A great many symbols and significations to do with the spiritual life and, above all, with the power of intelligence, are connected with the images of ‘flight’ and ‘wings’. The ‘flight’ signifies intelligence, the understanding of secret things and metaphysical truths . . . discovered in the course of new awakenings of consciousness. (MEMDM 105)

The flight of the soul is afforded by a release from a restraining force: this release symbolises an initiation into sacralised reality, for in going beyond-the-self one accedes to a new consciousness (MEMDM 104). Indeed, Carrington’s own study of Gnosticism, as Orenstein suggests, ‘is deeply significant to [Carrington] because it speaks of the release of the soul from the prison of this life’ and the metaphysical quest towards the divine.71

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Such events in the novel are revealing when read in relation to Celtic or alchemical traditions and surrealism. However, the sociological understanding of the left to right sacred transition effected by initiation rituals and the affects of ecstasy are absent, and it is this coherence that Carrington and other alternative surrealists employ in contradistinction to the intentionally cognitive utilisation of the alchemical and the esoteric in official surrealism. By engaging in the novel with the theme of breaking the brahmarandhra of the house-body and the soul’s flight, Carrington re-enacts the sacralisation of the self through anthropo-cosmic homologies in mythic narrative. The flight of the Sephira provides a novelistic symbol of this release comparable to mystical ekstasis. The resultant awakening of consciousness which Marian experiences accords with Bataille and the Collège’s view of moments of sacred ecstasy as an affective ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ and ‘new knowledge’ altering attitudes towards ontology and reality. A second initiation into sacred realities occurs when Marian answers a third and final riddle, enters the newly broken tower and chooses to descend the stairs into a cavern. In the history of comparative religions the cave is a powerful symbol of the unconscious, the ancestors and the sacred imago mundi of initiation (MESP 153). In the cave, Marian finds a cauldron which is stirred by her doppelganger and heated by a sacred ‘fire [that] seemed to burn with no fuel’ (HT 136). Mahon draws our attention to the fact that this ‘returns us to Carrington’s Celtic roots too, as it recalls the tale from Irish folklore of a petty King at Tyrconnell who underwent a symbolic rebirth that involves a cauldron.’72 The cauldron, like the Grail, is similarly an alchemical crucible of purification, initiation and transformation.73 Alongside this Celtic and alchemical reference, comparatively, in many indigenous mythologies, the cauldron holds the same symbolism (MEPS 206–07).74 Philip Gardiner and Gary Osborn add that the cauldron is a ‘symbol of fertility, transformation and rebirth’, similar in nature to ‘the void of Eastern tradition, from which everything in the universe originates’.75 By widening the frame of interpretation of Carrington’s narrative descriptions of initiation in flight and ritual spaces to include Eliade’s discussion of the axis mundi, imago mundi and eternal return to the illud tempus, Caillois’s rendering of the creative chaos of rudis indigestaque moles, and Bataille’s definition of ecstasy as the self ‘opening itself up to an infinite void’, a clearer picture is offered of the coherent alternative surrealist presentation of ‘living myth’ gained through ekstasis (GBIE 77; GB‘SA’ 22). Once in the cave Marian is required to leap into the cauldron (crucible/ void) without knowing whether she will survive. In taking this leap Marian is transformed into her own double, stirring her former self into the pot. This symbolic death and rebirth augurs Marian’s initiation into the nous of sacred reality and provides the third moment of novelistic ekstasis, as she goes beyondthe-self in communication with the ‘other’.76 The plane between sacred and profane reality is broken by the imago mundi and the divine madness affected in mystic ritual initiation under the symbol of Dionysus, described here as ekstasis or divin fou. In this new state of consciousness Marian’s nous appears in a mirror of ‘polished obsidian’ in which she sees first the Queen Bee, then the Abbess and then herself (HT 138). Carrington’s tripartite image has a specific

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significance which Orenstein details: ‘The three-faced female is the image of the Triple Goddess or the Triple Muse who, according to Robert Graves, is woman in her divine character.’77 Its Celtic aspect and surrealist connotation is detailed by Mahon: The triple goddess is sometimes described as an old hag or crone and depicted brewing with a cauldron, the symbol of rebirth and the Grail in Celtic myth. The three faces are typically aligned to the stages of womanhood – the Virgin (Badb), the Mother (Macha) and the Crone (Morrigán) – but together they also have shape-shifting powers similar to those witches described in Jules Michelet’s book La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages (1863), a text that was popular with the Surrealists.78

In this cave initiation Carrington syncretically fuses many sacred symbols – first that of the cave, then the cauldron, the finely redrawn Greco-Roman triple deity Hecate (invoked also during the dance) and it gestures also towards the Aztec and Mayan god Tohil, or ‘Obsidian Mirror’ – to create a complex surrealist collage.79 The occult, Celtic and surrealist resonance of the work are vitally highlighted here and alongside it one can look to the alternative surrealist psychoanalytic, social and sacred connotations of such imagery. In the Lacanian sacred-social ‘mirror’ the three characters of the triple goddess reflect interconnectedness as self: this recognition of other as self initiates ego development. The triple image in this sense presents an anthropocosmic homology linking the sacred animal, the abject mother of the Sephira and Marian, the last of whom is now able to identify each image as part of herself, and herself as part of the ganz andere of the divine. Carrington’s triple image, Rehberg suggests, unlike her earlier fiction, is at this stage connected to a positive self-image: ‘Carrington created a myth of a reconstructed (female) self . . . that can tolerate complexity and conflict, [one that] is carefully drawn, as idealized and suspect aspects have become integrated.’80 Indeed, by accepting conflicting aspects of ‘self’ through the symbols in the mirror, Carrington, in this novel, reclaims the states of womanhood lost when the worship of the triple female deity was repressed.81 In this way Carrington reuses and reshapes surrealism’s fusion of the real with the fantastic, mythic, oneiric or madness, to further feminist goals of self-recognition and empowerment, but in doing so serves to coherently reflect an alternative surrealist sacred sociology. Rituals of invocatory dance, initiatory flight, death and rebirth represented in The Hearing Trumpet demonstrate Caillois’s view that myth deals with a ‘projection of psychological conflicts . . . caused by the social structure itself’ which, when released in ritual and myth, can serve to reshape group bonds (RCES 118). The affects of ekstasis arising from each experience leave Marian renewed so that one can see the rejuvenating effect of ‘ecstasy’ identified by Caillois: ‘now I was climbing to the upper world,’ she says, ‘as spry as a mountain goat . . . Strangely I could see through the dark like a cat. I was part of the night like any other shadow’ (RC‘BC’152; HT 140). This third ekstasis completes the sacred process begun in the mystic ekstasis of ritual dance and the mythic flight of the Sephira, as a new affective reality is psychologically born from the ruins of the old.

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The ‘continuity’ between the subject and the world that Bataille – like Durkheim before him – sees as lost in the profane world is regained in ecstasy (GBTR 32n33; cf. GBIE 53). This is, however, not a nostalgic ‘continuity’ but one present in the material basis of everyday life and accessible through the breaking of the plane between the profane and the sacred. In The Hearing Trumpet Carrington puts into praxis what Bataille describes as the communication between human and non-human beings like ‘water in water’, by sacralising the earth, its animals and its people using sacred-social surrealist practices of the divin fou (GBTR 33 [23]). Danforth’s description of the Anastenaria and Eliade’s comparative descriptions of the social effect of sacred symbolism reveal, as do the novelistic experiences of mystical ekstasis, that the sacred alters the group through recognition of the ‘other’ as ‘self’. This identification with sacred symbols in active imagination, which Eliade sees in Desoille’s cures and in myth, bear witness to the psychological impact that living ritual and myth have on the social ego’s ability to develop and transform its affective relations in the mirror provided by the sacred. Not simply evincing a utopian idealism, the conclusion of the novel reveals the ways in which the marginalised can experience social bonding and freedom from regulation through ekstasis. * The remainder of this chapter will explore surrealist practice in a little more depth and consider its logic-inverting techniques and states of consciousness. If, as Eliade notes, ‘the [fairy] tale takes up and continues “initiation” on the level of the imaginary’, so that ‘the man of the modern societies still benefits from the imaginary initiation supplied by tales’, then by implication the symbols from myth used in nonnaturalist narrative partly fulfil the same function in society (MEMR 202).82 Surrealism’s engagement with myth and deformations of the real position it near to nonnaturalism: ranging from the mildly nonnaturalistic, as with Breton’s Nadja, to the wildly nonnaturalistic, as with Michel Leiris’s Aurora. Surrealism then easily adapts symbols and realities that contravene the rationalist worldview to feature in their narratives, including those of sacred realities. Both official and dissident surrealism considered the sacred, esoteric and alchemical but, as discussed and as Ungar points out, there is a qualitative difference between official surrealism and the Collège’s treatment of the sacred. Indeed, reading each novel through Bataille and Caillois’s surrealist theorisati on of ecstasy – mediated by its origin in ancient Greek ekstasis – brings to the surface the commonalities between the forms of surrealist deregulation concerning (ex)dissident postcolonial, ex-centric feminist and radicalised anti-communist international surrealist prose fiction, certain examples of which present scenes of initiation, played out on the level of the personal and social imaginary, which fully utilise the symbols from sacred realities through moments of novelistic ekstasis. In Carrington’s novel, one witnesses an empowering invocation, releasing flight and crucible initiation into nous that affectively repolarises values from abject to adject, from left to right sacred, gained via affective connections with the primary sacred.

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Utilising the surrealist ‘supreme point’ of non-contradiction outlined by Breton and its collage technique, Carrington juxtaposes fragments or objects and employs logical inversions in The Hearing Trumpet to question the boundaries of rationalist logic.83 Ali Smith describes Carrington’s humorous logical inversions in this novel as ‘unexpected maxims’, which suggests the familiar surrealist practice of semantically recoding conventional concepts.84 It also reflects a questioning of logic by focusing on what it excludes, parallel to Bataille’s extension of surrealism through the theory of heterology. For example, when Marian is told she is to go into an old people’s home, her son Galahad asks her to be reasonable, and she replies: ‘My dear Galahad, I wonder what you consider being unreasonable?’ (HT 18). By comparing imagined unreasonable reactions to what he defines as her unreasonable reaction she questions the logic by which he makes such an ascription. This humorous undercutting technique utilises heterology, undermining as it does the very parameters determining the inclusion and exclusion of values that are enforced by a regulating authority, and thereby serves to reclaim a positive self-definition. A similar recoding occurs in relation to the vegetable and the elderly human which, by placing two different interpretations side by side, overturns the conventional attitude in a humorous way (HT 9). It is significant that the connection that Marian makes between the human and the natural world here augurs the start of a series of human and non-human fusions in The Hearing Trumpet. It is perhaps in this sense that Lusty makes note of what she sees as an under-discussed feature of the novel: its ‘dark comic edge’ and ‘black humor [which] takes a particularly playful turn’.85 By humorously negating the boundary between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’, Carrington presents a typically surrealist image. However, its specific use in relation to gender and animals presents, much as did Carpentier’s negation in relation to barbarity and civilisation, a reworking of surrealism to her own ends. Bataille’s surrealist theory of heterology becomes an insightful tool with which to analyse the practices employed by surrealist novelists, and to understand the form of logic inversion Carrington employs. Carrington’s humour, as Knapp notes, borders on the Buddhist laughter of the kƃan. In the kƃan the opponent is mocked in order to question the parameters of their logic and open them to previously rejected ideas. As such, Carrington questions the conventional attitudes that define ‘otherness’ in society, not only by using cognitive approaches to changing attitudes common to official surrealism but through a redefinition of the affects shaping these regulating attitudes. This affective technique is seen again as the values of Inner Christianity are inverted by the painting of a leering nun, her biography, the horned statues and mythic events irrupting into Marian’s life. Surrealism was anti-religious, it rejected regulation by authority of any kind, especially that of the Church. As Hollier notes, ‘the surrealists issued a 1931 broadside entitled “Au Feu!” (“Fire!”) in which, refusing to be blackmailed by aesthetic considerations, they saluted “the great materialist flare-up of the burned churches” that was illuminating the Spanish sky.’86 However, pagan, indigenous or autochthonic beliefs did not face the same fire, perhaps because, as with alchemy, although not superficial, its use was marshalled under surrealism’s own ends, as Lepetit notes – and this could mean disrupting its communication of the primary sacred. Although official surrealism utilised images of Goddesses and muses, thereby negating Christian ideology, it did

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not aim to replace religion with another locus, as Hollier has discussed.87 But Carpentier’s fé and Carrington’s Goddess worship do present another locus of belief which defines them as alternative surrealists. When descending into the cave, Marian initiates a conversation with Christabel: ‘“What is this place?” [Marian] finally asked, shaking all over . . . “This is Hell,” [Christabel] said with a smile. “But Hell is merely a form of terminology. Really this is the Womb of the World whence all things come”’ (HT 137). Carrington here uses heterology to affectively recode the negative term ‘Hell’ as positive pagan underworld, the womb of transformations, much as the devil’s horns are recoded as the pagan nature deities’ horns. Both images reverse the excising of pagan beliefs by Christianity and thereby offer a new attitude with which to interpret reality. This technique is seen again when presenting the apocalyptical shift of the earth, not as chaos in its negative sense as it is perceived by authority, but as the avant-garde chaos and sacred illud tempus that leads positively to a new beginning. Carrington’s renegotiation of the term ‘Hell’ can be viewed in relation to Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957) when, using heterology, Bataille reverses the negative affective orientation of the term ‘Evil’: In an eloquent world where logic reduces each thing to a certain order, William Blake spoke, on his own, the language of the Bible or the Vedas. By so doing he managed to restore life to original energy. So the truth of Evil which is essentially a rejection of subservience, is his truth. (GBLE 96)

This transformation of affectively denigrated terms or ideas from negative to positive reveals the methods and modes by which exclusion occurs (stigmatisation, repulsion and moral excision) and it exposes flaws in the logic shaping conventional social attitudes. Both Bataille’s theory and Carrington’s novel give credence to the official surrealist warning that ‘the “real” is often only habit’,88 and offer ways to revalidate the marginalised and excised groups within society through the ‘illogical’. Alongside official surrealism, they illustrate this shift but extend it through the depiction of the affective qualities of the primary sacred in society. In The Hearing Trumpet Carrington applies this logic-inverting strategy to ‘old age’, just as it was applied to the concept of ‘life’: ‘Senile? yes I dare say they were right, but what does senile mean?’ (HT 10). The senescent state described in the novel is a creative stimulus, like the ‘illogical’, liminal, altered states of consciousness of sleep-waking, child-adult and insanity-sanity that fascinated surrealism. Carrington sets about redefining and reclaiming the senescent state of consciousness so that it offers as much of a surrealist deformation of ‘reality’ and rebut to rationalism, as other surrealist altered states of consciousness. Much like the sleep-waking, fluid state of consciousness, senescence serves to kairologically distort linear temporal relations in the narrative, as Marian examples: Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up. My memory is full of all sorts of stuff which is not, perhaps, in chronological order, but there is a lot of it. So I pride myself on having an excellent faculty of miscellaneous recall. (HT 23)

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This distortion also occurs as memory and reality conflate, and the past fuses with the present: The moon shone in through my window and I could not get off to sleep, but lay half dreaming and half awake, a state which is quite familiar to me now. Souvenirs from the far past rose like bubbles in my mind and things I thought were long forgotten came back as clear as if they had just happened. (HT 59)89

Like a compressed spiral, memories from the past filter into the present time in the senescent state akin to the distortions in surrealism’s other altered states. The elderly characters also experience visions; the first vision is that of Natacha, a self-styled Christian mystic and devotee of Inner Christianity. Described with Carrington’s characteristic irony, Natacha’s visions, Marian implies, are faked when, ‘[i]n spite of her fainting condition [Marian] saw Natacha’s mouth tighten’ (HT 35). During her ‘trances’ Natacha receives messages from ‘The Great Beyond’ that tell of her own spiritual importance: ‘“Rejoice for you are chosen to lead others, Natacha Blessed amongst women”’ (HT 48), a description that could be seen to mock the ecstasies of the Christian mystic. Unlike Natacha, the visions or dreams of a prophetic nature experienced by other characters are not exposed as feigned and serve to incite further interest in the Abbess and prepare for the revelation of the Goddess quest in the main narrative. Carmella dreams of a ‘nun in a tower’: a condensed image of the Abbess and the Institution’s tower, prophesying the conclusion of Goddess quest (HT 52). It is not only women who experience visions though, for Maude-Arthur has a ‘vivid’ prophetic day-dream/vision telling of the Goddess Diana’s honey-filled chalice and the Abbess (HT 57). Indeed, the prophetic senescent state proves to be more powerful than empirical reality, as Carrington illustrates in the novel: ‘Somebody is singing O Sole Mio to Marlborough who is floating around in a gondola with his two-headed sister,’ I said, and stopped abruptly. Really I must learn not to say my thoughts aloud. The image had been so clear that I had seen her two heads through the lemon cheesecloth curtains of the gondolas. (HT 37)

Marian’s wanderings, however, are symbolically accurate and prophetic as indicated when Marlborough and his wolf-headed sister arrive at the Institution having travelled from Venice in an Ark (HT 151).90 The surrealist impulse to engage with the imagination, dream images and insanity, to disrupt reality and the rational, is also evident in the characters’ prophetic visions. Prophecy is a form of foresight accepted by surrealists which will be discussed more fully in relation to Naum’s novel. In Carrington’s presentation, however, the prophecies begin to tie into the sacred realities detailed in the narrative. The place these visions are given within the coherent mythic structure of the novel belies the role prophetic visions play in official surrealist theory and implies rather a wildly ekstaƟc reconfiguration of identity that can be read as more closely allied to Apollo. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates aligns the symbolic figure of Apollo to the divine madness of the priestesses performing rites but also with ‘the Sybil or the others who foretell many things

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by means of god-inspired prophetic trances’ (Ph 244b). Carrington demonstrates these prophetic, Apollonian ekstaƟc visions in the altered state of consciousness experienced by the elderly people. This senescent state becomes increasingly sacralised through the elderly residents’ visionary experiences, a point Orenstein also highlights when she sees that, in old age, women enter a highly creative state: Elderly women, in particular, seem to enter an extremely creative period as they age, for they sharpen their visionary and intuitive faculties, and become wise in the ways in which they perceive things from a wider, more holistic perspective. Thus, the Grail Quest Cycle teaches us to revere aging women, for they emerge as prophetic figures.91

The authentic prophetic role attributed to Maude-Arthur’s vision shows that, for some men and some women in old age, when dream and waking states fuse more closely, visions appear to be closer to the surface of one’s consciousness. Orenstein proposes a way in which to link this senescent insight to Carrington’s interest in the sacred and its foundation in official surrealism, when she states: However, it is specifically as a Surrealist artist, and because of her interest in the dream state and in other altered states of consciousness, that Leonora Carrington’s contemporary work related to these ancient traditions. In the Tibetan and Gnostic systems, Gnosis, or inner illumination on the path toward liberation, takes place in an altered state, perhaps akin to the dream, a state which is closer to the spirit world . . . Surrealism, too, posits states apart from full wakefulness as those which reveal the truer reality, surreality.92

As Lusty affirms, the novel shows ‘the paradoxical wisdom of senility as opposed to [clinical] madness, hybridity and excess as opposed to the dissected and disarticulated female body.’93 Carrington’s choice of senescence is also a reaction against official surrealism and its restrictive images of women: ‘The humor in Carrington’s novel derives from debunking both the surrealist myth of woman as an alchemical vessel through which man is transformed and the social myths which portray women, particularly old women, as irrational, defenceless creatures.’94 In this way, Carrington’s surrealist representations of women offer a critique or counter-narrative to many official surrealist works that relay the dismemberment and psychological fetishisation both of the female and of the sacred. In some ancient societies the heightening of spiritual ability in old age is honoured and the elderly are placed in the role of spiritual leaders. It is this sacred-social role given to the elderly that is acknowledged in Carrington’s novel thereby marking the semantic transition from abject to adject, and from elderly to elder. It is possible to propose an alternative surrealist intention in which the primary affective experience of the divin fou negates both the logic of Christianity and that of official surrealism’s refusal to replace religion with another locus. In this sense, Carrington replaces the official surrealist ‘au feu!’ for the otherworldly feu divin (divine fire) of mystical and prophetic ekstasis in The Hearing Trumpet. It is this coherent sacred-social engagement with pre-Christian sacred reality that partly separates this novel from official

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surrealism – as it does for Bataille and the Collège’s ideas on ecstasy. In The Hearing Trumpet the fluid, non-linear memories of the elderly characters and their imaginative, prophetic dream visions outline that the senescent altered state of consciousness, often rejected as senility, can be identified with that of the sacred elder. Prophecy, both of the elder and the sacred scrolls auguring the birth of the Sephira, fractures linear temporality by seeing future events in the present moment. Non-linear temporality, a common feature of modernism, as discussed by Joseph Frank, is also prevalent in surrealism and sacred realities, such that nonnaturalistic approaches to chronology can be described as mythical time. In British surrealism the emphasis on nature was an important feature, reflecting both a Romantic literary tradition and its anthropological interests. Nature was also a central concern for many female surrealists. Chadwick, paraphrased by Orenstein, indicates ‘the fertile earth’, in particular, ‘had become a symbol for women’s creativity amongst women surrealists’.95 Orenstein furthers this line of thought in relation to The Hearing Trumpet, stating the earth also takes on an ecological aspect that involves ‘placing the interests of the human aŌer the interests of the whole’.96 Clearly Carrington is part of a surrealist female identification with nature, as in The Hearing Trumpet the creation myth and mythic quest to return the pneuma and the cup to the Goddess privilege the vital need to preserve the earth. Carrington’s surrealist reworking of the Christian Grail quest to accommodate pre-Christian reality expresses uniquely ecofeminist themes, through the sacralisation of the earth, the Queen Bee manifestation of the Goddess and her companion the Horned God. In her novel, however, this communication with nature enacts a divin fou and sacralisation of tellus that, like the other novels considered here, also indicates an alternative international surrealist practice. The sacred concept of pneuma is used by Carrington here to widen the category of the official surrealist therianthrope. It is this sacralisation of the therianthrope and of tellus that overturns the rationale of the male God of Christianity and its repression of earth-centred theosophies and Goddess worship.97 Multiple sacred symbols from Celtic and Greek mythic figures, forms of trial, quest, flight and crucibles of death, initiation, rebirth and regeneration, Quiché Mayan and Aztec gods are fused in a comparative collage which details the reshaping of self and group identity in the novel. The fracturing of chronological with kairological time common to modernist works is instantiated in The Hearing Trumpet as memory and imagination preside over logic and ‘reality’ and the mythic past and the mystic present fuse to create a spiral. The transformation of time into a spiral recalls the ritual eternal return to formless chaos and rebirth, and the Collègean alternation between infraction and regulation. Such works vestigially represent, as Eliade stipulates, the ability of myth to recreate the illud tempus and thus momentarily fuse the past into present (MEMDM 36–37). The sacralisation of kairological moments in Carrington’s novel, in myth, visions and memory experienced by the senescent altered state of consciousness, offers not the surrealist merveilleux – even as it is presented in post-war surrealist esotericism – but an alternative surrealist practice sacralising reality via mystical and prophetic ekstasis.

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SUMMA Life risks itself: Destiny’s plan is realized. What was only a dream figure becomes myth. Bataille, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (July 1938), GB‘SA’ 22

In The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington engages with invocation, initiation, anthropocosmic homologies and sacralised altered states of consciousness in service of the surrealist revolution. The ritual misrule she describes echoes saturnalia, but unlike the saturnalia, it does not return the world to the old order after a period of licence. Instead the divin fou brings a new era in which the ancient worship of the earth and the Goddess is reborn as an ecofeminist surrealist statement. The evidence of cycles of death, chaos and renewal in the novel may cause critics to accuse Carrington’s representation of surrealist rebellion of offering society only a temporary inversion of order and a limited, or containable, chaos. The concept of the carnivalesque has been criticised along similar lines as an ineffectual release from social order, leaving no lasting effect.98 Both surrealism and the Collège have also been criticised for their limited revolutionary capacity. Put in the context of the sacred ritual act or social release through nonnaturalism, instead of limitation, what is visible is the ebb and flow of the socius answering the question of what social ontology could mean. While the end of The Hearing Trumpet may be seen as problematic in terms of materialist feminist practice, as the utopian events show nature overturning social authority in mythic and folkloric ways, they communicate that coherent symbolic analogies have the potential to affectively alter the attitudes given to both the self and the other. The aim here has been to look specifically at the social effect of symbols in literature and consider how symbols communicate this potential. The affective, primary experience of the sacred and the ontological quest are integral to the meaning of mythic symbols – just as they are central to the altered state of consciousness of the divin fou visible in certain ex-centric surrealist texts. In Carrington’s novel one sees three original outgrowths of surrealist practice. First, critics have considered the way in which Carrington appropriates surrealist representations of women, alchemy, humour; its utilisation of Celtic myth; the empowering of women’s altered states of consciousness in old age; and the rejection of prescriptive social and surrealist constructions that shape ‘woman’ as an object, either abjectified or sexualised. The replacement of Christianity with the specific representation of the pre-Christian Goddess in the novel serves to refute official surrealism’s abject or sexualised objectification of the chthonic Goddess/muse. Carrington revalorises the female deity as subject, in her multiple expressions as woman, mother and crone, in order to promote a greater equality between animals, earth, men and women.99 As a surrealist, Carrington partakes of the British surrealist concern with nature as a neo-Romantic sublime force, and she also engages with the female surrealist treatment of nature as a source of creativity. The ecological view of nature and animal life attributed to Goddess worship in this novel discloses a specifically sacred view of nature, configured by an alternative surrealist focus on outward, rather than inward, routes to attaining surrealist altered states of consciousness.

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Carrington’s second, less commonly discussed, innovation consists of the use of the surrealist collage technique. In The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington plays with various hybridisations of genre, myths and figures, placing them into a collage within which images of transformation appear. The gothic genre, which appears at the forefront of her earlier work, moves to the background in this novel and is contained within a humour that is less noir and increasingly festive: a humour Lusty defines as containing ‘a dark comic edge that resists a purely celebratory feminist reading’.100 The Sephira, a manifestation of the pneuma, is also drawn with a sacred ritual humour much different from Carrington’s earlier gothic hybrid characters that highlighted le merveilleux. Generically, Carrington begins her novel in the realist mode and transforms it, using myth via a surrealist logic-inverting questioning of the tenets of rationalism, which positively recodes hell as the chthonic world of the Goddess and the Horned God, Dionysus or the Green Man. Her narrative turns increasingly mystical through the residents’ spiralling kairological visions, and mythical through the Cabbalist symbol of the Sephira in flight and a crucible initiation. Through a collage of mythic and autochthonous symbols, Carrington shapes the Goddess quest and the image of the Goddess from Greco-Roman Goddess worship, the ancient Greek concept of the pneuma, the Cabbalist notion of the Sephira, Celtic mythology and Mayan and Aztec beliefs which all combine to revivify the surrealist merveilleux with a sacred ekstasis as divin fou. The quest plot offers surrealism the opportunity for chance encounters and the search for the philosopher’s stone. In the novel, the quest can be said to be fulfilled in the Sephira, but the complex meaning of the symbol and the coherent way in which it is contextualised within a frame of belief reveal an alternative surrealist sacred quest that moves surrealism from its focus on the individual unconscious. Drawing upon surrealist methods of logical inversion Carrington recasts Christianity’s Grail narrative to challenge Christianity’s authority to suppress pre-Christian beliefs, and recasts the surrealist chthonic muse through a group of elders, who return to the chthonic Goddess and nature worship. In Carrington’s novel Christianity, as a patriarchal religion, is shown to have also led to the very material repression of women, much as the Old Man in Zenobia, discussed later, identifies that the clinical death of love in society is due to the masculinisation of the sacred: echoing Breton’s forwarding of the feminine sacred, but predicated on very different grounds. Although Carrington’s early female protagonists give subjectivity to the official surrealist images of women, this is accompanied by physical violence toward self or other as they compulsively consume or fear being consumed.101 In this novel, the acceptance of all aspects of woman in the recognition of each of the three specular images as self demonstrates how sacred symbols of ‘ontological mutation’, reactivated in active imagination, can catalyse ego development. Thereby illustrating that The Hearing Trumpet is aptly positioned at the end point in the development of Carrington’s fiction, from the ‘sadistic’ suppression of the female as object which pervades official surrealism, towards an alternative surrealism where ‘mystical’ suppression or negation of the subject in ekstasis gifts rebirth.102 The Goddess quest is fulfilled in these moments of loss and renewal which are interpreted through the concept of ekstasis. In return,

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reading narrative experiences of ekstasis highlights that the Collège’s dissident surrealist understanding of the tension and release, regulation and infraction of social ontology is alive to the social implications carried by the rituals and cycle of life and death in sacred reality and mythic narratives. Carrington’s syncretic mythic symbols and generic codes combine in this ex-centric surrealist novel, as in Carpentier’s (ex)dissident surrealist novel, to exemplify what Walter Benjamin observes as social ‘wish images’ – similar to Freud’s view of dream as a wish fulfilment acting on an individual level or, as already discussed, his view that ‘it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations’.103 Carrington’s surrealist practice extends surrealist aims by advancing a kƃan-like humour and logical inversions akin to Bataille’s heterology, by underscoring the living nature of myth and transforming surrealist therianthropes and the Goddess into coherent sacred symbols. Carrington’s third innovation is her forwarding of a senescent surrealist altered state of consciousness as an access to creativity. This state is shaped by the kairological function of memory and the permeability of the boundary between the imagination and reality, and, in the elders’ sacred visions, it recalls mythic symbolism in sacred realities, thereby articulating the connection between daydream and myth, the sacred symbol and social change: a connection endorsed by psychology, theology and sociology, to which the category of the divin fou – through ritual invocation and initiation – offers an elucidation and incorporation, not just in the area of study on women surrealists but within a general area of international alternative surrealist prose works. Some surrealist works prefer to provoke an exoticised sacred shiver rather than engaging with what, here, has been shown as the transformative power of the sacred symbol, making Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet a rare and valuable exception. The social psychology behind sacred practice and realities, analysed by the Collège as the move from left to right sacred and the resulting metamorphosis of being, serves to break open the semantics of the quest motif in surrealist prose. A reading of the issue of alchemy in Carrington’s work, offered through the Bretonian lens, can be complemented by an understanding of sacred adjecƟon.104 Breton’s Arcane 17 and L’Art magique, and Mabille’s esoteric interests, inform Carrington’s own explorations of sacred realities. However, Carrington demonstrates that in this novel she moves away from the official cognitive methodology of surrealism and towards the alternative affective primary connection to the esoteric. In this sense a specifically represented Priestess, evocative of the second arcanum of the tarot, stands as the leading symbol in Carrington’s novel instead of the Star of the seventeenth arcanum which configures Breton’s Arcane 17. Additionally, the Tower from which the Sephira escapes, echoing the sixteenth arcanum, in The Hearing Trumpet, symbolically demonstrates not a fall but a flight of the soul from the tower of authority towards the surrealist aim of liberation. Carrington’s sacred-sociological use of myth serves to extend official surrealist practices not only in relation to esoteric bricolage and to gender but foremost in relation to confronting authority: by adding to it a habitation of the subjectivity of the femme-sorcière as the Bataillean

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sorcerer’s apprentice who refuses servility and a coherent symbolic analogy of the affective experience of the primary sacred through the deregulating logic of Dionysian and Apollonian ekstasis. Through this affective form of the social sacred, it is possible to begin to see how postcolonialist, feminist and anti-communist Balkan writing can be drawn into an international comparativist surrealist articulation. Just as Carpentier presents the point at which the categories of Western logic collapse, thereby altering reality and the very values attached to Europe’s ‘other’, Carrington portrays the point at which the logic of ‘authority’ inverts to forward the liberation not just of the female subject, but also of the living sacrality of indigenous beliefs: of evocation, the imago mundi, initiation, ekstasis and nous. Read through the lens of the Collège, this female, British (Mexican) surrealist also highlights a ‘preoccupation with rediscovering the primordial longings and conflicts of the individual condition transposed to the social dimension [that] is at the origin of the College of Sociology’ and is instanced in the act of affective ecstasy (RC‘ICS’ 10).

Notes 1

Susan Suleiman, ‘Feminist Intertextuality and the Laugh of the Mother: Leonora Carrington’s Hearing Trumpet’, in Neverending Stories: Toward a CriƟcal Narratology, eds Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey and Maria Tatar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 187.

2

Lusty, Surrealism, p.64, notes the comic elements of this.

3

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, p. 436.

4

Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 151.

5

Arppe, AīecƟvity, p.111n16.

6

A point made also by Lusty, Surrealism, p. 63.

7

Matthews, Novel, p. 177.

8

Horace Walpole, ‘The Castle of Otranto’, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 39.

9

Mario Piaz, ‘Introduction’, in Three Gothic Novels, p. 17.

10

For a discussion of the Gothic in reference to Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron and Ruthven Todd’s The Lost Traveller, see Patricia Scanlan, ‘English Surrealism in the 1930s with Special Reference to the Little Magazines and Small Presses of the Period’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1999), pp. 239–40.

11

This refers specifically to the Gothic features of Carrington’s stories: ‘The Skeleton Holiday’, ‘Pigeon Fly’, ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Cast Down by Sadness’, in The Seventh Horse, pp. 16–18; 18–29; 42–49; 50–55, respectively.

12

Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 67.

13

Renée Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE and London: Nebraska University Press, 1994), p. 139.

14

Lusty, Surrealism, p. 75.

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15

Carmilla is the Gothic tale of a female (interpreted as lesbian) vampire by the Irish writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, serialised in 1871–72 in The Dark Blue, and collected into In a Glass Darkly (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1872).

16

Salmerón highlights Carrington’s use of rhetorical repetition and a ‘collage effect’ in HT, ‘Errant’, pp. 225, 211. Teresa Arcq makes the interesting comment on Celtic belief ‘that incantations repeated three, five, seven or nine times consecutively increased the creative activity between the hemispheres, which in turn could bring about the desired effects of the magical act’; see ‘A World Made of Magic’, in Leonora Carrington: The CelƟc Surrealist, ed. Seán Kissane (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013), p. 25.

17

David A. Leeming, Kathryn Madden and Stanton Marlan, eds, Encyclopaedia of Psychology and Religion (New York and London: Springer, 2009), pp. 110, 114.

18

Orenstein, ‘“The Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess”: Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Alchemical Tractate’, Cauda pavonis, 19, 2 (Fall 2000), 4.

19

Jean Snitzer Schoenfeld, ‘André Breton, Alchemist’, The French Review, 57, 4 (March 1984), 500.

20

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 174.

21

Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of TradiƟonal Religions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 103, cited in Brian Hayden, ‘Old Europe: Sacred Matriarchy or Complementary Opposition?’, in Archaeology and FerƟlity Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Anthony Bonanno (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1985), p. 25.

22

Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London: Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 96, quoted in Victoria Ferentinou, ‘Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery: Androgyny and the Feminine Principle in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Essex, 2007), p. 269n33. Mark Amaru Pinkham describes the Green Man as the son of the White Goddess in Guardians of the Holy Grail: The Knights Templar, John The BapƟst, and the Water of Life (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004), p. 76; cf. Scott C. Littleton, ‘The Holy Grail, the Cauldron of Annwn, and the Nartyamonga: A Further Note on the Sarmatian Connection’, The Journal of American Folklore, 92, 365 (July–September 1979), 326–33.

23

Orenstein, ‘Chrysopeia’, 4.

24

Much critical discussion abounds regarding this shift in her paintings.

25

Bataille and Caillois describe traditional and elective communities in ‘Sacred Sociology and the Relationship between “Society,” “Organism,” and “Being”’ (November 20, 1937), in College, ed. Hollier, p. 82.

26

Salmerón, ‘Errant’, p. 225.

27

See Rehberg’s discussion on this point in ‘Mirrors’, pp. 301–02. Carroll in ‘Return’ discusses the possibility of problematised utopia in relation to feral characters in Carrington’s earlier work, p. 142.

28

See Peter G. Christensen’s critique of Mandlove for naming the conclusion ‘matriarchal’ rather than highlighting its emphasis on the animal over the female, in ‘The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington’s Literary Work’, in Surrealism and Women, eds Caws, Kuenzli and Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 153.

29

Caillois, Appendix III, 2nd edn, Guerre et sacré, p. 167.

30

Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 108.

31

Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 151.

148 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

32

See Mandlove, ‘Humor’.

33

Suleiman connects the novel to the carnivalesque in, ‘Intertextuality’, p. 182.

34

John Corrigan, ‘Review: Ingvild Saelid Gilhus’s Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion’, Church History, 68, 1 (March 1999), 243.

35

Bettina L. Knapp, ‘Leonora Carrington’s Whimsical Dreamworld: Animals Talk, Children are Gods, a Black Swan Lays an Orphic Egg’, World Literature Today, 51, 4 (Autumn 1977), 528; Marina Warner, ‘Leonora Carrington. New York’, The Burlington Magazine, 130, 1027 (October 1998), 797.

36

Knapp, ‘Dreamworld’, 528.

37

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, pp. 21–25.

38

Mahon, ‘She who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington’, in CelƟc, ed. Kissane, p. 139.

39

Alongside Pierre Mabille and Kurt Seligman’s esoteric interests, which influenced Carrington in New York, and others before her, Keith Aspley links Carrington and Varo to the work of Gurdjieff and his disciple Peter Ouspensky, in Historical DicƟonary of Surrealism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), pp. 106, 490. Arcq points to the influence of Gerald Gardner’s work on Carrington in ‘Magic’, p. 22. One could also posit the influence of Jean Markale’s 1950s writings published in Médium and Surrealisme même, and his Les Grandes bardes gallois (1956), prefaced by Breton.

40

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, pp. 436.

41

Natalya Lusty and Susan Rubin Suleiman point to this, for example.

42

Mahon, ‘Celtic’, p. 149.

43

The Roman Venus, as the evening star, with its implicit connection to Lucifer, the light bringer, appears at HT 72.

44

Epona ‘aligned with the Celtic cult of the mare goddess’; Mahon, ‘Celtic’, p. 139.

45

Lusty, Surrealism, pp. 47–49.

46

Festival release is noted also by Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, and although outside this text’s focus on the sacred, one could perhaps find many more correlations between the work of the Bakhtin circle and the Collège, given Bakhtin’s connection with members of the group.

47

Hollier comments on Caillois’s social application of Freud’s discussion of release in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, as mentioned in College, p. xvi.

48

Noys, Bataille, pp. 8, 103.

49

As discussed, in Durkheim’s view, primary experience of the sacred can be either individual or collective; Hervieu-Léger, Memory, pp. 52–53.

50

E.R. Dodds, Greeks and the IrraƟonal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 [1951]), p. 77.

51

One could also productively collapse the Bretonian/Bataillean dichotomy outlined here by aligning both forms under the sign of transgression in all its forms, including Dionysian, and that of apocalypse.

52

Plato’s Ion, reproduced in Ion: Hippias minor; Laches; Protagoras, trans. R.E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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53

As mentioned, Smith, ed., Greek, p. 1048. References: Euripides, Bacchae, 420; Strabo, Geography, x, 468; Siculus, History, iv. 4; and Pausanias, Greece, i. 31.2, vii. 21.2.

54

Aaron J. Atsma, The Theoi Project: Guide to Greek Mythology, (accessed 10 January 2009).

55

Helen Cullyer, ‘A Wind that Blows from Thrace: Dionysus in the Fifth Stasimon of Sophocles’ AnƟgone’, Classical World, 99, 1 (Fall 2005), 3.

56

Richman, ‘The Sacred Group’, pp. 67–68.

57

Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 47, 50, quoted in Evans Lansing Smith, ‘Postmodern Grail Quests: Leonora Carrington, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon’, in Course Information, English-2413, Summer 2007, pp. 30–31, Midwestern State University, (accessed 2 April 2010).

58

In such a reading, symbolic analogy is both that which Eliade attributes as connecting the sacred and profane, but also indicates the analogical language Rudolf Otto described, as paraphrased by Eliade, MEPS 10; MEMDM 124. Maude-Arthur’s vision occurs at HT 58.

59

Cullyer, ‘Dionysus’, 3.

60

Brenner, ‘Affects’, 546.

61

Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, 11–17; ‘The Mirror Stage’, pp. 3–7.

62

Lacan and Bataille shared acquaintances, met socially, and Lacan married Bataille’s ex-wife.

63

V. Crapanzano The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); D. Moerman, ‘Anthropology of Symbolic Healing’, Current Anthropology, 20 (1979), 59–80; and A. Kleinman, PaƟents and Healers in the Context of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), are cited in Loring M. Danforth, ‘The Resolution of Conflict through Song in Greek Ritual Therapy’, in Contested IdenƟƟes: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece, eds Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 98, 109, 101–02.

64

Mandlove, ‘Humor’, 122. Although not unconcerned with social change, as the movement’s anti-colonial attitude and battles with the Communist Party demonstrate, surrealism’s impact is sometimes limited by the methods of its application, as discussed in relation to Carpentier’s novel.

65

M.M. Mahood, ed., ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, TwelŌh Night (London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 10, 8–9 respectively.

66

Patricia Allmer, Antony Penrose and Fiona Corridan, ‘Exploring Angels panel discussion’, Angels of Anarchy: Women ArƟsts and Surrealism, Manchester Art Gallery, 2009–10, (accessed 14 September 2014).

67

Bataille, The Absence of Myth, quoted in Richardson, Bataille, p. 126.

68

Quetzalcóatl (or Mayan Kukulcán), the peace-loving god who rejected human sacrifice, symbolised ‘death and resurrection’ and was accompanied by ‘Xolotl, a dog-headed god’; see ‘Quetzalcoatl’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online at (accessed 3 March 2011).

69

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, p. 133.

70

Cf. Ph 246d–e, 251b, 256d.

150 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

71

Orenstein, ‘Hermeticism’, p. 567.

72

Mahon, ‘Celtic’, p. 139.

73

See Littleton, ‘Grail’.

74

Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: Origins and Structures of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 84. Cf. Orenstein ‘Hermeticism’, p. 572; Suleiman ‘Intertextuality’, 191.

75

Philip Gardiner and Gary Osborn, The Serpent Grail: The Truth Behind the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life (London: Watkins, 2007), p. 11.

76

As discussed, Waldrop details that in ancient philosophy nous (intuitive reasoning) was esteemed over discursive reasoning; ‘Reason’, 72–73.

77

Orenstein, ‘Reclaiming’, 65. Alongside the Celtic association of the divine bee with the virgin and Mexican Nahualist identification with the animal divinity, a comparativist viewpoint could interpret this as an expression of the anima mundi.

78

Mahon, ‘Celtic’, p. 139.

79

The Quiché Maya god of the Cauecs people, Tohil, can be traced back to the classic period god, ‘Tahil, a Cholan word meaning “Obsidian Mirror”’; see Denis Tedlock, ‘Introduction’, in Popol Vuh, trans. Denis Tedlock (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1986), p. 49. Also, ‘Linked to landscape, cosmology and myth, obsidian attained its apotheosis as the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking (Obsidian) Mirror”, and after the conquest its symbolic role was re-aligned’; Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘A Dark Light: Reflections on Obsidian in Mesoamerica’, World Archaeology, 33, 2 (October 2001), 220.

80

Rehberg, ‘Mirrors’, p. 298.

81

Of course, this can be assimilated to the female goddess detailed in formal surrealism. However, this is a specific feminist adaptation of such a surrealist figure.

82

Eliade made this implication clear in relation to all modern narrative, but it is possible to claim that nonnaturalism draws on symbols from myth and nonlinear temporal structures in less camouflaged ways and thereby stands in a somewhat differing relation to the rites of ‘initiation’ than realist narrative; MESP 205.

83

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 123.

84

Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, p. xiii.

85

Lusty, Surrealism, pp. 62n15, 63.

86

Hollier, ‘Discontents’, 8–9.

87

Hollier, ‘Discontents’, 7. Here Hollier argues against Caillois in ‘Illusions Against the Grain’, La Nouvelle revue française (1955) that surrealism/ethnography reversed the colonising process, rejecting the West in favour of the Orient.

88

Chénieux-Gendron paraphrasing Breton’s ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers’, PosiƟon poliƟque du surrealism, in Manifestoes, p. 219 (En. edn, pp. 234–41), in Surrealism, p. 10.

89

Cf. memories of England, HT 15–16.

90

A parallel could be drawn between Anubeth and the dog-headed god Xolotl who accompanies Quetzalcoatl.

91

Orenstein, The ReŇowering of the Goddess (New York and Oxford: Pergamon, 1990), p. 184.

92

Orenstein, ‘Hermeticism’, p. 569.

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151

93

Lusty, Surrealism, p. 63.

94

Mandlove, ‘Humor’, 117.

95

Chadwick, Women ArƟsts and the Surrealist Movement (1985), paraphrased by Orenstein, ReŇowering, p. 47.

96

Orenstein, ReŇowering, p. 185.

97

Eliade notes that this shift is partly socioeconomic: ‘the ascent of the Earth-Mother to the position of the supreme, if not unique, divinity, was arrested both by her hierogamy with the sky and by the appearance of the divinities of agriculture’; MEPS 262. In agrarian societies the land and the Goddess became associated primarily with fertility and sexuality.

98

Similarly, this was discussed in Chapter 1. Lusty also doubts the transgressive nature of the carnival, preferring the idea of parody in relation to Carrington’s novel; see Surrealism, pp. 63, 78.

99

Christensen’s attribution of passionless androgyny to the Goddess seems to deny her multivalency; see ‘Flight’.

100 Lusty, Surrealism, p. 62n15. 101 See Carroll, ‘Return’, p. 145; and Cottenet-Hage, ‘Subversive’, p. 83, on this change. 102 Bataille describes the suppression of the object or the subject as sadism and mysticism respectively in GBAM 90. 103 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1935), in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 4–5, quoted in Michael Calderbank, ‘Surreal Dreamscapes: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades’, Papers of Surrealism, 1 (Winter 2003), 7 (here, Calderbank also elaborates Freud’s stance on the dream). Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, p. 151. 104 For example, Balakian, Breton, and Aberth, Carrington, amongst other critical considerations which look to esoteric features in Carrington’s writing.

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PĆėę IV TčĊ RĎĘĊ Ĕċ RĔĒĆēĎĆē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ Ćēĉ AĒĔĚė DĎěĎē FĔĚ

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6 TčĊ BĆđĐĆēĘ Ćēĉ ęčĊ RĔĒĆēĎĆē AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ: CĔĒĒĚēĎĘĒ Ďē SĔĚęč-EĆĘęĊėē EĚėĔĕĊ

In this part of the book I am reviving an exceptional surrealist text, nearly forgotten and buried in the complex histories of global surrealism and the region where it comes from: the Balkans. Although its borders and its very definition are continuously contested and re-examined, the region of the Balkans is usually assumed to be composed of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia (from 1946 comprising Socialist Republics of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (Kosovo and Vojvodina) and Slovenia) and Romania.1 Historically, the region has experienced Imperial Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg, Soviet and Soviet-style communist rule and witnessed from an external vantage point the comparative freedoms of Western Europe. The relations of the Balkans to its rulers, and to Western Europe, are not those of colonialism. As the critic Dušan I. Bjelić notes, ‘the Balkan region was never colonised in the modern sense, as the Orient was, despite being subjected to Ottoman rule.’2 Similarly, communist rule in the Balkans did not mimic the features of colonialism, for each form of political governance arose out of opposing socioeconomic precepts, a point Adrian Otoiu highlights: ‘Colonialism is rooted in capitalist ideology’ that favours a ‘rhetoric of difference’, while communism ‘purportedly aimed to abolish all difference’.3 This chapter focuses specifically on the historical relations between the Balkans and Western Europe in the modern period. Maria Todorova pays particular attention to the construction of Balkan ‘identity’ in relation to Western Europe, comparing Edward Said’s critique of ‘orientalism’ in Orientalism (1978) to the negative construction of ‘balkanism’ by the West. Todorova states: ‘unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about an imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity’, and this dynamic takes the form of Western Europe’s ‘schematisation’ of the Balkans as the ‘lowermost suggest[ing] “the shadow, the structurally despised alter ego”’, ‘violent’,

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‘disruptive’, ‘ambiguous’ and an ‘incomplete self’ rather than ‘other’.4 Western Europe’s stigmatisation of the Balkans complicates Balkan social identity on the global stage. Similarly Bjelić highlights that ‘Balkan identity has been a potent channelling tool in the cultural exorcism of civilized Europe’, citing as support Carl Schmitt’s critique of ‘liberal democracy and its violent self-beautification’ at the expense of its margins.5 It is clear that, as a result of negative schematisations and projections emanating from Western Europe, the reconfiguration of Balkan social identity is as important an issue for the region as it is, and has been, for postcolonial regions. However, one must not forget the differing socioeconomic precepts shaping them. The psychological and affective component of this rejection by Western Europe, which Todorova and Bjelić focus upon, serves to replicate in a regional context Bataille’s dissident surrealist theory of heterology in which society self-defines through what it excludes, and his analysis of such abjections and exclusions.6 The similarity is clear between Todorova’s analysis and Bataille’s theory of heterology when Todorova writes that Balkan ‘ambiguity’ is rejected within Western European schemas and is codified with affective repulsion: ‘As Mary Douglas has elegantly shown, objects or ideas that confuse or contradict cherished classifications provoke pollution behaviour that condemns them, because “dirt is essentially disorder”.’7 Todorova, like Bataille’s heterology, makes the theoretical move to dismantle the foundations of normative thought – by interrogating the rejected category and analysing its affective construction. Todorova and Bjelić enact a radical questioning of Western European ‘pollution behaviour’ towards its periphery – a critique that was also central to the surrealist questioning of bourgeois rationalism. The schematisation and rejection of any periphery – be it social, sexual or cultural such as in postcolonial regions, feminism and the Balkans – can be challenged in unique ways by international surrealist methods of critiquing exclusionary social bonds. Bataille’s theory offers a way to understand Todorova’s identification, and to see how national ontology is affectively constructed in the global arena in dialogue with other regions. Surrealism’s refusal of a Western hierarchy of geopolitical world regions, and its validation of peripheral regions, received international avant-garde support and may account for its continued popularity. It is imperative that in outlining an approach to Balkan literary studies – which is a burgeoning field outside specialist language departments – that the dynamics of Western European colonialism do not impose themselves on Balkan experience. Within which the position of Romania is particularly fraught in the regional and extra-regional imaginary. Variously described as ‘postcolonial’ or, more appositely, ‘post-imperial’, the Balkans requires a conceptual rubric under which its geosocial complexities can prevail without collapsing under the specificities of other fields of study. Therefore, the term ‘suzerainty’ will be used here to denote the various forms of Eastern European rule specific to the Balkan region. From 1800 onwards there were close ties between Romania and France, with many of Romania’s elite being educated in Paris. Critics have noted that this relationship was often characterised by a Romanian emulation of French culture, which Adrian Cioroianu views as arising from a wish to ‘escape’ from ‘Balkan’ identity – evident from 1850 onwards.8 In 1861 Romania became

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a Principality, finally breaking from Turkey and Russia in 1877. Waves of suzerainty in the Balkans had led to the mixing of ethnicities within national borders. This mixture gave rise to specific literary features which Sanja Bahun details: ‘it is the heteroglotic everyday experience in a multi-ethnically striated culture that make Balkan modernists particularly attentive to language – to layering of discourse, semantic slipperiness, political-linguistic abuse, and, also the subversive potential of innovative structuring.’9 Attention to multiple ethnic codes and their differences led to an appreciation of the absurd, and in Romania a strong indigenous tradition arose around cultural and aesthetic presentations of the absurd, notably in the modernist works of Ion Luca Caragiale and Urmuz. The widespread use of the French language amongst the Romanian elite and the effect of educating its young men in France meant that Romania’s non-Western voice was influenced by, and made significant contributions to, European avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism. The first wave of East-Central European modernism, and within it Balkan modernism, began around 1890 and was composed of Decadence, Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Impressionism.10 In the period 1890–1914, relations between Western Europe and Romania were strengthened for, as Bahun details, the Balkans saw ‘substantial foreign investment’ as ‘European countries were actively involved in the internal affairs of the new Balkan states’, in defining borders and overseeing appointed rulers.11 Western Europe’s influence extended to the educational and ideational spheres of cultural life and became a determining factor in the spread of Western European movements, such as surrealism, in Romania. A second ‘more radical’ wave of East-Central European modernism arrived with the avant-garde in 1910–30 including Expressionism, Constructivism and Futurism, which developed into Dada and surrealism.12 Tom Sandqvist incisively observes the Romanian embrace of absurdity as part of the polyvalent nature of Romanian culture and a constituent factor in the creation of its avant-garde.13 The Romanian tradition of the absurd was to play an influential role in Zurich Dada, through its Romanian members, Tristan Tzara, the brothers Marcel, Jules and Georges Janco (Iancu) and Arthur Segal, all of whom had been active in the Romanian avant-garde.14 Zurich Dada was to advance a specific appreciation of sacred reality. As Richard Shepherd observes, the Dadaist Hans Richter adhered to Buddhist precepts and described Dada ‘chance’ as originating during meditations in which the ‘voice of the Unknown’ was heard.15 In addition Sandqvist details the Jewish Hasidic mystical tradition which shaped the backgrounds of the five Romanian members of Dada in Zurich. Dada was to have a formative influence upon the Parisian avant-garde scene in the early 1920s and on the formation of the surrealist movement in Paris, when it was carried there in 1919 by the peripatetic figure of Tzara, who exported the subversive attitude of Romanian early avant-garde thought into a global arena. Richter further defines the ‘Unknown’ as having two potential loci, one from within and one from without: Was it the artist’s unconscious mind, or a power outside of him, that had spoken? . . . Was it a part of oneself, or a combination of factors quite beyond anyone’s control? . . . This

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experience taught us that we were not so rooted in the knowable world as people would have us believe. We felt that we were coming into contact with something different, something that surrounded and interpenetrated us just as we overflowed into it . . . a genuine mental and emotional experience that gave us wings to fly – and to look down upon the absurdities of the ‘real’ and earnest world.16

Although in Bretonian surrealism the privileging of the artist’s unconscious stands as the source of creativity, it is the external source which, I propose, forms the basis for an alternative strain of sacred surrealist practice that is not analysed by contemporary readings of surrealism.17 Following the disbanding of Zurich Dada, the movement’s popularity grew in East-Central Europe during the 1920s. Dada was particularly relevant to Romanian avant-garde expression and, like the tradition of the absurd, was shaped by regional views of the contradictory and fluid nature of reality and its absurdist approach to modernity. Bojtár explains that Dadaism also played an important role ‘as a silent partner in other trends’ so that its ‘often “ecstatic” program of gaiety worked its way into other, socially quite substantial concepts.’18 Importantly, in Romania the early to mid-1920s saw a definite resistance to the new surrealist ideas in favour of other avant-garde trends including Constructivism and machine-oriented Integralism. Surrealism, however, became popular during the second phase of the Romanian avant-garde, from 1928 to 1939, a period in which the right-wing nationalistic forces of the Iron Guard were gaining ground in Romania.19 The international and eclectic nature of the Romanian avant-garde is demonstrated in a number of periodicals from the early 1920s, but during this second phase it could be observed in the pages of Geo Bogza’s journal Urmuz (1928), whose contributors included Tristan Tzara, Stephan Roll and Ilarie Voronca.20 Also in the magazine unu (1928–32) which, under the directorship of Saşa Pană, fused Futurist, Dadaist and surrealist aspects, and counted amongst its contributors Voronca, Roll, Bogza and [Victor] Brauner, to whom the critic Camelia Darie adds, ‘Urmuz and Mihail Cosma [Claude Sernet] . . . M.H. Maxy, Jacques Hérold and Jules Perahim’.21 Both Hérold and Brauner went to Paris in 1930 and later joined the surrealist movement. In these ways avant-garde and surrealist formations in Romania benefited from the close relations between Romania and France. The burgeoning of surrealist ideas continued in the magazine Alge (1930–33), staffed by the younger generation of contributors, Ghérasim Luca, Paul Păun (Paon), Jules Perahim, Sesto Pals, and edited by Aurel Baranga. A great number of the journal’s contributors were Jewish, as were many of the Romanian avant-garde.22 Following the discontinuation of Alge, Luca, Păun and Perahim, with the illustrious addition of the former unu contributor, Bogza, produced a manifesto, Viata Mediata (December 1933), influenced by Breton’s version of surrealism but rejecting its unu predecessors.23 Although contact was made with Breton during the second phase of the Romanian avant-garde, no official Romanian group was founded. Dimitru Tsepeneag determines that this pre-war ‘Romanian version [of surrealism] had a greater aspect of social protest to it’ than its Western European variants, a feature that becomes clearer in post-war versions.24 Bojtár, however, excludes ‘Romanian surrealism of the thirties from surrealism proper’ which emerged in the 1940s, and Petre Răileanu defines it as

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‘superficial and shy . . . not go[ing] in-depth with any of the great experiences that are specific to the movement’.25 Romania’s avant-garde in the 1930s did engage with surrealist ideas but usually when fused with a number of avant-garde trends. Appreciating the specific interaction between Dada and surrealist ideas at this point adds greatly to our understanding of the historical spread of international surrealism.26 In the 1940s a surrealist group proper was established in Romania in which can be identified a more concrete commitment to surrealist ideals. It been noted that Oskar Pastior in the 1950s and Herta Müller in the 1970s worked in the surrealist vein.27 Although Romanian figures, such as Tzara, Brauner and Hérold, spent lengthy periods of time in Paris and are familiar names in surrealist studies, a full exposition of Romanian28 and South-Eastern European surrealism is slow to emerge in Anglo-American scholarship. This is perhaps a result of sociopolitical factors in the region, where communism restrained and restricted avant-garde expression and its scholarship. Surrealism’s popularity in South-Eastern Europe was, however, significant and can tell us much about the international surrealist movement. In this part of the book the Balkan region is considered through the exemplar of the Romanian surrealist group and the novel Zenobia by the poetwriter Gellu Naum, following on from indicative examples of postcolonial and feminist expressions of the surrealist international voice. * Romanian avant-garde interactions with surrealism were to change drastically following a two-year sojourn in Paris undertaken by Luca, contributor to Alge and co-author of Viata Mediata, and by Naum from 1938 to 1939. Gellu Naum, a student of philosophy at the University of Bucharest from 1933 to 1937, had, during his studies, become a great friend of unu’s Brauner, who had recently returned from his four-year stay in Paris amongst Breton’s group.29 At this time Naum also became associated with Luca and Păun, and published his first poetry collection in 1936.30 In 1938 Naum and Luca travelled to Paris – Naum to undertake doctoral studies in philosophy – where they stayed until the outbreak of war. Brauner had previously returned to Paris, and his affiliation with the surrealists was to bring Luca and Naum into surrealist circles during this time. For these men, Parisian intellectual life stood in direct contrast to events at home where right-wing censorship had begun to curtail avant-garde expression, as Neubauer highlights: ‘The liberal and democratic periodicals were closed down in Romania, first during the Royal Dictatorship (declared February 10, 1938), and subsequently under General Ion Antonescu’s military dictatorship, which was supported by the right-wing Iron Guard.’31 Romania’s allegiance with the Axis under Antonescu’s dictatorship instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing in Romania which was to impact greatly on Romanian avantgarde circles.32 Following their return to Romania, in 1940 Luca and Naum founded the Romanian surrealist group with Virgil Teodorescu and Păun (joined later by Dolfi Trost).33 During the 1940s the surrealist group was to build upon the proclivity for social protest exhibited in 1930s surrealism and turn their attention to a productive critique of official Parisian surrealism. For reasons outlined by

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Sandqvist and Bahun as being particularly pertinent to the Balkan and Romanian context, these Romanian surrealists brought a complex understanding of cultural polyvalence to surrealism. Although the activities of the Romanian surrealist group were restricted and it was cut off from France during the war, its voice maintained a strong tone of social protest and revolutionary aims. As Krzysztof Fijalkowski details, the Romanian surrealist group ‘nevertheless led an active secret existence, and developed a number of highly original theoretical and formal directions which both extended and radicalised the European surrealism of the 1930s.’34 This radicalisation offers a possible rationale as to why Romanian surrealism has been a virtually uncharted topic in Anglophone surrealist studies, and why it warrants serious consideration by scholars. A primary aim of the Romanian surrealist group was to entirely bring the dream into reality. As Luc Mercier details, they ‘claim quite specifically to “oneirize life”, merge dream and reality . . . . a far cry from Breton, who had been careful to specify that surrealism only aimed to “make visible” the point where contradictions were abolished.’35 Naum’s doctoral studies at the Sorbonne may have been integral to his formulation of surrealist tenets in the Romanian surrealist group. Naum’s thesis considered the medieval French scholastic philosopher Pierre Abélard (1079–1142) who critiqued scholastic realism using a form of conceptualism. Abélard’s conceptualism professed that universals exist only in the mind, via perception or intention, the extension of which is nominalism, which refutes the existence of universals. In opposition to the meaning of modern realism (predicated on scholastic nominalism and modern rationalism), scholastic realism accepts the pre-existent nature of universals and is associated with Plato’s thought. In moderate scholastic realism, universals exist only in material manifestation. In this sense Eliade’s observations on hierophany and the sacralisation of material objects as symbols, myths and rites, concur with elements of scholastic realism. The latter also bears some relation to the surrealist vision of reality, a connection outlined by Walter Benjamin: Breton indicates in his ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’෴.෴.෴.෴how the philosophical realism of the Middle Ages was the basis of poetic experience. This realism, however – that is, the belief in a real, separate existence of concepts, whether outside or inside things – has always very quickly crossed over from the logical realm of ideas to the magical realm of words.36

Here, Breton views poetic experience as arising from the mythic symbolism inherent in medieval philosophical realism (scholasti c realism), which as Benjamin points out is very close to the magic word and therefore to surrealist concerns with language and the esoteric, which may potentially impact upon surrealist views of the real and the object. Similarly, as Kadri identifies, other forms of philosophy such as absolute nominalism had a bearing upon surrealist theory.37 Naum’s study of scholastic conceptualism allowed him a unique insight into surrealism’s use of philosophical realism, absolute nominalism and cognition. The Romanian surrealist group’s intention to realise dream as reality provided a way to extend surrealist theory beyond its official parameters: a view

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informed by Naum’s understanding of the intricacies of medieval philosophy, which is clearly evident in the sophisticated oneiric, sacralised representation of reality in Naum’s novel, Zenobia (1985). The Romanian surrealist group tolerated internal dissension, which was mainly visible between Luca and Naum. This is perhaps a result of the Romanian attitude of ‘ba da’, which Sandqvist identifies as open debate in which criticism and contradiction is sportingly welcomed.38 After the war, the Romanian surrealist group’s ideas and vivacity created an impact on the international scene causing Breton to say: ‘The centre of the world has moved to Bucharest.’39 In 1945 the most noted manifesto, DialecƟque de la dialecƟque (The DialecƟc of DialecƟc), written in French, was signed by Luca and Trost and CriƟca mizeriei (CriƟque of Misery) was produced by Naum, Păun and Teodorescu in Romanian. In the following two years, L’infra-noir (The Infra-Black) and Eloge de Malombra: Cerne de l’amour absolu (Eulogy to Malombra: A RepresentaƟon of Absolute Love) were co-authored in French by all five members. The signatories of each manifesto could indicate differences of opinion in this small collective, and possibly explains why Tsepeneag views Naum and Luca as belonging to separate surrealist groups entirely, one of which included Naum, Păun and Teodorescu, the other Luca and Trost.40 Monique Yaari proposes that the matter of language indicates a source of conflict in the group.41 Given the joint manifestos, however, each grouping could, at most, be viewed as simply a faction within the greater whole. Many critics privilege Luca and Trost’s ideas, material and their manifesto, The DialecƟc of DialecƟc (1945), when detailing the history of Romanian surrealism. Fewer articles discuss the other Romanian ‘faction’ headed by Naum; an exception within this trend is offered by Tsepeneag’s analyses.42 Bretonian surrealism, like Dada, was inspired by a dialectical monism present in Heraclitus’ thought.43 The ‘short circuits’ generated by the meeting of oppositions, proposed by Bretonian surrealism and inspired by dialectical monism, crucially develops the dialectic thread of avant-garde thought and is visible in Romanian surrealism through Luca and Trost’s manifesto The DialecƟc of DialecƟc.44 This may suggest why this manifesto is usually considered more important to the history of Romanian surrealism than any other. In The DialecƟc of DialecƟc, Luca and Trost outlined what was to become, thus far, the most significant Romanian contribution to the international surrealist movement – the concept of ‘surautomatism’.45 Expressing the spirit of ‘ba da’, they also critique official Parisian surrealism for their ‘gradual transformation of objective discoveries into means of artistic production’ which negate the revolutionary potential of objective chance, thereby indicating their deep awareness of the social and political potential of surrealist revolution.46 Naum did not sign The DialecƟc of DialecƟc and this could imply his reservations, either of the sexual/ erotic liberation of the proletariat as the catalyst for revolution, or the pursuit of rigidly dialectical thinking present in the manifesto. Naum, Păun and Teodorescu’s manifesto, CriƟque of Misery (1945), although not available in translation, is detailed by Tsepeneag as the place in which ‘they declared themselves to be both Marxists and Hegelians at the same ti me. They were less Freudian than Luca and Trost, whom they accused of “conformism”

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and even “reactionaryism” [sic].’47 CriƟque of Misery took a more radical stance towards surrealism than even The DialecƟc of DialecƟc. As Tsepeneag notes, they returned to the original claims and intentions of Bretonian surrealism and came ‘closer to the positions taken by the First Manifesto than Breton himself was at that time’.48 Further, he adds that at the heart of this endeavour was the intention to ‘resolve the contradiction between the imaginary and the real by transferring subjectivity to the outside world using automatic writing and liberation of the object’.49 As already mentioned, Naum’s studies in medieval philosophy offered a unique perspective on the real and the surrealist liberation of the object expressed in CriƟque of Misery, one that also shaped his understanding of the Romanian surrealist group’s aim to ‘oneirize life’ itself rather than to ‘make visible’ the supreme point at which oppositions meet. Their intention to develop and transform official surrealism reflects the radical nature of the Romanian surrealist enquiry and concurs with the impetus of dissident surrealists in the Collège, who returned to early surrealist ideas in order to combat the increasing lack of rigour they saw in later official forms of surrealism. Of the two collective manifestos signed by the circle of five, little Anglophone critical material exists on Infra-Black (1946).50 In Eulogy to Malombra (1947),51 objective love, which created the foundations of objective chance in The DialecƟc of DialecƟc, reappears as the central focus. Love is allied with madness and hysteria, concepts of non-contradiction and the borderless. The signatories of the manifesto state: ‘Apart from the love of the heart, the love of the senses, relative love, there is also that kind of love where everything, absolutely everything folds back and concentrates . . . Pure love for the absolute essence is awareness alienated from itself . . . the magnetism of eternal love.’52 Through the lens of official surrealism, as Balázs Imre-József points out, absolute love connects with ‘Breton’s concept of “mad love”’ and refers to convulsive beauty.53 Also, the group’s distinction between relative love and objective love makes a separation which could, respectively, be likened to Socrates’ separation in the Phaedrus between physical desire as a ‘surrender[ing] to pleasure’, and the divine madness of love where the initiate stands ‘reverently’ (Ph 250e), giving it an entirely different tone to that in official surrealism. While both Romanian surrealist ‘factions’ agreed upon their definition of love in Malombra and upon the importance of objective love as a revolutionary force, love is a topic which the fictions of Naum and Luca present in greatly differing ways. The ‘cataclysmic deconstruction of the self through love’, which Fijalkowski attributes to Luca’s 1945 texts, Inventatorul iubirii (The Inventor of Love), The DialecƟc of DialecƟc and Le Vampire passif (The Passive Vampire), also indicates Luca’s interest in sexuality and perversions wholly in accord with Bataille’s views on erotic experience.54 In contrast, in Zenobia, Naum’s fictional presentation of ‘objective love’ is more readily in accord with the Collège’s theory of sacred sociology and Bataille’s route beyond-the-self through sacred ecstasy. Therefore Naum adheres more closely to the strain of sacred thought in international surrealism. From 1945 to 1947 the Romanian surrealist group actively participated in the brief continuation of a diverse and vibrant avant-garde scene in Romania,

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under a ‘regime that was still pluralistic, democratic, and tolerant of artistic experimentation’.55 The impact of the war upon Romanian identity was profound and during this period, Romania began processing the horrors of its collusion with fascist activities and ethnic ‘cleansing’ programmes. This brief revival of the Romanian avant-garde after the Second World War lasted only a few short years, until Stalinist communism took over Romania and curtailed avant-garde expression. As John Neubauer describes, ‘literary mourning, and remembering in general, became ideologically controlled under the communist dictatorships that were soon established in all countries of the region.’56 From this point onwards, public activities of the Romanian surrealist group ceased. Luca and Trost escaped to Israel in 1950, later settling in Paris and Chicago respectively. In 1961 Păun also escaped and settled in Israel. Naum and Teodorescu would stay in Romania during the following four decades of communist rule.57 During their coalescence the Romanian surrealist group redeveloped and challenged official surrealism in terms that are not yet fully understood by Anglophone scholarship. In this sense it confirms certain aspects of the Collège’s critique of the lack of rigour of official surrealism in the 1930s, whilst relating a unique regional appreciation of the absurd and ‘ba da’ in ways that impacted the international avant-garde. In the late 1950s, Russia relinquished direct control of Romania and was succeeded by the restrictive Soviet-style communist leaderships of Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej until 1964, and Nicolae Ceauşescu from 1964 until 1989. To continue publishing, both Naum and Teodorescu were required to comply with communist aesthetic expression in the form of social realism. Teodorescu became somewhat aligned in his praise of communism, but the unaligned Naum confined himself to publishing mainly children’s fiction until 1968.58 Communist censorship of the arts caused writers, intellectuals and theorists who were not in agreement with party politics to react in three generalised ways: a simulated acceptance; a powerlessness and passivity in the face of police terror and ideological restrictions;59 or a resistance-expression that evades the censor using what Ştefan Augustin Doinaş termed a ‘plurisemantic’ or ‘aesopic language’.60 Understanding this ‘aesopic’ resistance to communist ideology in Romania offers a way of interpreting Gellu Naum’s ideas in his surrealist novel, Zenobia, and decoding the symbols used in its resistance. As a form of affective social rejuvenation utilised by the avant-garde, myth was central to all forms of surrealist expression, but its effects were also open to abuse by Soviet communist ideology, as Letiţia Guran and Alexandru Ştefan detail.61 Communist rhetoric utilised the powerful forces at work in the myth of eternal return and origin myths to construct an exclusionary, monovalent national imaginary aimed at shoring up the boundaries of identity (evident also in some forms of modernism) rather than the avant-garde response of liberating heterogeneous forces.62 The images of chaos and renewal evident in Bataille and Caillois’s description of death and rebirth, anguish and ecstasy, and tension and release, indicate the liberating forces at work in society that can augur a new beginning. As Eliade states, nonnaturalistic, avant-garde representations of apocalypse and beginning anew (millennialist or eschatological myths) serve to construct a new cultural identity as a reaction to crisis. During periods of social

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basanos or ‘times of trouble’, just as in Desoille’s application, symbols of renewal derived from myth prove a ritual regenerative force to rebuild social identity: [T]he cosmogonic myth lends itself to various applications, among them healing, poetic creation, introducing the child into the society and culture, and so on. We have also seen that the regressus ad uterum [return to the womb] can be homologized with a regression to the state of Chaos before the Creation. This being so, we understand why certain archaic therapies employ the ritual return to the womb instead of ceremonial recitation of the cosmogonic myth. (MEMR 82)

The affective component of social rebinding is instanced in the profound impact which mythic symbols have in establishing national identity. The year 1964 heralded a quasi-liberal phase in Ceauşescu’s regime, but by 1971 liberalisation of the arts ended and ideological control was once again reinforced through police intervention and tighter state censorship.63 From 1968, Naum was able to publish more freely. Interestingly, his relative isolation on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ was to ensure that his ideas and development as a writer were vastly different from those of the free members of the international surrealist movement. The work Naum carried out in this period qualifies for what could be termed a third phase of Romanian surrealist activity in which there was a marked return to avant-garde expressions of myths of death and renewal, the esoteric and recourse to a specifically ‘Romanian’ mystical attitude towards death.64 Eliade details that the latter is present in national folktales, and influences Romanian identity through the Mioriԕa myth.65 Death or chaos is thus configured mythically in a local autochthonic constellation that concurs with the avant-garde impetus for eschatological myth, and myths of renewal. In 1979 Naum began writing his novel Zenobia, the only novel of the Romanian surrealist group published within communist Romania. Published in Bucharest in 1985, when Naum was 70 years old, it was translated into English and published in the US in 1995.66 Zenobia is a late masterpiece of surrealist prose infused with Romanian folkloric and mythic elements which detail a world populated by nonnaturalist elements and the unknown. The surrealist world Naum creates in Zenobia is communicated via symbols and hierophanies, and is read here as a complex interaction with the precepts of scholastic philosophy. It is possible to read the novel in light of official surrealist theories of madness, love and prophecy. Prophecy is a form of foresight recognised by surrealists, as indicated in Breton’s letters reprinted at the end of Les Vases communicants (CommunicaƟng Vessels, 1932),67 and by the great significance surrealist figures gave to prophetic incidents, such as the Romanian surrealist Brauner’s paintings depicting the loss of his eye prior to the accident in which this actually happened.68 However, Naum also remains true to the aims of the Romanian surrealist group to ‘oneirize life’ and forward ‘objective love’ as the basis of revolutionary thought that is able to free the imagination. As such, it is possible to read the novel as an alternative surrealist text and thereby release new meanings distilled and refracted in moments of textual ekstasis. Through this lens, the aesopic commentary on Romania’s communist rule in the novel reveals language, symbols of metamorphosis and myths that coherently utilise thresholds of initiation, presentations of ekstasis and resultant ontological

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changes to the national imaginary, paralleling the recitation of the cosmogonic myth auguring a new beginning. Zenobia is a novel that has been overlooked by Anglophone Western surrealist scholarship, perhaps because Naum’s surrealist expression was repressed by communism for forty years, and while surrealist ideas found a place within his mature works they had, by then, been consigned to the periphery of surrealist history.

Notes 1

One can define the Balkan region geographically, as in the Oxford English DicƟonary: ‘of or relating to the countries occupying the part of South-Eastern Europe forming a peninsula bounded by the Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, and the Black Seas’, or nationally as above, but the nationalities included in such definitions can vary from source to source.

2

Dušan Bjelić, ‘Introduction: Blowing Up the Bridge’, in Balkans as Metaphor: Between GlobalizaƟon and FragmentaƟon, eds Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 6.

3

Adrian Otoiu, ‘An Exercise in Fictional Liminality – the Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation’, ComparaƟve Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, 1–2 (2003), 91.

4

Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 17–18, cf. ambiguity and schema, respectively, pp. 59–61, 116.

5

Bjelić, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.

6

Chapter 1 defined the affective, constructivist and behaviourist modes of attitude shifting, in order to separate dissident ‘affective’ from oĸcial ‘constructivist’ surrealist methods. Of course in praxis they are often inter-fused actions as is evident through this discussion of ontological status derived from the affective motivation (repulsion) for constructivist schema that stigmatise, exorcise or exclude the ‘shadow’ (separation).

7

Todorova, Imagining, p. 17.

8

Adrian Cioroianu, ‘The Impossible Escape: Romanians and the Balkans’, in Balkans as Metaphor, eds Bjelić and Savić, pp. 210–33; Doina Harsanyi and Nicolae Harsanyi, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Little Sister: France and Romania’, Eastern European Quarterly, 28, 2 (Summer 1994), 183–92.

9

Sanja Bahun, ‘The Balkans Uncovered: Toward Historie Croisée of Modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 36.

10

Endre Bojtár, ‘The Avant-Garde in East-Central European Literature’, in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and TwenƟeth Centuries, eds Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004), p. 364.

11

Bahun, ‘Modernism Uncovered’, p. 27 (draft copy of Bahun’s chapter cited at n9 above).

12

Bojtár, ‘Avant-Garde’, p. 364. Dimitru Tsepeneag observes that these same trends applied in Romania; ‘Onirism’, Review of Contemporary FicƟon, 28, 3 (Fall 2008), 112.

13

Tom Sandqvist, DADA East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 102, discussed by Bahun, ‘Modernism Uncovered’, draft copy supplied by author, p. 18.

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14

Tzara was particularly influenced by the absurdist modernism of Urmuz. See Adriana Varga, ‘Periphery to Center and Back: Exploring Dada and the Absurd in the Context of Romanian Literary Tradition’, in The Avant-Garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism, ed. Sanja Bahun-Radunović and Marinos Pourgouris (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 134, 148.

15

Richard Sheppard, ‘Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities’, in Dada Spectrum: The DialecƟcs of Revolt, eds Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli (Madison, WI.: Coda Press, and Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1979), p. 98. Cf. Ko Won, Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Hans Richter, Dada: Art and AnƟ-Art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997 [1965])

16

Richter, Dada, p. 51.

17

Richter, Dada, p. 51.

18

Bojtár, ‘Avant-Garde’, p. 366.

19

Petre Răileanu, ‘1928–1939. New Publications. The Magazine of the Unu Group. The Culture Climate. The Chronology of the Unu Years. The First Romanian Surrealism. The “Suicide” of Unu’, Plural, 3 (1999), (accessed 15 August 2009), 65–73.

20

S.A. Mansbach, ‘The “Foreignness” of Classical Modern Art in Romania’, The Art BulleƟn, 80, 3 (September 1998), n55.

21

Camelia Darie, ‘Victor Brauner and the Surrealist Interest in the Occult’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Manchester, 2012), p. 21. Mihail Cosma joined the Grand Jeu Parisian dissident group.

22

Leon Volovici, ‘Romanian Literature’, trans. Anca Mircea, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, (accessed 2 December 2011).

23

Răileanu, ‘1928–1939’, 69, 72.

24

Tsepeneag, ‘Onirism’, 112.

25

Bojtár, ‘Avant-Garde’, p. 372; and Răileanu, ‘1928–1939’, 71.

26

Petre Răileanu, ‘1922–1928. The Beginnings. Magazines and Manifestos. The Intellectual International. The Theorizing Machines. 75HP – the New Start of the Romanian AvantGarde. Integralism and Synthesis. Synchronism and Internationalism’, Plural, 3 (1999), 3, (accessed 15 August 2009). Răileanu dates the avant-garde’s first wave as 1922 to 1928 and the second as 1928 to 1939, in contrast to Bojtár’s use of the terms to denote 1908 to 1929 and 1930 onwards respectively.

27

Beverly D. Eddy, ‘A Mutilated Fox Fur: Examining the Contexts of Herta Müller’s Imagery in Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger’, in Herta Müller, eds Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 85.

28

Over the last two decades Anglophone criticism includes that by Catherine Argand, Ana Coman, Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, Ileana Alexandra Orlich, Simona Popescu, Petre Răileanu et al.; two special editions of Plural (1999; 2003); with recent additions by Bálazs Imre-József, Camelia Darie, J.P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Catherine Hansen, Ion Pop, and Monique Yaari amongst others; to which we can also add the special edition of Dada/Surrealism, 20, 1 (2015), eds Monique Yaari and Timothy Shipe, which promises to add much to our understanding of this group; see (accessed November 2015).

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29

Simona Popescu, ‘P.S. With Victor Brauner (This Is How I Would Like To Write)’, from Salvarea speciei: despre suprarealism şi Gellu Naum (The RedempƟon of the Species. On Surrealism and Gellu Naum) (The Romanian Cultural Foundation Publishing House, 2000), Plural, 19 (2003), (accessed 20 August 2009).

30

Naum’s Drumeԕul incendiar (The Incendiary Traveller), illus. Victor Brauner (Carmignano, Italy: Tipografia Alfa, 1936), followed by the 1937 volume Libertatea de a dormi pe o frunte (The Liberty of Sleeping on a Forehead).

31

John Neubauer, ‘1945’, in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, eds Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, p. 148.

32

After Naum’s return to Romania he was conscripted to fight for the Axis, then discharged in 1944. The dictatorship was overthrown in 1944 after which Romania joined the Allies. Naum married Lygia Alexandrescu in 1946.

33

Petre Răileanu, ‘1940–1947. The Romanian Surrealist Group’, Plural, 3 (1999), (accessed 15 August 2009); he also adds the figure Nadine Krainik as allied to the group.

34

Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Ghérasim Luca: Reinvent Everything’, (accessed 17 June 2009).

35

Luc Mercier, ‘The Eroticized Universe: The Bucharest Surrealist Group 1939–1947’, Plural, 3 (1999), 1–5, (accessed 15 August 2009), 2.

36

Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, p. 212 (ref. to André Breton, IntroducƟon au discours sur le peu de réalité, in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1988), p. 275).

37

Kadri, Reimagining, pp. 6, 115.

38

‘ba da’, a negation ‘ba’, followed by an affirmation ‘da’, coexisting: ‘this attitude of protesting, absurd from a pure Western rational point of view, is not only characteristic of the Jewish way of perceiving life and existence but also resembles the typical Romanian behaviour . . . the Romanian always opposes a mode of being, not being in itself . . . Even when he says that something does not exist at all, the Romanian does not deny its being. The most common answer to a negative question is also “ba da” . . . proving that the pure negation can always be conjugated in Romanian in the affirmative’; Sandqvist, DADA, p. 309.

39

Elena Doană, Gellu Naum FoundaƟon, (accessed 30 June 2009).

40

Tsepeneag, ‘Onirism’, 114–15.

41

Monique Yaari, ‘The Surrealist Group of Bucharest, 1945–1947’, in Paris–Bucharest, Bucharest–Paris, ed. Anne Quinney (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 95–136. This point is also discussed by Balázs Imre-József, ‘Body, Love, Object: Frontiers for Romanian Surrealism’, Transylvanian Review, 22, supplement 1 (2013), 90–98.

42

For example, Răileau, ‘1940–1947’; and Mercier, ‘Eroticized’, 2–5. Although DialecƟc of DialecƟc and Eulogy to Malombra are available in English translation, other manifestos are not. As such comparisons are limited, although in ‘Onirism’ Tsepeneag discusses Naum’s position in CriƟque of Misery, filling this gap somewhat. Recently, Monique Yaari talks briefly of CriƟque detailing its opposition to the other group works, in ‘Bucharest’, in Paris–Bucharest, p. 106.

43

‘Opposites come together and from what is different arises the fairest harmony’; Heraclitus of Ephesus, from On Nature, 34, 8, cited in M.R. Wright, The PresocraƟcs: The

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Main Fragments in Greek (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1985), (accessed July 2009). 44

Breton, ‘Second Manifesto’ (1930), p. 161.

45

Ghérasim Luca and Dolfi Trost, ‘The DialecƟc Of DialecƟc: A Message to the InternaƟonal Surrealist Movement’, Plural, 3 (1999), (accessed 15 August 2009).

46

Luca and Trost, ‘The DialecƟc Of DialecƟc’.

47

Tsepeneag, ‘Onirism’, 114.

48

Tsepeneag, ‘Onirism’, 113.

49

Tsepeneag, ‘Onirism’, 115.

50

The collection edited by Yaari, Infra-noir, un et mulƟple: Un groupe surréaliste entre Bucharest et Paris, 1945–1947 (2014), offers an addition to the Francophone critical field, considering not only the manifesto of this name but the body of works titled ‘Infra-noir’.

51

Luca, Trost, Păun and Naum, ‘Eulogy to Malombra: A RepresentaƟon of Absolute Love’, trans. Monica Voiculescu, Plural, 3 (1999), 85–87, (accessed 15 August 2009).

52

Luca et al., Eulogy to Malombra, 86–87.

53

Balázs Imre-József, ‘Mal D’ombre: A Surrealist Interpretation of the Gothic Film Malombra’, Studia Ubb Philologia, 57, 2 (2012), 74.

54

Fijalkowski, ‘Ghérasim Luca’, n13.

55

Monique Yaari, ‘Paul Paon’s Sur-Surreal Chimera’, Utopian Studies, 5, 1 (1994), 108–27.

56

Neubauer, ‘1945’, p. 159.

57

Mercier, ‘Eroticized’, 1.

58

Doană, Naum.

59

See Adam J. Sorkin, ‘The Paradox of the Fortunate Fall: Censorship and Poetry in Communist Romania’, Literary Review, 45, 2 (Summer 2002), 891, 899–900, 905; and Otoiu, ‘Liminality’, 93.

60

Ştefan Augustin Doinaş’s use of the term, referring to the style of poetic language that arose to confuse the communist censor in Romania, is discussed in an interview with Lidia Vianu in Censorship in Romania (Budapest: Central University Press, 1998), pp. 30–31, quoted by Sorkin, ‘Paradox’, 889.

61

Letiţia Guran and Alexandru Ştefan, ‘Romanian Literature under Stalinism’, in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, eds Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, pp. 112, 114. Eliade discusses totalitarian and avant-garde uses of myth in MEMR 69, 181–82.

62

Again this refers to Anderson’s term from Imagined CommuniƟes.

63

See Katherine Verdery, NaƟonal Ideology under Socialism. IdenƟty and Cultural PoliƟcs in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995).

64

The first phase is marked by the appearance of the surrealist-influenced journals and works from the 1920s and 1930s, and the second is constituted by the official formation of the Romanian surrealist group. A similar division is presented by Ana Coman, ‘Summary’, in ‘The Dialectics of the Imaginary in Gellu Naum’s Works’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Lucian Blaga University, Romania, 2009), pp. 1–15, (accessed January 2010). Naum and Brauner shared

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an interest in esotericism that stemmed back to the 1940s; see Popescu, ‘P.S.’. Adrian Mihalache stipulates that Naum’s plays demonstrate an affinity with esotericism, in ‘Writers In Troubled Waters’, Plural, 19 (2003), (accessed 20 August 2009). The topic of the esoteric must be left here, due to the focus upon ekstasis. 65

Mircea Eliade, The Romanians: A Concise History (Bucharest: ‘Roza Vînturilor’ Publishing House, 1992), p. 48.

66

Catherine Argand, ‘Quote’, Plural, 19 (2003), (accessed 2 August 2009).

67

Ileana Alexandra Orlich makes a similar point in Avantgardism, PoliƟcs and the Limits of InterpretaƟon in The (Ex)centric Waste Land: Reading Gellu Naum’s Zenobia (Bucharest: Paideia, 2010), p. 23. This text was brought to my attention after completion of the doctoral thesis upon which this volume is based.

68

Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 75n96; also see Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, for a description of this matter, p. 211.

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7 EĚėĔĕĊ’Ę EĆĘęĊėē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę MĊĆēĎēČĘ: TčĊ GĎċę Ĕċ ęčĊ PėĎĒĔėĉĎĆđ WĆęĊėĘ Ďē GĊđđĚ NĆĚĒ’Ę ZĊēĔćĎĆ

NARRATIVE LANGUAGES [A]ll things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth. Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’ (1927), GBVE 5

In the novel Zenobia Gellu Naum utilises a number of different stylistic and conceptual modes and draws on modernist and postmodernist inflections in a variety of ways. Zenobia was published in 1985, which situates it in what scholars in the Western world typically designate as the postmodernist era. Although the novel is a product of Eastern European postmodernism, Naum’s use of surrealist techniques and concerns in Zenobia, his position as an original member of the Romanian surrealist group and the culturally restrictive atmosphere in communist Romania – which effectively froze the natural development of indigenous literature by censoring its avant-garde expression – may allow us to label the novel a ‘late avant-garde work’. In cultural settings like Romania, the definitional boundaries between modernism and postmodernism exhibit a fluidity that confounds Western European hegemonic delineations of literary periods.1 In such settings the repressive geopolitical environment ensured the resonance of modernism and the avant-garde for far longer than in Western Europe. Naum’s novel is a paradigmatic expression of what could be recognised as the political constitution of Balkan temporality. It is possible to propose that the vicissitudes of modern Balkan literary texts, such as Naum’s Zenobia, can teach the ‘Western eye’ about the continued potential of modernist avant-garde methods to fracture

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rationalist attitudes. These potentialities are especially visible in literature that was written before emergent postmodernism in the Balkans. In Zenobia, the first person narrator-protagonist, following surrealist precedents, is named after the author and will be referred to as ‘Naum’ in order to distinguish him from the author Naum. The plot follows the narrator’s meeting with his future partner, Zenobia, and their journey from the swamps to the city and back. The novel’s seven chapters are split into numbered sections, interspersed with occasional factual material or newspaper snippets which demonstrate fantastical facts. Naum’s characteristic humour is visible in these insertions in which the empirically separated modes of fact and fiction fuse. These seemingly ‘stranger than life’ facts serve to provide a foil to the strangeness and intensity of ‘Naum’s’ affective experiences, therein lending a probability to the surrealist world he encounters, much like Caillois’s ‘natural fantastic’ category (RCES 51). In the first chapter of the novel, ‘Naum’ is caught in the rain and seeks refuge in the house of his neighbour, Mr Sima,2 where he meets Zenobia, a woman found that evening on the road by the host’s two other guests, Jason and Petre. Also present is an old man, Dragoş, whom no other guest acknowledges and is a ghost. From its opening scene, the novel is characterised by the landscape of the swamps, by water, bizarre moments of chance and affective forces experienced through what ‘Naum’ describes as ‘the film of love’ and ‘the film of your own receptiveness’, which are contained within the ‘film that contains us all’ (Zen 4, 5, 9). ‘Film’ here refers to a form of incorporeal membrane containing and causing specific types of affective interactions and, to avoid any confusion the word may cause, it will appear as ‘film’ in the discussion which follows. Together, ‘Naum’ and Zenobia leave Mr Sima’s to live through the harsh winter in a hollow of a dam. Upon Mr Sima’s impending death he bequeaths to the couple Dragoş, the ghost, who is defined by the critic, Ion Pop, as ‘a projection of the ancestral hypostasis (his name references the legendary founder of the Moldova state)’ whose presence in the novel serves to link the living to past communities.3 The couple’s life in the countryside, mired by poverty and physical discomfort, causes ‘Naum’ to decide that they and Dragoş will go to the city. ‘Naum’ had previously lived in the city and when they arrive, soaked by the rain and penniless, a chance meeting with ‘Naum’s’ former lover, the artist Maria, ensues. Maria still bears some affection for ‘Naum’ and offers her studio as lodgings for the couple while they become established. Returning to the city stimulates ‘Naum’s’ painful memories of his former time there, related in the chapter ‘Corridor’, where he lived in an apartment leading onto a corridor. The corridor is both a literal location and a symbolic feature connecting the past to the present. ‘Naum’s’ present experiences in the city and the memories they evoke turn the city itself into a reflective surface filled with affective surges and moments of communion. Chapter 3, ‘Corridor’, ends at the point at which ‘Naum’ leaves for the swamps to find the woman he has seen in his dreamstate. The novel itself begins at this point, causing the first cycle of the novel (Chapters 1–3) to form a temporal narrative loop. The second cycle of the novel (Chapters 4–6) begins with the chapter ‘The Ladder’, as the couple move from Maria’s studio to a rooftop apartment, reached

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by a ladder. The change of abode augurs in a new phase: in contrast to the loving union of the first cycle, now basanos dominates, as other characters relate their painful, negative experiences of love – one of which serves to distort ‘Naum’s’ sense of sanity and equilibrium. Like the corridor, the ladder is a fitting symbol here, and provides what Eliade terms an axis mundi: an ascension symbol of transformation after anguish (MEPS 104–05, 140). This cycle begins and ends with the couple’s time in this city sky-apartment, from ‘The Ladder’ to the chapter ‘The Witnesses’, where the rising anguish and basanos finds resolution in ‘Naum’s’ madness. The couple return to the swamps in the final chapter of the novel, ‘The Plank’, and leave behind the negative experiences of love in the ‘magma of the city’ where ‘despair and anger, otherwise vain, are harder to melt’ (Zen 178, 32).4 Such negative experiences provide a foil through which the reader can then interpret their positive affection. This return to the rural location causes the first and last chapters to form a pastoral narrative frame around the events in the city. Surrealism’s focus upon the city is central, but here it is a figurative, negatively presented space that is by no means the exciting locale of official surrealist wanderings. This is further highlighted when the return to the swamps provides a renewed sense of value, peace and continuity with nature. In Zenobia, the characters’ reality is hermetically sealed, as historical events appear absent and a small number of characters move through a surreal world filled with hierophanic experiences, symbols and spirits. This is not the nonmythic rendering of Carpentier’s novel, nor the mythic reality of Carrington’s novel, but lies in between in a fluid dreamstate inflected by myths of renewal. The first person narration of the novel fulfils the remit of what Jeremy Hawthorn calls a ‘modernist novel’, namely, to place greater focus ‘on to the states and processes inside the consciousness of the main character(s) than on to public events in the outside world’, as a reaction to instabilities in social reality that instigated ‘new methods of fictional expression’.5 Naum uses a free direct style in the novel that at times reaches a confusing fluidity, similar to that caused by the syntactical decomposition in a free indirect style (the latter giving rise to the stream-of-consciousness technique), but overall is closer to an interior monologue. This is further emphasised by the conventional presentation of tagged direct speech – although it is in the content of these dialogues that one sees a surrealist fracturing of rationalism. The avant-garde affiliation of Zenobia is indicated by Naum’s engagement with the surrealist presentations of the oneiric, love, nous and its radical attitude to political and social realities. This can be placed with the articulation of interiority that allies this novel with forms of Western European modernist fiction. Determining the genre of Zenobia is complex because, as is often the case with surrealist prose, Naum draws from a number of narrative traditions. The common autobiographical feature of surrealism is present in the novel. Generically, fictional autobiography derives from the confession. Identifying the former initially in Rousseau’s work, Northrop Frye notes that where ‘the confession flows into the novel, the mixture produces the fictional autobiography’.6 Scholarly discussions on Zenobia have compared it to Breton’s fictionalised autobiography Nadja (1928) which is purportedly about his lover, later incarcerated for mental

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illness. The narrators of Nadja and Zenobia are both named after the authors, are poets and engage in a love affair.7 In an interview with James Brook, Naum confirms a connection to Breton’s Nadja, and also links the relationship in the novel between the narrator and Zenobia to his relationship with his wife, Lygia: Following the 1948 consolidaƟon of power, you were unable to publish much෴.෴.෴.෴How did this censorship aīect your work? . . . Lygia became my spiritual support . . . I drew closer to the sources of poetry, even when hungry and ill and wandering about the countryside. I lost myself in the world and then I lost myself in Lygia, where she found me . . . Isn’t this the story of your ‘novel’, Zenobia෴.෴.෴.෴– a book that seems to me a response to Breton’s Nadja, with the narrator taking Nadja’s part? Exactly. It was Lygia who called me back from madness and despair.8

Although Zenobia and Nadja are stylistically similar, Brook suggests that the differing character placement causes a very different image of madness and love to be presented in each novel. Each novel casts its female characters in the role of the muse. However, in Nadja the muse is deemed clinically mad and rejected, whereas in Zenobia madness is experienced affectively by the male narrator and serves to express in the first person a surreality that Breton’s constructivist male gaze in Nadja can only observe externally. For Naum, the female muse provides guidance to the poet, just as Lygia brought him back from madness and despair. But his muse is neither an unstable female ‘other’ nor exchangeable, as is Nadja. Indeed, Ileana Alexandra Orlich, one of the few critics to write on Naum’s Zenobia in English, describes Naum’s representation of Zenobia and other female characters as ‘shadowy and not quite real, in the terms prescribed in the Manifestes du surréalisme where Breton also talks about the same unseizable quality attributed especially to women’, but similarly emphasises that Naum does not replicate surrealism’s placement of female as ‘subaltern’.9 The surrealist world of chance and transformation which Naum describes in Zenobia reflects this autobiographical lineage and furthermore aligns the text with the genre of romance which provides the focus for this reading. Events in Zenobia fulfil Northrop Frye’s description of the romance genre as containing a marvellous hero or heroine around whom the ‘ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended’, as well as with Wellek and Warren’s designation that ‘the romance . . . may neglect verisimilitude of detail . . . [but it] . . . address[es] itself to a higher reality, a deeper psychology’.10 The world of the medieval romance is shaped by the admission of miracle and is conceived within the parameters of scholastic realism, a connection particularly relevant to understanding Naum’s surrealist use of the romance genre in Zenobia, given his Parisian doctoral study of medieval scholastic philosophy. Ian Watt outlines the parameters of this philosophical doctrine and its relation to the rise of the novel as follows: By a paradox that will surprise only the neophyte, the term ‘realism’ in philosophy is most strictly applied to a view of reality diametrically opposed to that of common usage – to the view held by the scholastic Realists of the Middle Ages that it is universals, classes or abstractions, and not the particular, concrete objects of sense-perception, which are the true ‘realities.’ . . . [T]he very unfamiliarity of the point of view of scholastic Realism at

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least serves to draw attention to a characteristic of the novel which is analogous to the changed philosophical meaning of ‘realism’ today: the novel arose in the modern period, a period whose general intellectual orientation was most decisively separated from its classical and medieval heritage by its rejection – or at least its attempted rejection – of universals.11

It is from the basis of this close connection between Naum and his understanding of the medieval romance that this reading will proceed. Between the secular chivalric and religious hagiographical strains of romance that Frye outlines, the novel tends towards the latter in the unusual connections which Zenobia and ‘Naum’ have with sacred ‘forces’ and their performances of ‘small miracles’ (Zen 24–25, 76, 117–18, 30). One can also see the ‘trial and faith’ structure of romance and hagiography identified in the move from basanos to resolution in the novel.12 A medieval understanding of the confession, the marvellous, mythic and folk symbols and chance in romance and hagiographical structures are all narrative elements that surface in Naum’s fictionalised autobiography, thereby evoking an older world of mystery and miracle congruent with the theorisation of the sacred in the Collège’s surrealist practices. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the sacralised reality to be discussed does not reflect the kind of religious vision inherent in the Romanian interwar traditionalists’ adherence to Orthodox Christianity.13 Rather, it is possible to argue that the text’s sacred vision of reality follows what Eliade terms ‘pagan forms’,14 that it develops surrealism’s interest in ‘the primitive’ and folk culture, with a particularly Romanian folkloric understanding of spirituality, as articulated in the Mioriԕa. In this light, Naum’s text accords with what Irina Livezeanu argues are the Romanian avant-garde’s interests in the pagan, rural and mythic rather than Romanian traditionalist interests in Orthodox Christianity and nationalism, which were anti-pagan.15 Surrealist prose infuses the novel with pre-modern visions of reality and serves to develop the form in new directions. The identification of forebears has always featured prominently in the surrealist movement, and Breton specifically refers to the influence of this earlier heritage on Nadja, and of the relation of medieval realism to poetics, as Walter Benjamin notes.16 In addition, in ‘Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non’ (‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’, 1942), Breton identifies with Abélard, and therefore with the scholastic conceptualist view of the role of universals.17 Such views of reality shape the surrealist approach to le merveilleux and the alogical as an aspect of society that can be reclaimed through love, liberty and poetry. * The Romanian surrealist group evinced a complex and theoretical grasp of the logical subversions at play in surrealism and this is visible in Naum’s subtle rendering of ambiguity and its relation to linguistics in Zenobia.18 In the novel, language’s restricted ability to communicate meaning is demonstrated in many ways, and attempts to analyse the novel are complicated by this fact. It is not official surrealist methods of obfuscating realism alone that create this impression but also the alternative surrealist images of primary sacred communication with

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nature, the socius and with folkloric and mythic symbols leading to a change in ontology. Naum begins the novel with a note signalling the potential complexities arising from the irreconcilability of linguistic representation and the communication of meaning, marking a referential frame that immediately indicates a surrealist perspective: TOO MANY THINGS SOLICIT US, AND, GIVEN THE EQUIVOCAL solicitation mechanism, too many words flock to contain them, to hide them in their useless and deceiving labyrinth – that’s why I might sometimes tell you what shouldn’t be told; anyway, I am convinced that everyone will meditate more on the surplus, leaving aside the state in which I float, below, like a frogman, for instance. But there is also that rumble and everyone’s capacity to perceive it . . . (Zen 1)

The opening statement of the novel signifies, on one level, that the surplus of words deflects attention away from the ‘state in which I float, below’, and, on another level, that the narrator conspires and colludes with the reader to expose this state and reveal what ‘shouldn’t be told’. The sociopolitical context of the novel’s production and the multivalent symbols presented suggest a political subtext can be uncovered through a reading of its aesopic features. In addition to indicating the restricted communication of meaning, the extract articulates a common surrealist complication of representation that deforms the referential nature of language and deconstructs rationalist epistemologies. Surrealism oversteps language’s limitations by the use of nonnaturalistic features, specifically in mythic, oneiric and automatic symbols. Language or communication was of primary importance to all forms of surrealism because, although their methodologies differ, their concerns can be seen to intertwine repeatedly. Breton wrote: ‘Language can and should be rescued from the misappropriation and the tarnish that come from its function as a basic means of exchange; in it are included possibilities for much closer interpersonal contact than the laws presiding over such an exchange usually imply.’19 It is not a simple task to express in language what language does not openly convey. In surrealism, the distortion of monovalence, aetiology and temporality provides a means by which to express what language can frequently obfuscate and to recover its vitalism in a playful and anti-nostalgic manner. Following on from this, Bataille’s references to ‘communication’ in all his major works can be seen as offering an expression and extension of the possibilities which Breton indicates are latent within language. Specifically, in alternative surrealist practices, another element comes into play for, beneath disorientation, moments of ‘communication’ move beyond conceptualism to indicate an affective web or ‘film’ where the sacred can manifest. This affectivity is expressed through the coherent sacred modalities of myth, symbol and ritual, which are portrayed in the theory of the Collège and Naum’s novel. The surpassing of linguistic boundaries is instanced in common surrealist games that engaged with chance, the most cited example being cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). ‘Naum’ and Zenobia play just such a surrealist game in which they take turns to draw in the dark while the other waits to ‘read’ the drawing in the light: ‘the time such a game lasted represented for me the beginning of

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a state of indescribable serenity where I felt each and every hyphen . . . with their meaning that came from beyond us’ (Zen 104).20 In this game, meaning is externally accessed as in a Bataillean form of communication from beyondthe-self. The sacred overtones of this comment echo the crux of Naum’s radicalisation of official surrealism, for his narrator suggests that the meaning originates ‘from beyond us’, whereas for Breton meaning was instead individual desire projected on a grid and then writ large upon the world.21 This, as has been elaborated, is the key differential between official surrealism’s focus upon the individual unconscious and the Collège’s dissident surrealist concern with the ‘sacred’ and affective ‘ecstasy’, which is neglected when interpreting surrealist texts through official criteria alone. ‘Naum’s’ description of a meaning ‘from beyond us’ is a concept present also in Zurich Dada and sets a precedent for the postulation here, of a criteria for one alternative strain of surrealism. Zurich Dada members meditated and during such practices they heard a voice from ‘beyond’: ‘The absence of any ulterior moƟve enabled us to listen to the voice of the “Unknown” – and to draw knowledge from the realm of the unknown. Thus we arrived at the central experience of Dada.’22 As already mentioned, they ascribed the voice of the ‘Unknown’ to two possible sources: ‘Was it the artist’s unconscious mind, or a power outside of him, that had spoken? . . . something that surrounded and interpenetrated us just as we overflowed into it . . . a genuine mental and emotional experience that gave us wings to fly.’23 Richter’s second description is reminiscent of Bataille’s discussions on unknowing, and both indicate an external focus in such rapturous states.24 Tzara acknowledged this sacred basis to Dada, calling it ‘the return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference’ – where ‘indifference’ accords with the approach to the ‘Unknown’ which Richter termed the ‘absence of any ulterior moƟve’.25 It is of note that Tzara did not translate this aspect into Paris Dada in 1919. As Sheppard details, ‘the mystical interest [of Zurich Dada] is less evident in other Dada centres but it was certainly there in Berlin . . . Elsewhere, the interest is less pronounced still’, and did not characterise New York, Cologne or Paris Dada.26 This ‘lack’ transferred from Paris Dada into official surrealism’s suspicion of the mystical sacred, making it more concerned with ‘the artist’s unconscious mind’ as the source of Breton’s grid, and with the esoteric in the ways outlined by Lepetit.27 The concept of communicating with the unknown as ‘a power outside’ the self is directly represented in Zenobia, when ‘Naum’ details: ‘I, since I was born, have had this idea that I have to communicate forgotten truths from some place where my sensitivity could meet the great general sensitivity lost on the way, I ask you to excuse me for using the word sensitivity’; and so he replaces the word with ‘the Unknown, I think that it is related to Unbekannt’ (Zen 70–71). ‘Naum’s’ reference to meaning from ‘beyond us’ and the lost ‘great general sensitivity . . . the Unknown’ are equivocal. Both engage with the communicability of meaning from without the self, that of social and/or sacred reality, central in an alternative surrealism that attends to the meaning of ecstasy in sacred sociology. Another representation of the Unknown appears in the couple’s ability to read one another’s thoughts, find each other at an unspecified location, and

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alter people’s actions through thought – all of which indicate the workings of what ‘Naum’ calls ‘thought-language’ (Zen 41–42, 157, 138). The ability to read and alter ‘thought-language’ connotes something which one may interpret through the esoteric interests of official surrealism or as a projection onto a grid. However, it is also explicable through the lens of the Collège, as integral to a number of sacred realities. Eliade argued that ‘the sacred invariably manifests itself as a power’, indicating that ‘thought itself can be a considerable source of energy’ (MEMDM 133). Thought, in sacred reality, carries a force much as the physical forces of natural laws do. The sacred itself deconstructs rationalist categories in ways that resist expression in language. Eliade summarises Rudolf Otto on the difficulty of expressing the sacred in language: [T]he sacred always manifests itself as a power of quite another order than that of the forces of nature. It is true that human language naïvely expresses the tremendum, the majestas or the mysterium fascinans in terms borrowed from the realms of nature or the profane consciousness of man. But we know that this terminology is analogical, and simply due to the inability of man to express what is ganz andere; language is obliged to try to suggest whatever surpasses natural experience in terms that are borrowed from that experience. (MEMDM 124)

The presence of the sacred ganz andere, that which is ‘wholly other’, appears in the novel coupled with the inability to express it in language – except in analogical or ambiguous terms. ‘Naum’ endorses this difficulty: Naturally, I say only what is appropriate, apparently petty things, that is – aware of the fact that even they sometimes seem a little far-fetched, this being their way of allowing themselves to be seen; it is as if I were trying to narrate a mountain with its avalanches and all, but only a pebble would let itself be narrated. (Zen 38)

Reading this passage in its sacred acceptation is supported when ‘Naum’ adds: ‘I was humiliated by this poor, profanatory description of Zenobia . . . I should have known, however, from the very start, that I am defiling a zone’ (Zen 45). To attempt to speak of such things he uses analogy: in ‘laws’ and ‘films’, and for Zenobia, ‘Isis’ or ‘Cybele’, the ‘untrammelled marvellous’ or part of the great ‘Woman Spirit’ (Zen 82, 39, 99). Naum’s treatment of woman as an expression of the marvellous, similar to that in Carrington’s novel, varies from official surrealist presentations.28 The difficulty of expressing and interpreting ‘meaning that came from beyond us’ finds a specific application in Zenobia (Zen 104). Strange events or sacred ‘miracles’ in the diegesis are described as allied ‘to a false immediate causality and maintained within the limits of the admissible, in a zone of ambiguity capable at any time of accepting the most natural and modest explanations’ (Zen 30, my emphasis). Further, ‘Naum’ notes that this ‘zone of ambiguity’ is both distressing and fascinating, like the ganz andere: ‘At first, when you put your finger on a thing and that thing lights up, it’s not at all funny, you’re even scared’ and then ‘the torture of uncertainty starts, whether you only foresaw the lighting up or whether it just occurred when your finger touched it’ (Zen 48).

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In accord with Otto, Eliade and the Collège’s description of simultaneous experiences of attraction and repulsion when one encounters the sacred ganz andere, the novel relays this dual affective reaction of fear and fascination. One method, then, by which to express what is beyond the limitations of language is through symbol and analogy and these are employed by both the internal and external ‘Unknown’. In Zenobia the external Unknown finds expression in thought-language, games, and the strange connection between the lovers – all of which are ruled not by natural laws but by an engagement with something ‘beyond us’ which ‘Naum’ terms the ‘laws of a strange active indifference’ where ‘the most insignificant gestures gained in importance while the limits of the conscious will grew more and more unstable’ (Zen 39). Naum’s term ‘indifference’ echoes Tzara’s description of Zurich Dada’s quasi-Buddhist meditations.29 Indifference is central to many ‘sacred’ systems as various forms of nonaƩachment. It may also be related to the ‘automatic speech and ecstatic sorceries’ of ‘Hasidic prayers’ that the Romanian members of Zurich Dada witnessed as children.30 The laws ‘Naum’ describes reveal something beyond-the-self akin to sacred ekstasis: ‘I tried not to disturb the law, to keep myself receptive to its movements, I don’t know how to express it . . . Then the universes moved slowly . . . I was flooded by an immense serenity, perhaps I was in paradise’ (Zen 82). Experiencing such moments of sacred communication with something beyond-the-self within a community is problematic in a desacralised society where it can lead to expulsion from the group. This is a feature emphasised in the work of the Collège and articulated here in Bataille’s later work: [T]here cannot be knowledge without a community of seekers, nor inner experience without a community of those who live it. Community is to be understood in a different sense from Church or from order . . . communication is a phenomenon which is in no way added on to Dasein, but constitutes it. (GBIE 24)

This communication of being and nous articulate and illustrate the sacred world of scholastic realism and the ‘miracles’ the couple perform which align Naum’s fictionalised autobiography with the medieval, hagiographical romance. The ‘zone of ambiguity’ and ‘law of active indifference’ Naum presents, subvert rationalism, and the ordinary laws of language and nature. This zone and these laws and forces could be interpreted through official surrealist concepts such as the grands transparent (higher animal beings) or, with Clifford Browder, as supernatural beings, in light of Breton’s ‘Ouvrez-vous?’ (1953), wherein ‘the poet who had once categorically denied the possibility of any communication with the dead . . . would seem now to have changed his position radically’.31 In this sense Naum’s zone and laws are resoundingly embedded in the official surrealist interest in psychic states, the esoteric and the unconscious for the purpose of undermining conventional attitudes and creating a new cultural objective. The official surrealist treatment of errance/dérive, objet trouvé, hasard objecƟf, amour fou and precognitive insights all feature in Naum’s Zenobia. However, the aesopic characteristics and symbolic reality of the novel ‘oneirize life’ not by interpolating but by integrating dream and reality: the ‘dream’ becomes a

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feature of ‘reality’, a fusion of scholastic realism, conceptualism and empirical reality. Naum’s study of medieval philosophical views of the object and reality then offered unique tools with which to adapt surrealist practices in new and significant ways. Naum’s position, like Bataille’s, is ‘to be understood in a different sense from Church or from order’, as an approach attentive to sacred realities. In this reality, the limen (threshold) is primary, as madness and sanity, philosophical and empirical realities, and absence and presence blur. In this way Naum’s surrealist practice in Zenobia goes beyond a Bretonian surrealist uncanny andere to make of it the ganz andere of alternative surrealist territory, connecting to primary experiences of sacred reality and affective moments of ekstasis. These moments serve to demonstrate how the self can be altered by the external Unknown, which at once links Naum’s work more closely to surrealism’s origins in Zurich Dada, its dualistic understanding of the ‘Unknown’, and to Bataille’s affect-led philosophy rather than official surrealism’s cognitive exploration of altered states of consciousness. Indeed, these stances differ but remain related. As Anna Balakian notes, official surrealism eschews religion for a ‘mystically inspired atheism’ and ‘in place of gods, surrealism values the infinite or the eternal revealed by the inconceivable and its disorder: such ‘“divine” disorder leads to an image of the infinite’.32 It is possible to see this surrealist attitude explored and expanded in literary works if the more overtly sacred lens of Bataille’s dissident surrealism, and Bataille and Caillois’s work for the Collège, is applied.

NATURAL COMMUNION By opposing itself to Nature, human life had become transcendent and had sent off to the void everything which it is not: on the other hand, if this life rejects the authority which maintained it in oppression, and itself becomes sovereign, it detaches itself from the bonds which paralyze a vertiginous movement towards the void. Bataille, ‘Blue of Noon’ (1936), GBIE 79

In Zenobia the forces and laws that provide a symbolic analogy for the sacred are further described by ‘Naum’ through three states: the ‘film of love’, ‘film of your own receptiveness’ and the ‘film that contains us all’ (Zen 4, 5, 9). The altered states of consciousness indicated by these three ‘films’ can be interpreted in relation to surrealism, through scholastic philosophy and through what is determined here as the affects of ekstasis. It is to the latter, to states of divine madness symbolised by the figures Apollo, Dionysus, the Muses and Aphrodite, that the discussion now turns. In order to understand how the concept of ekstasis relates to these ‘films’, however, one should first examine the refinements Naum makes to official surrealist theories of chance in the object and errance, ghosts and clinical madness, each feature of which is aligned with the ‘film of your own receptiveness’ in Zenobia, but none of which serve to cause ekstasis. They do, however, provide the basis on which to understand Naum’s presentation of the extreme limit of the known world, and how his version of surrealist practice borders on the sacred sociology of Bataille and Caillois.

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The surrealist objet trouvé results from an activation of objective chance33 which, as previously mentioned, Breton viewed as the result of a projection of personal desire upon ‘an appropriate grid [which] tells him in advance of his own acts’.34 In Zenobia, ‘Naum’ demonstrates an ability to Įnd artefacts buried in the earth due to a miraculous receptiveness to the ‘solicitation forces’ surrounding objects, an ability he terms ‘mediumistic’ (Zen 21–25).35 It may first appear that ‘Naum’s’ Įnds concur with the typology of the surrealist object outlined by Sarane Alexandrian,36 which describes Breton’s interest in searching for and finding ‘natural objects’ as indicative of a specific process in which chance plays a reduced role: ‘The divinatory nature of stones, and the “second state” which they induce in the connoisseur, are found only where the stones have been discovered . . . Breton said that an unusual stone found by chance is of less value than one which has been sought for and longed for.’37 However, in the novel, each Įnd indicates ‘Naum’s’ archaeological receptiveness to the solicitation forces emitted by objects (a view closer to that of moderate scholastic realism than conceptualism) which have a protective and sacred function: an idol, a fertility statue, a carved weapon, a ‘fortress’ and a medallion often worn as a talisman (Zen 21–24).38 The divinatory nature of ‘Naum’s’ searched-for and found natural objects hold a sacred-social significance that cannot be adequately explained within the parameters of Breton’s chance or ‘grid’ of personal desire. Therefore Naum’s transformed objective chance may be described rather as recepƟve chance – locating a surrealist objet trouvé through a divination of forces external to oneself, as if a gift rather than Bretonian chance or a ‘grid’ of personal longing or desire.39 ‘Naum’s’ presentation of the affective solicitation forces of objects evokes moderate realist stances on the object, which are reminiscent of Bataille’s discussions in the Collège on the sacred forces of attraction and repulsion surrounding sacred objects and artefacts (GB‘ARI’ and GB‘ARII’). The object offers a method by which Naum enacts the Romanian surrealist intention to ‘oneirize life’ outside that of the ‘supreme point’, and the internal unknown sought in official surrealism as it becomes the material basis for an encounter with sacred adjecƟon and the external unknown. ‘Naum’s’ treatment of the object echoes that expressed in Bataille’s conceptualisation of inner experience: ‘Principle of inner experience: to emerge through project from the realm of project’, such that materiality provides the basis for communication (GBIE 46).40 This communication, Bataille argues, occurs in ‘states proceeding from objects which are in themselves barely graspable (silence, breath). Memory – above all, memory’ (GBIE 140). This sacred view of the object differs from the official surrealist sacred discussed by Rabinovitch, and its esoteric and divinatory objects. Rather, it extends it to accommodate the ‘coherent’ symbol and is contextually allied to the living sacred, which, thus far, has been occluded from many readings of international surrealist works arising within cultures and produced by certain writers for whom the living sacred is integral to their surrealist expressions. The official surrealist act of errance, as engagement with objective chance, is experienced by ‘Naum’, although, it also is adapted to the particular conceptual world of Zenobia. One day when walking, ‘Naum’ alters his intended route: ‘without reason, I turned away; drops of rain began to fall, a cloud shed

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water . . . a trace of weakness made me vaguely wonder why I had deviated from my route, what I was doing on a cemetery path’ (Zen 43). This errance leads by chance to a friend who, unbeknown to ‘Naum’, has been waiting for him after a funeral. In this meeting Naum presents his narrator’s ability to read the affective force emitted by people which, although explicable as body language, in the novel takes on spiritual hues, or those of the miracle in medieval romance, given ‘Naum’s’ ‘mediumistic’ ability to locate objects and read thought-language. On subsequent occasions ‘Naum’s’ sensitivity to people’s affective emanations, both negative and positive, are indicated. When he meets Zenobia, for example, he instantly responds to her positive affective presence, and he also reacts to the negative force of the man who has beaten Zenobia: ‘Jason represented, in my eyes, the substance of another circle and I had no intention of absorbing his hostility’ (Zen 7). Then again, when ‘Naum’ meets a former acquaintance in the city: ‘I tried to avoid Ioachim because every time I met him he triggered a strange physical sensation in me: it seemed that he dragged after him, through this world . . . a hard-to-bear mental stench’ (Zen 91). In surrealist practice ghosts are commonly naturalised,41 a feature that may derive from the medieval romance tradition where ‘a ghost as a rule is merely one more character: he causes little surprise because his appearance is no more marvellous than many other events’.42 Ghosts figure prominently in Zenobia, in the character of Dragoş and others that ‘Naum’ sees: ‘People went back and forth, all of them looked alive, even the dead, they gave me friendly smiles’ (Zen 93, 58). Spectrality is placed on the limen poised between the logical and alogical; it is both absent and present at the same time, as if under a Heideggerian erasure. The official surrealist interest in presence and absence, in ontology and spectrality, however, configures these as symptoms of the unconscious. In Zenobia ‘Naum’ articulates a view, accepted in coherent symbols of folk, ‘primitive’, pagan and esoteric realities, in which the ancestors are considered as present and which appears as a form of divination in ancient Greece, as skiamanƟkĤ (ʍʃɿɲ, shadow; ђɲʆʏɿʃʊʎ, prophecy), a view Breton may find harder to accept, except in the sense Clifford Browder identifies above. It is this connection to the ancestral realm that, as Ion Pop observes, links the past and present in the name of the Moldova ancestor-founder. Similarly, in Bataille’s surrealism, this absence/presence takes such a form: ‘spirits are mythical . . . the hierarchy of spirits tends to be based on a fundamental distinction between spirits that depend on a body, like those of men, and the autonomous spirits of the supreme being, of animals, of dead people, and so on’ (GBTR 36–37). Caillois makes a similar observation of the sacred ‘epoch of the transmission of myths and rites, when spirits appear to novices and initiate them’ (RC‘F’ 283). As an effect of the ‘zone of ambiguity’ which is the chronotope of the novel, the surrealist, sacred events that ‘Naum’ experiences sometimes communicate meaning to him and at other times cause confusion, and lead him to fear he is mad. This effect surfaces when ‘Naum’ doubts if Dragoş exists: ‘If Maria can’t see him, if she can pass her hands and drawings through him, that means that I’m hallucinating’ (Zen 52). In this way, Naum conveys either the assurance or uncertainty that accompanies hierophanic experiences of the sacred. This is doubly meaningful for his protagonist, who lives in a communally profane

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reality where the forces and laws of the sacred are not seen or accepted and the perception of which may mimic clinical madness. In this separation one sees an accord with Socrates’ careful separation of divine madness from clinical madness in the Phaedrus: ‘there are two kinds of madness, one produced by human illness, the other by a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour’ (Ph 265a). In the chapter ‘Corridor’, past events in ‘Naum’s’ life reveal why he fears he is hallucinating. He notes that his receptivity to affective forces caused his incarceration: ‘Like tectonic plates – massive, unconscious, and invisible – the forces were in movement . . . I was forced into an institutional room’ (Zen 79–80). Key to any reading of Zenobia is an acknowledgement of the surrealist interest in the state of madness. However, unlike Breton’s simulated clinical madness in L’Immaculée ConcepƟon (The Immaculate ConcepƟon, 1930) or observations of female madness in Nadja, Naum in Zenobia relates a first-person account of male madness, an account that details a communication with the living sacred through nature, creative inspiration, love and prophecy, comparable to the pathways to ekstasis outlined in ancient Greek philosophy: a surrealist madness that is neither observed nor a simulacra but that of the divin fou.43 Reading the surrealist features deployed in Naum’s novel through the theories of the Collège reveals a contextualised sacred image of the affective forces of the found object: wandering, spectrality and madness. * Symbols derived from myths can have a powerful effect upon ontology, as seen in Desoille’s psychoanalytic application. Potentially the same applies to their coherent use in literature and surrealism. Many surrealist expressions utilised the polyvalent nature of the symbol to counter rationalist attitudes and interpretations of reality, but official surrealism often intentionally engaged with meaninglessness and practices of ‘display’.44 During the 1930s official Parisian surrealism was criticised by fellow travellers and ex-surrealists for the erosion of its own initiatory theory. In the 1940s the Romanian surrealists Luca and Trost, in The DialecƟc of DialecƟc, criticised the overshadowing of surrealism’s objective insights by aestheticism. This reaction was not dissimilar to that of Caillois who had questioned the official surrealists’ ‘stubborn indulgence of personal simulacra’ (RCES 330). The Romanian surrealists, as stated, embraced a sporting questioning and challenging attitude towards surrealism, characterised culturally as ‘ba da’, to more clearly define surrealism’s aims. As a surrealist, Naum was engaged with a social critique of rationalism. Indeed, to fully appreciate the subversive methods enabling Naum’s aesopic text to evade the censor and enforcement of socialist realism, one must take into account his specific use of mythic symbols in his application of surrealist techniques.45 For a reader attuned to aesopic-critique, the mythic symbols of rebirth, stasis, death and renewal also gesture towards the need for Romania’s sociopolitical rebirth and a reshaping of the national imaginary away from that of the communist vision. Myths, their symbolic meanings and ritual enactments are tied to the action of ecstasy and release, and the Collège’s investigation of the ‘active presence of

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the sacred’ and of the issues of ‘power, of the sacred, and of myths’ detail that myths have the capacity to lead to a ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ (RC‘ICS’ 11; RC‘F’ 282).46 By reading Zenobia in relation to the Collège and Bataille’s concept of ecstasy the potential is uncovered for an alternative surrealist sacralisation of the symbol that itself reframes the official surrealist ‘supreme point’ at which sanity and madness, reality and unreality, the known and the unknown meet. Alternative surrealist practices then evoke neither the religious marvellous, nor the surrealist merveilleux, but indicate a sacred-social surreality that can be explored in relation to ekstasis. From its opening episode a coherent use of mythic symbols and rituals is apparent in Zenobia. Before entering Mr Sima’s house, where he meets Zenobia, ‘Naum’ could be said to undergo a symbolic initiation in the forest, which can be further interpreted as a rebirth from the womb of the earth akin to cosmogonic myth (MEMR 82). When the reader first encounters ‘Naum’ he has been ‘standing for several hours, covered in mud from head to toe, and, as I was saying, soaked through, stuck in a crack in the dam, a crevasse, listening to its breathing and groans’ (Zen 1). The personified sounds of the earth, his entrapment and the amniotic, visceral covering of mud speaks of a ritual rebirth from the Tellus Mater (Mother-Earth), central to archaic therapies – wherein rebirth signals the death of the initiate’s former self. As Eliade describes: ‘the “death” of the initiate signifies at once a regressus ad uterum – a return to the pre-cosmogonic state’47 and that, ‘[s]acred knowledge and, by extension, wisdom are conceived as the fruit of an initiation, and it is significant that obstetric symbolism is found connected with the awakening of consciousness’ (MESP 198). In its ritual symbolic meaning, ‘Naum’s’ rebirth marks the subject as an initiate who stands on a threshold – placed ‘liminally’ between the old and new state of consciousness, where one finds both an ontological symbol of beginning anew and of the experiential development of the ego. At this point the reader enters the modern cosmology of the novel and, released from the womb of the earth, ‘Naum’ meets the woman who is to be his partner and his guide. This ekstaƟc rebirth episode inaugurates a series of water symbols through which active symbolic forces in the novel are presented. In myth and ritual, water is a powerful symbol, for the primordial waters are the formless cosmic night from which creation emanates: when returned to this formless state, the initiate encounters what Eliade terms an eternal return to the time of mythic creation (illud tempus) and a renewal (MEPS 193–98). During his rebirth, ‘Naum’ is covered by a muddy fusion of earth and water so that obstetric symbolism merges with elemental symbolism echoing many sacred realities in which the initiate is reborn from contact with nature. The ‘mythic theme of the primordial waters’ is here coherently evinced as Naum engages with what Eliade terms ‘[t]he creative forces of water [which] are at their height in mud’ (MEMDM 35; MEPS 192). The sequence of ‘death’ and rebirth is detailed in myths from many cultures and it figures in the cycle leading to ecstasy which Bataille describes. Its presence in Naum’s novel holds a specific resonance. As noted above, Eliade indicates a characteristic feature of Romanian spirituality that finds its expression in the

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myth of Mioriԕa where ‘death’ is identified as a mystical reunion with nature.48 Orlich, commenting on the work of Lucian Blaga, reiterates this insight: ‘the Romanian spirit is rooted in a mystical existence of a reunion with nature’.49 After his symbolic death and rebirth ‘Naum’ experiences a further moment of intense union with nature which continues the water symbolism in the novel: ‘in the bushes, I heard so much calm, indifferent rustling mixed in with the void of silence, that I felt as if I were enclosed in a giant drop of water that was thinking and breathing for us, like that, as in the beginning’ (Zen 1–2). The reframing of temporality and spatiality outside chronological and naturalistic interpretative schemas are basic features of surrealist practice, but here the effect is created through nature’s presence, which serves as an analogical symbol of the formless cosmic night of chaos and regenerating primordial illud tempus (MEPS 212). The water symbolism reoccurs soon after the couple meet and move into the dam. When the dying Mr Sima visits in winter, ‘Naum’ greets him coldly, suspicious that he is a wolf come to eat them. His action evokes a Romanian folk character which, as Victor Simion explains, holds ‘an important place in Romanian iconography . . . [for] the wolf, [is] seen during the Middle Ages as a quintessence of the malefic spirit’.50 In this episode the water symbol is no longer fluid but is solidified as a ‘tear that had frozen in the corner of [Mr Sima’s] eye’ (Zen 12). The frozen tear is at once an image of sorrow and of stasis, of the staunching of the creative forces of water and Mr Sima’s imminent death: ‘I’m going to die soon, I don’t think I’ll live until spring’, he says (Zen 12). The turn from the all-enclosing mythic drop to the frozen teardrop of the ‘wolf’ utilises two narrative forms that are integral to surrealist expression: myth and folklore.51 It is when water’s creative force is frozen in death that Mr Sima bequeaths the couple the ancestor spirit. One wonders if the mistaken identification of a friend for the wolf’s malefic spirit could also be an aesopic (satiric and Swiftian) allusion to the policies of the Romanian communist regime which provoked fear and paranoia even between friends.52 Although the life cycle of the water symbol seems completed by this image of stasis and death, one sees in ‘Naum’s’ relationship with Zenobia a final transformative phase from the frozen solid to cloud vapour. This last transformation, by inference, could denote the shift from matter to spirit: Zenobia helped me to reestablish, step by step, a partially forgotten, partially prefigured nature . . . In the cloud that lived us the time of theory had passed, it was a time of proofs and testimonies; there, the solicitations, especially those regarding the state and movement of the world, disconnected themselves in order to be reconnected differently and their new connections made room for others, infinitely enriched, they became something else, remaining, in a way, the same. (Zen 40–41)

The vapour stage in the water symbol cycle occurs in the city and signals a turn towards a more thorough detailing of the affective experiences of certain ‘solicitations’ and ‘films’ in Zenobia. In the novel Naum’s representation of water symbolism indicates how symbols from myth can carry coherent meaning when transposed into literature. At this point it is useful to adopt a specific term, aithein (ɲ஁ɾɸɿʆ), to detail the sacred hierophanic forces described in Naum’s

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novel and Eliade’s theory.53 In the semantic system of the novel the transforming symbols move in a cycle from death, to ontological change, to renewal, that mirrors the mythical cycle from chaos to creation, thus participating in the widespread avant-garde utilisation of myths of chaos and renewal. The ‘void of silence’ during the rebirthing scene and ‘Naum’s’ experience in the giant water drop ‘thinking and breathing for us . . . as in the beginning’ partake not only in the cycle of water symbols from ‘death’ to renewal, but a ritual connection with nature as a source and site of ontological rebirth – also evident in many pagan, indigenous and ancient sacred realities (Zen 1–2). This connection with nature becomes a catalyst for moments of communication, specifically in the sense of a nature-led Dionysian ekstasis. Socrates details this form of divine madness as ‘worship, discovering mystic rites and purifications’ (Ph 244e), to which can be added his role as ‘protector of trees’, Caillois’s description of Dionysian infraction (RCES 157–59) and Eliade’s understanding that, ‘in the dialectic of the sacred a part (a tree, a plant) has the value of the whole (the cosmos, life) a profane thing becomes a hierophany’ (MEPS 324). With this redefinition of Dionysian ekstasis in mind it is possible to read its presence in Zenobia in a more complex way. As he rests in a park, ‘Naum’ experiences a further communication with nature which leads to a second ekstasis: Then the earth covered me with a solid crust, the grass and the flowers invaded me, they grew out of me . . . I felt . . . a boundless reconciliation . . . It was as if, working with several equations, the common unknown had shed its circumstantial crust and, renouncing itself, had turned into something whole and total . . . I simplify a lot, but anyway . . . Maybe sometime I’ll mumble more things about death and everyone will say ‘I knew that’ and forget. (Zen 95–96)

The ‘new knowledge’ or ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’ that comes from this ‘death to the self’ in nature is an experience of the ‘whole and total’ unknown, one related to Bataille’s ‘bewildering path of ecstasy . . . As I had earlier become a tree, but the tree was still myself’ (GBLE 26n8; GBIE 53, 127). Naum’s description of this mystical experience exemplifies the Mioriԕa belief that, in ‘death’, one is ‘reintegrated into nature’.54 Nature, viewed in its sacred form and its symbolic cycle of death and rebirth, is a feature that is integral to many autochthonic sacred realities, and these are perhaps reflected in various examples of international surrealism. Naum’s description of this reunion in Zenobia is not that of the Christian mystic for whom transcendental rewards are offered by death. Rather, he corrupts Christian and right-wing interpretations of folk culture to demonstrate folklore’s roots in the mystical-esoteric traditions. Such views are also visible in Bataille’s description of death, as it connects with ecstasy, when he refers to Eliade’s Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, which defines the act of ‘dying to this life’ as a symbolic ‘death to the self’, leading to mystical rebirth or deliverance to an altered state of being on this plane of existence (GBLE 26n8). Such rejuvenation is evident both in the rebirth scene in the novel and in the park where something all-encompassing is sensed by the narrator in nature: this could be termed, after the narrator’s designation, ‘the film that contains us all’.

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Further evocative examples of mythic and folkloric interactions between humans and nature are demonstrated through human-animal relations in Zenobia. As in a philosophical treatise this connection is presented through two events, one positive and one negative, that serve as mirror scenes. In the first event, ‘Naum’s’ communication with animals evokes a continued connection with nature which is interpreted as (a Dionysian) ekstasis here. While walking in the swamps, ‘Naum’ is unsure which path to take and allows himself to be led by a ‘bird [which] showed me the way amid [the sun’s] orange rays’, and ‘at the foot of the precipice a butterfly would greet me, usually a brown one, apparently always different but the same (I couldn’t explain) . . . [and] I thanked the butterfly as if it were an obliging guide’ (Zen 21–22). This communication deepens as ‘Naum’ enters a personified forest, that ‘tried to yank out my eyes with great, ferocious love’, where oak trees moved, gestured and ‘told stories from a world terribly alive’ and he ‘felt unprepared for their point of view in which day and night mingled in a yellowish magma’, so he leaves their ‘vegetal embrace that could have annihilated’ him (Zen 22). Here the ‘zone of ambiguity’ prevails and, as can be seen in the next example, one may interpret ‘Naum’s’ connection with nature as caused by imagination, clinical madness, or within the laws of sacred reality (mythic and folkloric) as a mystical union with nature (see MESP 149). In the second event, a negative connection begins on the first day of the couple’s stay at Maria’s studio, when ‘Naum’ finds a moth in the studio doorway and in revulsion traps it in a red box on the table. ‘Naum’ wakes the next morning and is aware of a ‘hostile Rhythm . . . everywhere, real and perfidious’ (Zen 37). In the ‘zone of ambiguity’ multiple interpretations of such events are possible. First, this hostile rhythm can be attributed to ordinary causality, perhaps as an indication of his guilt about his act. There are, however, two further possible interpretations of this ‘Rhythm’: as symbolic analogy and aesopic feature. An interpretation of this event as a symbolic analogy representing sacred reality would read these hostile rhythms in the context of what Eliade calls a ‘symbolism [that] carries further the dialectic of hierophanies by transforming things into something other than what they appear to profane experience to be’ (MEPS 10, 452). These hostile rhythms, then, represent ‘Naum’s’ ability to sense the animal’s imprisoned distress: a sensitivity akin to that which ‘Naum’ has to the solicitation forces emitted by objects, the affects of people and ghosts in the ‘film of your own receptiveness’. He decides to free the moth only to find it transformed into a butterfly. But, barely alive, it crawls away, at which point ‘Naum’, once again repulsed, throws it out of the door. Each morning afterwards ‘Naum’ finds six broken wings on the doormat until he states, ‘I knew I had to wait’ (Zen 38). This ‘hostile Rhythm’ and its folkloric repercussions demonstrate ‘Naum’s’ affective repulsion from and imprisonment of nature (‘pollution behaviour’),55 and his inability to communicate ekstaƟcally with it. The third interpretation of this event moves away from the folkloric sacred towards the aesopic workings of the narrative, and is suggested by ‘Naum’s’ description of the box: ‘I should add a few details about the red cardboard box that, according to my habit of naming things, I called “Intimacy”, but I fear rendering more difficult an understanding that is vague enough already’ (Zen 37).

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A political interpretation of the red box called intimacy would connect the imprisonment of the moth-butterfly with the nation trapped in the red box of Soviet-style communism. At the time of publication in the 1980s, Romanian communism in particular intervened in family planning, and so encroached in the private sphere under the guise of intimacy and paternal care in, as Naum’s symbol suggests, a suffocating way. Naum’s descriptions of mythical rebirth from the earth, the state of vegetal embrace and communication with nature and natural beings, constitute in this reading what the narrator calls ‘the film that contains us all’. In this ‘film’, as in Dionysian ekstasis, nature is a source of moments of sacred contact which cause one to go beyond-the-self in an experience of the other. Bataille, like Naum, was a medievalist and during the course of his studies compiled a version of the thirteenth-century text L’Ordre de chevalerie (Order of Chivalry), a handbook written by a knight turned philosopher mystic. Bataille’s knowledge of the sacred realities of the medieval period, and its views on the marvellous and religious ecstasy, provide a point of confluence between Bataille and Naum and their approaches to surrealist practise and theory. As indicated, Bataille’s concept of ecstasy is alive to the importance of communion with nature and the material world as the basis of the sacred: The real world remains as a residuum of the birth of the divine world: real animals and plants separated from their spiritual truth slowly rejoin the empty objectivity of tools; the mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. (GBTR 38)

However, on the matter of love it is Naum’s images that stand closer than Bataille’s to those contained within the reality of the medieval romance and which will now be considered.

LOVE, PROPHECY AND POETRY From the outlandish mix of these two feelings – pain and joy – comes anguish and helpless raving. Ph 251d

From the beginning of the novel the ‘film of love’ is aligned with the feeling of silence ‘Naum’ experiences amidst the trees following his rebirth: ‘I was feeling so very good, like in that drop of water; I was happy in her film of love’ (Zen 4). By aligning the drop’s illud tempus to the ‘film’ of love, Naum creates a conceptual and affective connection between the state caused by a union with nature and through love, which similarly cohere in what is defined here through the concept of ekstasis. Going beyond-the-self during communication with nature and the resulting metamorphosis of self is also instigated by love, as ‘Naum’ illustrates: I’m writing here (because it seems that I am writing) about love, and I like the mumbling that dissolves my intelligence and my culture in order to open other doors for me, I like the blade of grass, the cat, and the little stick that know exactly the state of affairs. (Zen 25)

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Such moments of self-loss in the ‘film of love’ serve to alter ‘Naum’s’ being, his experience and interpretation of reality. In this, one sees the presentation of ecstasy and ekstasis, which alter the ontology of a person or group, as respectively argued by Bataille and Caillois in the work of the Collège, and by Socrates in the Phaedrus. In official surrealism amour fou for the female muse, as discussed, offers an altered state of consciousness allied to those afforded through clinical madness, the oneiric, automatism, the child and the ‘primitive’, which are privileged as sources of creativity. In their manifesto Malombra (1947) the whole Romanian surrealist group, placed an ‘objective love’ at the centre of their radical oneirisation of reality. The choice to designate their surrealist approach to love as ‘objective’ rather than Breton’s prescription as ‘mad’ indicates a desire for distinction as well as a different approach to the concept of love as such. This ‘objective’ form is visible in Naum’s later description of love in Zenobia (albeit in a radically differentiated form than Luca’s vision of love, discussed above). For Naum, love mimics the supreme surrealist state that fuses the oneiric and the real: ‘The equivalent to the seconds of sleep and awakening, in which dream and wakefulness cease to exist separately, I have only found in love.’56 Breton, following Nerval, as Rabinovitch details, was the first surrealist to outline the importance of love as a creative, inspiring state manifested through the female ‘ethereal muse’, which in surrealism was an andere, chaotic, dangerous, abject sexual force embodying ‘matter itself as chaotic and destructive’ and which ‘simultaneously attracts and repels’.57 The correlation between love, the female muse and the chthonic goddess is a prominent theme in surrealist thought. However, sexualised or demonised presentations of attraction and repulsion, although dual, delimit their role in surrealist practices. It is in detailing the ‘film of love’ in Zenobia that Naum most clearly reorientates the amour fou felt for the ethereal muse towards a divin fou. Orlich affirms the special position of love in Naum’s work: ‘Unlike Breton’s vision, Naum’s predominant tendency with respect to Zenobia is toward sanctification, an attitude that seems to grow out of his insistence on the cult of supreme, monogamous love. Consequently Naum’s love for Zenobia acquires something of a mystical or divine quality.’58 Love is not presented as ‘mad’, in the Bretonian sense, but more akin to the madness of amour divin, which Socrates described in the Phaedrus: ‘We also distinguished four parts within the divine kind and connected them to four gods. Having attributed . . . the fourth part of madness to Aphrodite and to Love, we said that the madness of love is the best’ (Ph 265b). Zenobia is a name chosen for the female protagonist by ‘Naum’, an act that raises critical reservations regarding the naming of women and in other contexts signals disempowerment (Zen 5). However, in this specific case, the symbolic nature of this renaming offsets any such suzerainty, and her name speaks of true strength. Although the novel makes no reference to the origin of the name, it is that of the Queen of Palmyra, a third-century warrior queen who, like Boudicca, fought Roman occupation. Palmyra, positioned between two great empires, fought bravely, but Zenobia’s might was negligible and she was captured. Her recantation has often caused her to be framed as a contrite figure in history, but

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in Naum’s novel the character stands as a symbol for the strength of a warrior who had chosen to fight against insurmountable odds for her people.59 Naum’s oblique reference to Palmyra, a nation trapped between two opposing empires which was subjugated by third-century Rome, is evocative of Romania’s prior position between the Ottoman and Russian empires and present ‘suzerainty’ under Soviet-style communism. Given that Naum’s Zenobia was written during the second, even more oppressive, period of Ceauşescu’s regime, this analogy serves to create an implied commentary woven covertly into the allusive frame of the narrative action. Through such allusions Zenobia and Zenobia evoke a historical moment of resistance against past suzerainty, thereby covertly offering an aesopic reference to solidarity and resistance against the present ‘suzerainty’. The muse character, Zenobia, is observed solely through ‘Naum’s’ eyes, thereby making her internal life intangible. This narrative stance serves to heighten the mystical status of the character which is extended by analogising her to Isis and the mythical ‘Woman Spirit’ using an anthropo-cosmic homology (Zen 82): I had always felt around me the all-encompassing presence of a feminine principle that, when I tried to define its features, to give it a face, I named the Woman Spirit . . . Mother of mothers, ferocious and indifferent, gentle and generous, deaf, primitive . . . she shielded me, she guided me through the complicated appearance that envelops us like the air we breathe . . . The brutality of the image and the tragic character of the dimensions obscured the brightness of the intuitive concept, they amputated its promises, they took it into the zone of the anomalous and grotesque, where only promiscuity would have felt at home . . . the concept . . . of the Woman Spirit . . . [became] a kind of purely spiritual, abstract, fluid, and formless dimension. (Zen 97–99)

Naum engages with an ‘objective love’ here which is not akin to the treatment of the female chthonic muse-goddess who causes amour fou and mediates male experiences of creativity in official surrealism. Naum refuses to make this spirit ‘anomalous or grotesque . . . promiscu[ous]’, instead he describes the sacred ‘Woman Spirit’ as adjectly poised between the indifferent and the generous, manifesting in all women characters: in the woman athlete, a kind old woman and in her ‘twin sister’ Zenobia (Zen 97, 99–101). Naum constructs the image of the muse in Zenobia, as a part of the guiding and protective mythic-real ‘Woman Spirit’ which Orlich describes as powerful.60 As the ‘Woman Spirit’s’ twin, Zenobia is attributed with some of her strengths, abilities and her sacrality: ‘Attentive to the faintest vibrations from outside, [Zenobia] responded to them only with the fibers of the unseen miracle that still lies dormant in each of us. In a world full of signs, she deciphered signs in everything. She bowed silently, with deep respect, before them’ (Zen 122). By aligning Zenobia with the figure of Queen Zenobia and the positive mythic force of the ‘Woman Spirit’, ‘Naum’s’ love for Zenobia is revealed as reverential, sanctified as Orlich notes: an ‘objective love’ indicative of the ekstasis of amour divin, not one wholly collapsible to surrealist amour fou. *

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In the ‘film of love’, Zenobia and ‘Naum’ are described as ekstaƟcally going beyond-the-self: [S]he continued to weave around me a protective aura. . . . Enveloped in the vainglorious axiom of our love, I felt her so attached, so incorporated in me . . . In this way our deep, fanatical union melted into a double solitude whose only echo I concealed within myself like a talisman. (Zen 92)

This experience of the other can be aligned with the ecstatic experience of the unknown described by Bataille, where ‘[t]here is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence’ (GBIE 59). Such descriptions, when compared to those of ‘Naum’s’ previous life, make it clear that Zenobia provides a support and a centre, fundamental to the widening of the narrator’s conscious will, and enables him to ‘reestablish, step by step, a partially forgotten, partly prefigured nature . . . this nature constituted for her the natural field of existence’ (Zen 40). Orlich suggests that the narrator’s unusual experiences and his low self-esteem find balance through Zenobia’s way of seeing reality and her positive expression of the female sacred: [W]hereas Naum makes Zenobia the sine qua non of his artistic inspiration who enables him to accede to an ever higher reality, Breton turns Nadja’s pursuit of enigmas and revelations into a sinister endeavour . . . [Zenobia thus holds a] pivotal position as a figure imbued with a cosmically mysterious dimension and responsible for the narrator’s cycles of transformation.61

This is perhaps most clearly evident in Naum’s ascription of madness to his male protagonist and not to the muse. Zenobia is then free to become the sacralised muse who inspires the poet, as the ‘untrammelled marvellous’ (Zen 39), and to cause transformations similar to the cycle which Bataille describes as the movement from ‘distress into strength’ in the sacred (GB‘ARI’ 111). Further, Orlich underlines that the representations of women in Breton’s Nadja and Naum’s Zenobia is their key difference, and is indicative of Naum’s extension of Breton’s official surrealist theory: Skillfully embedded in Zenobia, such views [of the female] may reveal not only Naum’s appropriations and perceived limitations and inconsistencies of Breton’s theories, but also, coming full circle, the significant contributions of Romanian modern fiction to the Surrealist experiment and to the perception of women as a strong and commanding presence on an imaginative plane.62

Neither sexualised and/or dismembered, nor made into an uncanny manikin/ automaton – all attitudes towards the female that make contemporary literary and cultural criticism resistant to works of surrealism – both the female muse and the female are positively conceived in Zenobia. Naum’s images therefore address the objectifications enacted in Breton’s Nadja and exist in dialogue with it.

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The positive, transformative form of love offered by Zenobia (which has a talismanic function for ‘Naum’, much as did Queen Zenobia’s love for her people) contrasts sharply with the box of ‘Intimacy’, both as symbolic analogy or aesopic symbol. The latter denoting Ceauşescu’s state propaganda of paternal love for the people, levied in order to maintain social control in 1980s Romania during the time Naum wrote Zenobia. The form of love presented in Zenobia offers, rather, liberation from this oppressive rhetoric: precisely the revolutionary liberation that was ascribed to objective love by the Romanian surrealist group in their manifesto, Malombra. If the ekstaƟc affects of amour divin detailed in the first half of the novel tell one side of the ‘film of love’ and echo the type of medieval romance which tells of a ‘requited love’, the second half represents its antithesis in the basanos of unrequited ‘courtly love’ or prurience.63 The turn in the narrative to consider unrequited love serves to increase one’s awareness of the unique aspects of ‘Naum’ and Zenobia’s connection. The painful aspects of love are revealed when Petru, one of the men at Mr Sima’s gathering, returns to stage nightly laments for his love, Nathalia. Believing Nathalia to be trapped or imprisoned in the room next door which is, in fact, empty, Petru spends the nights crying, crouched ‘on an extremely small rug, a doormat’ outside the couple’s room (Zen 113). Petru’s corporeal presence is in doubt at this point in the novel, for he may be a vision witnessed by ‘Naum’ and Zenobia: as spectral as Dragoş and as prophetic as Zenobia’s foreknowledge of the disastrous events of loss and suicide that configure this second aspect of love in Zenobia (Zen 114, 14, 157). Through such intimations the reader is given access to Zenobia’s prophetic and mystical abilities just as ‘Naum’s’ abilities have been described in the first person. In response to Petru’s keening lament night after night, ‘Naum’ makes an attempt to solace him – at which moment a ‘blue butterfly . . . alighted on the edge of [his] shadow’ and Petru cries, ‘“She doesn’t open up because they’ve beaten her. They’ve shaved her head and she’s embarrassed . . . They’ve locked her inside. She can’t open the door”’ (Zen 113). Nathalia, who is not present, is described as a tortured and trapped prisoner and symbolised by a blue butterfly, a symbol which serves to recall the moth-butterfly which ‘Naum’ trapped in the red box, and the folkloric wings on the doormat (Zen 37). Nathalia can be read in relation to that first imprisonment in ways that are as yet unclear in the novel, for in an aesopic coding the transposition of an imprisoned butterfly into an imprisoned human being suggests a political statement on humanitarian abuses in communist Romania. Petru’s repeated lament for Nathalia, like the ‘hostile Rhythm’ of the moth-butterfly, causes ‘Naum’ distress. This time ‘Naum’s’ distress is far greater and places him in the ‘zone of ambiguity’, on the limen between clinical and divine madness: My usual active indifference deserted me in favour of an obsessive need . . . A sensation of vague panic, like when you are at a funeral, insinuated its equivocal echoes into me . . . At the same time as his arrival, an increasingly severe blockage developed. By expressing it rather crudely and by admitting a few exceptions, I could define it as a divorce between my consciousness and my factual existence. (Zen 118–19)

Representations of possible negative consequences of love continue as Constantin, ‘Naum’s’ friend, tells his story of his cuckolded love and of the ideas

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expounded by his work colleague, the Old Man (Zen 128–36). The Old Man’s view of love constitutes a radical philosophical treatise critiquing the false image derived from stories elevating the tragic nature of love above a love of requited fulfilment, which Constantin relates: ‘[The Old Man] also maintains that we’ve been witnessing for thousands of years, unconsciously and impotently, the masculinisation of the sacred . . . he believes that for some millennia now we’ve been witnessing the clinical death of love . . . [Leaving only] pseudoloves . . . [which share] the belief that love can finally entail only unhappiness . . . those unhappy exemplars who were murdered or who committed suicide because of love . . . The Old Man maintains that there is no hint of love in any of these cases. True, he admits, there are exceptions . . . He considers them the chosen ones, the preservers of love in the world . . .’ ‘And what if he’s not wrong?’ I asked casually. (Zen 132–33)

For the Old Man the clinical death of love is a result of the masculinisation of the sacred. He links the misunderstanding of its true nature to the lost appreciation for the feminine sacred and therein expresses theoretically what the couple detail in practice. ‘Naum’s’ sacralisation of Zenobia through the ‘Woman Spirit’ indicates why their love is a validation of ‘objective love’ but it also reveals that societal views of love in each of its forms is intimately connected to the shape which the sacred assumes in society, which in turn has a great impact upon human relations. * As has been elaborated, in the ‘film of love’ ekstasis can be experienced by the lovers and, in the ‘film that contains us all’, ekstasis can be felt in nature. In the ‘film of your own receptiveness’, when constituted by sensitivity to receptive chance (as the found object of ‘mediumistic’ archaeology and errance) and to ghosts and clinical madness, there is no experience of self-loss in ekstasis. However, during the exposition of love’s negative aspect, ‘Naum’s’ ‘film of . . . receptiveness’ to the affective forces around people and aithein states of being, evident first through Petru’s distress, causes what can be described as a divine madness. In the chapter ‘The Witnesses’, ‘Naum’s’ anguish, which began with Petru’s lament, reaches a climax when he sees the apparition of a disabled woman from his past, Jeni Pop, and looks down the light well to see the vision of ‘a crushed human body’ (Zen 149–51). The floating apparition and the vision of a ‘body’ in the light well send ‘Naum’ running into the street, suffering ontological incoherence, reflected in his increasingly frantic thoughts and behaviour: ‘I followed people, I kept pace with them . . . I tried to enter a little into their reality . . . I tried to explain myself . . . that I needed them, the presence of each and every one, and their words, however stupid, to convince myself that we existed together’ (Zen 152). As ‘Naum’ attempts to re-establish the stability of his identity and reality through recognition by the group, he is met only with rejection. This point of collapse in communication for ‘Naum’ marks the fulcrum of his madness and distress, and signals what at first appears to be clinical madness. When a young crippled girl, living two floors down from ‘Naum’ and Zenobia, commits suicide by throwing herself into the light well, ‘Naum’s’ distress ends and events retrospectively take on a new hue (Zen 158). Petru’s lament,

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‘Naum’s’ vision of the disabled Jeni Pop and the body in the light well reveal themselves to be symptoms of ‘Naum’s’ receptiveness to the girl’s real suffering and a prophetic vision of her suicide. Thus far ‘Naum’s’ ‘film of receptiveness’ has shown his ability to gauge people’s affective states, Įnd objects and people, and sense the hostile rhythms of an imprisoned moth-butterfly. Here, his receptiveness to another person’s distress also has the capacity to cause the dreamlike visions of prophetic madness. This novelistic event could be read in relation to the official surrealist interest in mediumship and prophecy. It is also a coherent ekstasis, akin to those of the Prophetesses under Apollo’s divine madness who lose ‘control’ and thereby ‘are out of their minds’ (Ph 244b). It is the admissibility of the text to such a reading alongside its other instances of ekstasis that mark it as an alternative surrealist novel working on the periphery of official surrealist thought. It is this embrace of ‘unknowing’ that Bataille refers to when he describes ‘an authentic inner experience, obviously distinct from project, from discourse . . . I must admit today that these states of communication were only rarely accessible to me . . . [an] ecstasy before the empty unknown’ (GBIE 112–13). Much like in myths and dreams, ‘Naum’s’ prophetic abilities, in this context, are expressed through substitution, as one known character (Petru, Nathalia, then the disabled Jeni Pop) is substituted for another (the disabled girl). As a narrative device, this strategy reveals that ‘Naum’ is indeed one of those described by Borch-Jacobsen as ‘manifestly sick (malades) of the symbolic [order], that is, both sick from the point of the symbolic and sick because they cannot make themselves recognised in it’.64 The narrative suggests that the sacred cannot be articulated by any other means but a series of analogies. Using the same method of substitution these symbols carry the political critique visible in the novel. First, ‘Naum’ was disturbed by a ‘hostile Rhythm’ created by an imprisoned moth-butterfly. Then, a blue butterfly appears during Petru’s disquieting lament for Nathalia, an imaginary imprisoned woman, who is a symbolic substitution for the disabled young girl imprisoned in her father’s apartment. The young girl’s distress causes a hostile rhythm which once again disturbs ‘Naum’. Just as the butterfly ‘crawls’ away from the red box to its death, the girl crawls from her father’s apartment to die: ‘The witnesses were particularly curious about how the young handicapped girl, without legs and without her wheelchair, which was left near her bed, could have reached the light well window. “She crawled,” a woman tried to explain’ (Zen 38, 159). The connection between Nathalia and the disabled girl is furthered when ‘Naum’ notes that ‘an imaginary plumb line starting from Nathalia’s empty room would have reached her bedroom exactly’ (Zen 158–59). The young girl, Nathalia and the butterfly are related through this series of changing symbols of imprisonment. When the young girl dies, Petru and his mat disappear, further indicating that Petru’s absence-presence is a symbol of the girl’s distress. The relay of substitution comes full circle for the mat Petru sat on to stage his lament outside ‘Naum’s’ room serves to recall the mat at Maria’s studio upon which the butterfly wings appeared after ‘Naum’ throws the creature outside. The symbolic connections between the moth-butterfly, the imagined prisoner Nathalia and the girl, and between the red box, the empty room and the paternal home, carry a political subtext that speaks powerfully of the oppressive ‘paternal love’ and individual

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or national incarcerations experienced in communist Romania in the 1980s. This series of images of imprisonment present an aesopic coding that furthers the treatment of the national imaginary in Zenobia. Just as love is subject to Naum’s dialectical representation of both its adjecƟon and abject ‘pseudoloves’ or concupiscence, there are two antithetical representations of the nation: on the one hand, the emboldening image of Zenobia as a divine national protector, a warrior who fights despite the odds: on the other, life weighted down under imprisonment and suicide. If the ‘film of one’s receptiveness’ is characterised by ‘Naum’s’ receptivity to ghosts, sacred laws, solicitation forces of objects and prophetic visions leading to ekstasis, it also encompasses his ability to enter into poetic states as another instance of ekstasis. Among ‘Naum’s’ memories of the time spent living on the corridor he describes poetic composition in the form of an extreme affective experience: I had floated all night long in sublime circles, I wanted to escape from the memory of a too painful serenity, I cried like a baby, I felt like I would die laughing . . . I fall into a kind of trance, a kind of happiness more difficult to bear than pain . . . a state from which I want to communicate something and then bang! the words come. (Zen 66–70)

This trance could recall the somnambulistic trances of official surrealism but further than that it bears relation to the divine madness described by Socrates as a gift of the Muses: ‘If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail’ (Ph 245a). Similarly ‘Naum’s’ experience is neither pathological nor unwelcome, and his suffering and divin fou preceding inspiration can be related to the anguish that for Bataille precedes ecstasy in Inner Experience. It is an anguish that leads ‘Naum’ precisely into the fullness of meaning gained through a sudden ability to communicate. After the experiences in the city, the couple return to the swamps and to a connection with nature in the ‘film that contains us all’: ‘When we got off at that station, waves of serene quiet flooded from the top of my head to the soles of my feet and drained into the ground’ (Zen 178). If the Collège equate sacred sociology with the study of rising social tension and ecstatic release, this dialectic is visible in the many moments of ekstasis identifiable in Zenobia. The first release of tension occurs in the ekstaƟc communion with nature; the second in the ekstaƟc love between the couple; the third release takes place when prophecy is fulfilled and the fourth in creating poetry. The novel ends in a return to the first – communication in nature. It is ultimately through the dialectic topic of ‘objective love’ that Naum most clearly elaborates his alternative surrealist vision and his participation in the international surrealist cry of ‘poetry, liberty, and love’.

SUMMA When I solicit gently, in the very heart of anguish, a strange absurdity, an eye opens itself at the summit, in the middle of my skull. This eye which, to contemplate the sun, face to face in its nudity, opens up to it in all its glory, does not arise from my reason. Georges Bataille, ‘Blue of Noon’ (1936), GBIE 77

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Functioning on the conceptual, linguistic, geographical and temporal border of official surrealist practices, in Zenobia, Naum has created a unique expression of the external ‘Unknown’. Following the structure of a philosophical debate, Naum explicates the thesis and antithesis of his topic of love in this late surrealist prose work, and expresses a very different vision of love than that offered by the feminised sacred in official surrealism. The symbolic construction of ‘objective love’ places Zenobia as a mythic talisman for ‘Naum’ and his guide to an aithein reality filled with sacred forces and laws. ‘Naum’s’ ekstaƟc love for Zenobia, in addition, takes on the function of a sociopolitical commentary of, and coded resistance to, communist ideology in 1980s Romania. This function is disclosed through the naming of Zenobia, which establishes a parallel between Palmyra and Romania and constitutes Zenobia as a national protector against an assimilating might. Although Naum’s Zenobia may not take up arms, her ideological standpoint, revealed through her understanding of sacred reality, counters the very epistemological foundations of communist ideology. ‘Naum’ is offered rebirth through individual love and the rebirth of the people is proffered through the camouflaged myth of a female defender of the nation. In this novel the projected grid of personal desire is exchanged for a network of ‘films’, aithein sacred forces and laws of indifference in the ‘zone of ambiguity’, which partake of the external ‘Unknown’. The surrealist blurring of the limen between rationalism and madness, the real and the oneiric, collapses fully in Zenobia through communication and ekstasis. Each moment of ekstasis is gained through contact with a ‘film’, either through a union with nature in the ‘film that contains us all’, through ‘objective love’ in the ‘film of love’, or in prophecy or poetry linked to ‘the film of your own receptiveness’ and the esoteric. Each ekstasis brings ‘Naum’ to a greater ontological connection with something beyond-the-self and a ‘metamorphosis of . . . being’. The surrealist world Naum creates in Zenobia expands our understanding of official surrealist praxis through unique elaborations on the notions of chance, madness, prophecy and love. Naum’s fictional chronotope is not one that is insensitive to the affects of society however, for one sees the anguish that succeeds ekstasis, which can place oneself firmly at odds with the attitudes of a desacralised society. The Romanian surrealist intention to ‘oneirize life’ is put into practice in a very specific way in Zenobia, through the affective states denoted by ‘films’ and aithein forces. Naum’s deployment of the surrealist limen in the novel also draws from scholastic philosophy, and thereby creates a reality transfigured by living sacred forces, protective objects and affective circles that invisibly connect the fibres of the socius together. In this late novel Naum offers an example of an alternative strand of international surrealism that elaborates a different point of balance between madness and rationalism, or dream and reality, and considers both the inside and outside sources of the ‘Unknown’. The character Zenobia, and the poet’s love for her, finds clearer explication in the ancient Greek role of the muse as a leader towards divine inspiration and amour divin than is fully available in the mediating, sexualised or demonised mad muse and amour fou. Creative inspiration and love in the Phaedrus offer

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pathways to divine madness, and what is termed here as the surrealist affective experience of ekstasis, leading to ontological change and ego development. The first half of Zenobia articulates the rebirth of the main character attributable to the feminisation of the sacred, the socius and love as represented through the Woman Spirit in her various forms; and the ekstasis of amour divin as an expression of dialectal monism. The second half details the anguish of unrequited and imprisoned love that is completed in the image of suicide attributable to ‘the masculinisation of the sacred’; and interpretable as Romanian communism’s propaganda of paternal ‘love’ for the polis, imprisoning its own people and affecting the emotional ties of the socius (Zen 132). The rising tension felt in ‘Naum’s’ ‘film of receptivity’ in response to the suffering of the girl operates as an analogy for the fate of an entire nation, trapped and crippled within political dictates. In the ‘film of one’s own receptiveness’ which infers surrealist chance, objects, poetry and prophesy, visions occur which augur the coming of death in the novel. These utilise surrealist dream logic and echo Brauner’s often-cited precognitive knowledge of the real loss of his eye; and Naum radicalises this use of the vision to political effect, covertly pointing to the national themes of despair and entrapment. Naum’s descriptions of mediumistic abilities in Zenobia postulate the notion of a recepƟve chance in force around objects and events which develops upon official surrealism’s conceptualisation of objective chance using ‘ba da’ logic. Naum’s treatment of chance and the object as immanent extends the cognitive grid of self-projected desire and its treatment of the object as psychological fetish; just as he adapts official surrealist uses of indigenous folklore and primordial myth to reveal ekstaƟc moments. Like the external source of the ‘Unknown’ indicated in Zurich Dada meditations and social analyses of sacred ecstasy by Bataille and the Collège, in the novel ‘the Unknown’, the ‘Unbekannt’, is presented as a living sacred force (Zen 71). The extrinsic Dadaist ‘Unknown’ and the ecstatic ‘unknown’ that Bataille also refers to as ‘night’ both reveal kinship to a mystical interpretation of reality.65 Bataille describes this approach to reality as ‘. . . the vision of that object in which I lose myself at other times, which I call the “unknown” and which is not distinct from Nothingness by anything which discourse is capable of articulating’ . . . I gave to night the name of object . . . I have shown the way which leads generally from the common state, in which we are aware of the world, to the ‘unknown’. (GBIE 125)

In sacred ecstasy and ekstasis, the self and the other interact in ways that bring to the fore living myth: a sacralised reality that official surrealist theory draws its esoteric interests from but does not always aim to portray coherently. Naum, however, partly reconstructs this reality in Zenobia. The affective forces and laws of the ‘films’ mark out an alternative sacralised treatment of the subject in Zenobia. The forces and laws emanating from the external ‘Unknown’ are located on the far reaches of rationalist conceptions of reality, toward the centre of scholastic philosophical debates. In the novel the ‘film that contains us all’ has been allied with communicati on between humans, nature and natural beings, with the primordial waters and with the illud tempus.

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Novelistic representation of affective experiences within these ‘films’ (prophecy, mystical reunion with nature, poetry and love) demonstrate that the material world provides the basis for this momentary communication beyond-the-self in ekstasis. Through the use of symbols and analogies, Naum indicates how surrealist prose can speak of the unspeakable, the sacred or politically precluded. Nonnaturalistic representations here not only relay sacred reality but also the social reality of communism versus the needs of the nation. It is for this reason that the sacred, mythic and folkloric symbols act curatively in the novel as they reactivate ideas of ontological mutation. If coherent uses of myths, symbols and rituals can be seen to release psychic tension and to create ontological changes in identity, as in Desoille’s application and Eliade’s description of ritual rebirth, it is then possible to argue that the social function of myth is disclosed in the use of camouflaged myths, in the prepotency of myth in nonnaturalistic genres, and in sacred ecstasy that the Collège enshrines as a socially regenerating force. These novelistic surrealist expressions of ekstasis, like the dissident surrealist theorisation of ecstasy, are on the penumbra of official surrealist concerns due to their overt sacralisation of ontology and affectively gained alteration of attitudes. It is this strain of surrealist thought that is discussed, both theoretically and in the analysis of literary surrealism, here. Naum’s text performs this move by relaying the active sacred causes of affective forces casting his protagonist in relation to divin fou. This, however, is communicated in an analogical way, bound as it is by the restrictive medium of language: a feature that is both acknowledged in relation to the ganz andere ‘zone of ambiguity’ and utilised for political ends. In this novel Naum serves to develop the official surrealist categories anew for international and Romanian surrealism. First, the presentation of ‘objective love’ deviates from the role of amour fou and its politicisation of surrealist techniques instantiate the social revolutionary aims which The DialecƟc of DialecƟc manifesto feared Bretonian surrealism had abandoned. Second, the limitations of language and the ‘zone of ambiguity’ disclose ekstasis gained through prophecy, storytelling, nature and love as ‘divine disorder’. Third, Naum’s greatest alternative contribution to surrealist theory is the reorientation of the point of balance between the logical and alogical by bringing the dream fully into the real. To do this Naum brought the sacred realities of medieval Europe more fully into surrealism, thereby reorienting the point of balance once again towards the sacred, and specifically towards divin fou.

Notes 1

Similarly, Octavio Paz in The Other Voice (1990) argues that such boundaries are Eurocentric, and ‘postmodernism’ is based upon what Europeans call the avant-garde.

2

This could reference Josef Šíma, the Czech surrealist painter and member of Le Grand Jeu, a Parisian dissident surrealist group with connections to the Romanian avant-garde. Šíma directed the group’s journal of the same name.

3

Ion Pop, Gellu Naum – poezia contra literatuii (Cluj: Casa Cartii de Stiinta, 2001), p. 163, cited by Ileana Alexandra Orlich, ‘Romanian Avant-Gardism and French Surrealism

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beyond The Waste Land: Gellu Naum’s Zenobia’, in Myth and Modernity in the TwenƟeth Century Romanian Novel (Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 2010), p. 25. Moldova is considered to have been established in the fourteenth century by Dragoş, to the east of the Carpathian mountains and Wallachia (Romania) to the south. Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the PoliƟcs of Culture (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2000), pp. 13–14. Moldova was fragmented during the nineteenth century and exists today as a Republic, minus its western area which was integrated into modern-day Romania and a further section which was absorbed into Ukraine. 4

For a different reading of the city, corridor, plains and sky-apartment in Zenobia, see Orlich, PoliƟcs, pp. 87–88, 92, 100–01.

5

Jeremy Hawthorn, Studying the Novel: An IntroducƟon (London: Edward Arnold, 1993 [1985]), pp. 52–53.

6

Northrop Frye, ‘From Anatomy of CriƟcism: Four Essays’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, p. 8.

7

Orlich, ‘Romanian Avant-Gardism’, pp. 8–36; Orlich, ‘Surrealism and The Feminine Element: André Breton’s Nadja and Gellu Naum’s Zenobia’, Philologica Jassyensia, 2, 2 (2006), 213–24.

8

James Brook, ‘An Interview with Gellu Naum’ (1999), in Gellu Naum, My Tired Father/ Pohem, trans. James Brook (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), pp. 13–14. Orlich also references this interview in PoliƟcs, p. 54.

9

Orlich, PoliƟcs, pp. 105, 116.

10

Frye, ‘From Anatomy’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, pp. 122–23; René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949 [1942]), pp. 223–24.

11

Ian Watt, ‘From The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, p. 365.

12

Rosemary Woolf, ‘Later Poetry: The Popular Tradition’, in The Middle Ages, ed. W.F. Bolton (London: Sphere Books, 1987 [1970]), p. 271.

13

Irina Livezeanu, ‘After the Great Union: Generational Tensions, Intellectuals, Modernism, and Ethnicity in Interwar Romania’, in NaƟon and NaƟonal Ideology: Past, Present and Prospects [Proceedings of the InternaƟonal Symposium, New Europe College, Bucharest, 6–7 April 2001] (Bucharest: New Europe College, 2002), pp. 113–14.

14

Typical in vestigial form, in ‘rural Christianity, especially in Southern and Southeastern Europe, [which] has a cosmic dimension’; MEMR 160.

15

Livezeanu, ‘After’, pp. 113–14.

16

Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, pp. 209–10.

17

Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’ (1942), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Seaver and Lane, p. 285.

18

Orlich also discusses the problematics of language as coded political statement in Zenobia; see PoliƟcs, pp. 28–32, 92–93.

19

Breton, ‘Le merveilleux contre le mystère’, Minotaure (1936), Le clé des champs, p. 11, cited in Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 14.

20

As Robert Short points out, Breton saw the beyond of the self (the external, the other) to respond to ‘unspoken demands and desires of the human psyche’; see ‘Dada and Surrealism’, pp. 307–08.

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21

As mentioned, Breton’s L’amour fou, text 5, discussed by Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 83.

22

Richter, Dada, p. 50.

23

Richter, Dada, p. 51.

24

Bataille, ‘Un-Knowing’. Also see GBIE 34.

25

Tristan Tzara, [Speech to the Weimar Constructivist Congress] Merz, 7 (January 1924), 69, cited in Sheppard, ‘Dada’, p. 98.

26

Sheppard, ‘Dada’, pp. 96–98.

27

Lepetit, Esoteric Secrets, p. 437.

28

On the official surrealist treatment of woman, child-woman, cf. Cottom, Abyss, pp. 241–44.

29

Richter, Dada, p. 50; Tzara cited in Sheppard, ‘Dada’, p. 98.

30

Sandqvist, DADA, p. 300.

31

Breton, ‘Third Surrealist Manifesto’ (1942), p. 293; Clifford Browder, André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1967), p.146.

32

Balakian, Origins, pp. 11–12.

33

Cottom shows how close official and dissident methods are when he likens the found object to the gift, and Mauss’s analysis of the gift as indicative of non-capitalist logic; see Abyss, p.169.

34

Breton, L’amour fou, text 5, cited in Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, p. 83.

35

Naum’s descriptions of the object concur with those in sacred reality, also with Caillois’s surrealist work on stones, L’ecriture des pierres (1970), described by Michael Richardson: ‘He considered that each stone was a microcosm within which the whole world could be read if one established the right form of receptivity. This required that one should locate oneself directly in the world and respond harmoniously with it instead of treating it, as we are habitually encouraged to do, as something to be dominated’; Dedalus, Vol. 2, p. 281.

36

Breton discusses objects and stones in ‘La Langue des pierres’, Le Surrealisme même, 3 (1957).

37

Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, p. 142.

38

Discussing the ‘neo-Platonic belief systems such as Gnosticism and hermeticism’, that influence the work of the Argentine surrealist Olga Orozco, Nicholson details that ‘the Greek origin of the word talisman: telesma means “incantation”’; Nicholson, LaƟn American, pp. 160–61.

39

One could also read this mediumship in its official surrealist acceptation.

40

‘Project’ for Bataille denotes the utilitarian world. As discussed, Bataille does not detail the ancient paths to ekstasis. Rather his concept of sacred ecstasy and inner experience form the basis for the line I have drawn to its historical antecedent represented in Plato’s Phaedrus: a connection made clear by Durkheim’s reference to Greek ekstasis as the etymological root of ecstasy.

41

See Kendall Johnson, ‘Haunting Transcendence: The Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton’, TwenƟeth Century Literature, 45, 3 (Autumn 1999), 347–70; and Katharine Conley’s Surrealist Ghostliness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013) for treatment of this topic.

42

Frye, ‘Anatomy’, in Theory of the Novel, ed. McKeon, p. 125.

EĚėĔĕĊ’Ę EĆĘęĊėē SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę MĊĆēĎēČĘ 201

43

Orlich interestingly reads ‘Naum’s’ madness as a feature of communist repression, in PoliƟcs, pp. 99, 136–42.

44

Bataille uses ‘display’ in a similar sense to describe certain surrealist practices, in ‘Surrealism in 1947’, GBAM 68.

45

Comparably, as Falasca-Zamponi details, the ‘Collège’s focus on the ambiguity of the sacred dramatizes the need for new conceptual tools to re-evaluate fascism’s logic and scope. It also indicates the importance of rethinking the political in order to challenge the seduction of a sacred right’; see ‘A Left Sacred’, 47.

46

The Collège were aware, though, that in modern society myths offered a fundamental example of national ontology, as indicated in articles by Bataille and Caillois such as ‘The Structure of Democracy’, ‘Hitler’, ‘Power’, and others.

47

Eliade, ‘Shadows in Archaic Religions’ [1960], in Symbolism, p. 11.

48

Eliade, Romanians, p. 48.

49

Ileana Alexandra Orlich, ArƟculaƟng Gender, NarraƟng the NaƟon: Allegorical Femininity in Romanian FicƟon (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2004), p. 20.

50

Victor Simion, ‘Excerpt from Images, Legends, Symbols’, Plural, 33 (2009), trans. Scott Tinney, p. 256, (accessed 12 August 2011).

51

The wolf held a similar resonance in the Romanian fairytale Capra cu trei iezi (The Goat with Three Kids), by Ion Creangă, to that of Charles Perrault’s Le peƟt chaperon rouge (LiƩle Red Riding Hood). For a discussion on surrealist uses of the fairytale, see Richardson, Dedalus, Vol. 2, pp. 274, 277.

52

Breton determines that ‘Swift is Surrealist in malice’, in ‘Manifesto’ (1924), p. 26.

53

The root term ‘aithein’ has been used over the more familiar terms of ‘aureole’ or ‘ethereal’, including Eliade’s use of ‘auroral’ (MEMR 19) to indicate the presence of the sacred, and to avoid prior associations carried by each term. In addition this delineates a specific application of the concept in relation to ekstaƟc experiences. The term is drawn from the Greek root of ‘ethereal’, aitherios: ‘Gk aithĤr [ɲ஀ɾୱʌ] ‘upper air’, from the base aithein [ɲ஁ɾɸɿʆ] ‘to burn, shine’. See Concise Oxford English DicƟonary, ed. Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 489.

54

Eliade, Romanians, pp. 47–48.

55

Todorova, Imagining, p. 17.

56

Naum, PoeƟcize, cited in Simona Popescu, ‘Dream, Poetry, Lacework and The Great Congenial’ (from: Species), Plural, 19 (2003), (accessed 15 August 2009).

57

Rabinovitch, Surrealism, pp. 78, 202; on the surrealist vision of the female muse see pp. 136–37. Orlich makes a similar point in relation to Suleiman’s theories in PoliƟcs, p. 116. For an alternative position to such readings of the surrealist objectification of women, see work by Alyce Mahon, for example Eros.

58

Orlich, ‘Surrealism’, 219–20; a love that in PoliƟcs she defines as closer to Breton’s vision in Arcanum 17 than to Nadja, p. 60.

59

See Pat Southern, Empress Zenobia: Palmyra’s Rebel Queen (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).

60

Orlich, PoliƟcs, p. 117.

61

Orlich, ‘Surrealism’, 218–20.

202 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

62

Orlich, ‘Surrealism’, 215.

63

Woolf, ‘Later Poetry’, pp. 274, 276.

64

Borch-Jacobsen, EmoƟonal Tie, pp. 118–19.

65

Of course, as Richardson discusses, Bataille does not define inner experience as mystical, given the differences over the matter of confession, as such uses of this term relate to this negotiated sense; see Richardson, Bataille, p. 131; GBIE 9, 93.

PĆėę V SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ’Ę RĊěĔđĚęĎĔēĆėĞ CĔēĘĈĎĔĚĘēĊĘĘ: TčĊ CĔđđijČĊ ĉĊ SĔĈĎĔđĔČĎĊ’Ę EĝęĊēĘĎĔēĘ ęĔ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘę TčĊĔėĞ Ćēĉ RĊĆĉĎēČ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ

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8 TčĊĔėĊĒ, TčĊĔėĎĊ, TčĊŜėĊŜ1

It seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (1958)2

Surrealism is characterised by its anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and antirationalist attitudes. By providing techniques with which to question and undermine a number of dominant value systems, surrealism garnered global appeal. The surrealist search for a revolution in consciousness took form through the interaction of the imagination with the material world – the merveilleux with the quotidian – explored via free association, oneirism, coincidence, liminal waking-sleep states and other altered states of consciousness, also through objective chance, black humour and amour fou. Each of these explorations aimed to release the individual from repression within the paucity of rationalist reality. For Breton this release occurs in the ‘supreme point’ at which cognitive contradiction ceases to be perceived. However, not all surrealists or surrealist affiliates agreed with the official positioning of this point, specifically in relation to the point of balance between logic and ‘illogic’. For Bataille and Caillois the official surrealist focus on the individual, artistic and cognitive halted the investigation into the social, critical and affective aspects of surrealism. For the purposes of this alternative reading of international surrealist literature the dissident point of balance has directed our gaze: one which focuses upon ‘points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emoƟonal knowledge and those of discursive knowledge’ (GBIE xxxiii, emphasis added). As Breton’s supreme point and Bataille’s contact points identify, both official and dissident surrealism identified an intuitive knowledge in contradistinction to rationalism but the nature and method of attaining it differed. By separating Bataille’s thoughts on the sacred from the erotic and physically violent forms of expenditure he discusses, the contact points between emoƟonal and discursive knowledge come into a closer relation with the Collège’s

206 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

study of sacred sociology in the ‘points of coincidence between . . . individual psychology and . . . social organization’.3 Breton’s question ‘Who am I?’ sits at the centre of the surrealist movement. The dissident and alternative periphery alters this question to ask ‘Who are we?’ The social psychological approach of the dissident surrealists of the Collège gave greater weight to discursive knowledge, or what Caillois called ‘critical severity’. As such, the Collège’s sacred sociology was surrealism of a different nature to that of late 1930s official surrealism, one which was more reminiscent of the quasi-scientific surrealist enquiries of the early 1920s and the Bureau for Surrealist Research. The Collège’s consideration of the primary sacred also added a different quality to the emoƟonal knowledge Bataille speaks of, which is placed in very specific contact with this negotiated sense of discursive knowledge. Although official and dissident surrealism weight rationalism and irrationalism differently within their point of balance, they both forward an antirationalist agenda. This can be seen when Bataille comments that it was necessary for rationalism to lose the profundity of modes of thought that shackled it. But if we now seek what is possible before us . . . we no longer have any need to construct rational thought, which is effortlessly arranged for us, we are again able to recognise the profound value of the modalities of lost thought.4

In all its forms surrealism fought against personal and social repression caused by civil and colonial authority. To reject rationalism and chart a new tradition, surrealism had utilised derepression: official surrealism provided one way of talking about this liberation through its cognitive engagements with the self in relation to the other; dissident surrealism provides another, through an affective going beyond-the-self in ecstatic contact with the sacred other, predicated upon the same basis as amour fou, objective chance and humour in formal surrealism. The dissident surrealist point, plotted between emoƟonal and discursive knowledge, social and individual psychology, has been considered here through the theory of ecstasy in relation to ‘surrealism[’s] . . . prodigious outburst of mythical themes and primordial symbols’. By outlining the mechanics of symbolic analogies in myth and ritual discussed by the Collège, the surrealist prose works have been read in relation to the sacred symbolism of ‘the mythic themes of the primordial waters, of the isles of Paradise, of the quest of the Holy Grail, of heroic and mystical initiation, etc., [that] still dominate modern . . . literature’ to elucidate how ‘every human experience is capable of being transfigured, lived on a different, a transhuman plane’ (MEMDM 35; MESP 171). The Collège’s analysis of the sacred sociological use of such themes and symbols reveals a critical model of affective release that can be seen to draw on the ancient philosophical act of ekstasis. The Collège’s specific focus on being outside the self in ecstasy utilises Freud’s tension and release model in individual psychology as a basis from which to decode the workings of social release and subsequent ontological metamorphosis offered by ‘the sacred as infraction’. It is the meeting of discursive and emoƟonal knowledge which is at play here, for as Caillois stated: ‘The affirmations of . . . ecstasy . . . become, . . . during periods of crisis, a means of exalting communion. The latter makes for a feeling

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of rejuvenation, a restoration of society. Consequently, society is in fact restored and rejuvenated, because in these matters, sentiment precedes and engenders facts’ (RCMS 131). Coherent uses of sacred myths, symbols and rituals engaging with ecstasy release tensions built up by social regulation, and together they express a potential tempo for social processes. It is in such interactions that the social balance is maintained and revealed. As Richardson describes, Bataille’s heterology does not aim to create permanent chaos but to highlight that infraction is necessary in the reformulation and continuation of society.5 It is at core, a tempo characterised by infractions and the symbols representing them, and a contemporary lack of such rituals was seen as detrimental to the necessary ebb and flow of tension and release in the socius. In this way Breton’s focus on the individual and its repressed liberation is thereby theoretically extended into the socius. * Comparativist studies of international surrealism that attend to its uniquely differing national contexts can serve to reveal interrelated extensions of official surrealism. Here one form of non-official surrealism has been applied to prose works to offer additional, divergent or new textual readings. To do this the proposed category of divin fou – rather than amour fou, oneirism, clinical madness or the sacred (as discussed by Rabinovitch) – is presented to delineate one possible strand of alternative surrealist practices. The notion of divin fou diverts attention from the official surrealist concern with the individual unconscious toward the external unknown of the sacred-social. The ekstasis of divin fou serves at once to convey the concept of ecstasy, discussed by Parisian dissident surrealist factions, its etymology noted by Durkheim and the divine madness detailed in Plato’s Phaedrus. The Collège’s theory of social release, gained through the affects of sacred ecstasy, is visible in the coherent use of myths and symbols in alternative, international surrealist works, as novelistic ekstasis. Rural or suburban zones are privileged in each novel, and formal surrealism’s favoured milieu of the city is instead imbued with deathly, rejective or suicidal overtones. Each novel figures nature as an ekstaƟc communication with the sacred ganz andere, thereby undermining the ‘progressive’ neocolonial, regulatory or communist values of the city respectively, through the telluric symphony, Nahual or in pagan unspoken laws in ways similar to Bataille’s description of ecstasy in nature. Such ekstaƟc interactions with nature as the living sacred, alongside those with history, the shaman/priestess, prophecy and love, symbolised by Dionysus, the Muses, Apollo and Aphrodite respectively, alter the protagonists’ ontology and position in the community. The Socratic description, in the Phaedrus, of divine madness as a ‘gift’ of ‘fortune’ and ‘divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour’ that enables ‘anguish’ and ‘joy’ to turn to ‘bliss’ has been aligned here with the Collège’s identification of cycles of sacred ‘regulation’ and ‘infraction’, following the Durkheimian school, and Bataille’s references to anguish leading to ecstasy (Ph 245c, 251d, 256a, 265a). In addition this consideration has

208 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

been extended using the psychological theory of affects (sensations/emotions connected to ideas) to elaborate and align the Collège’s discussion of the shift from the left to right sacred with the terms abject and adject. In each novel this movement can be seen, as the protagonists’ socially given position of abjection (No-Man’s ‘barbaric’ identity, Marian’s senescence and ‘Naum’s’ mental distress) transforms into a touchstone of adjecƟon through ekstasis. For each protagonist the immanent gift of nous (intuitive reason) offers an understanding of the other and of history which alters the self. Importantly this is a balanced not idealised nous: Carpentier’s anti-‘Everyman’ finds poetry as a result of ritual music but at the expense and anguish of seeing the anti-poetic nature of humanity; Marian’s liberation, gained through experiences of the imago mundi and anthropocosmic homologies, also reveals the history of the repression of nature worship, the elderly and women; and for ‘Naum’ love comes with the understanding of its personal and political deformations and anguish. Derepression is at play in all surrealism but the ekstaƟc going beyond-the-self through communication with nature, poetry, prophecy or love, presents a qualitative difference in meaning to its expression in ‘human illness’ and the mythic symbol employed by formal surrealism (Ph 265a). The sacred cycle of purification rituals, anguish and infraction symbolising death in ecstasy leading to new knowledge and the metamorphosis of social being are described by the Collège, as Bataille notes, ‘[r]itually lived myth reveals nothing less than true being’ (GB‘SAi’ 232). By examining the vicissitudes and dynamics of this cycle Clifford suggests that the Collège focused ‘on the regenerative processes of disorder and the necessary irruptions of the sacred in everyday life’.6 This is seen again in Caillois’s idea that ‘[t]he excesses of collective ecstasy . . . arise as a sudden explosion after long and strict repression . . . This characteristic must be cathartic’ (RCMS 100–01). In light of this reading, one may claim also that if Bataille’s theory of heterology serves to describe how society creates its margins, the concept of ecstasy outlined by Bataille and the Collège proposes a theory of how this margin may be socially reclaimed: a reclaiming implicit in the formal surrealist validation of non-ordinary states of consciousness and repressed subjectivities. In practice, as Huggan indicated, it can provide an effective strategy for renewal: ‘the embrace of marginality . . . is self-empowering, not just because it takes its strength from opposition, but because it conceptualises the transformation of the subject’s relationship to the wider world.’7 Numerous critics have deemed that both official and dissident surrealism fail to achieve their revolutionary aims, some of whom, like Kirsten Strom, allow the exception of its ‘moment in the sun in the uprisings of May 1968’.8 However, it is in its various applications of the strategy of reclaiming that surrealism finds its fulfilment. It has been suggested here that the alternative tributary of surrealist practice can be made visible when images of release and transformation in international surrealist prose are read through the divin fou of dissident surrealist ecstasy, its root ekstasis and divine madness. The authors considered here were subjected to fascist, regulatory or authoritarian control and as such were shaped by social forces unlike those of the Western European male social experience. Therefore they serve to illustrate a strain of surrealist expression appearing in a number

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of geopolitical sites, which imbues the surrealist cry of ‘poetry, liberty, and love’ with new cadences. In these novels, in ways similar to Eliade’s description of the psychoanalytic use of sacred symbols, these three exemplary international surrealist writers express coherent rituals, mythic symbols of passage and ontological mutation in moments of divin fou which serve to shape powerful countercultural critiques. Like a social application of Lacan’s mirror stage, the social self is clarified as sacred ekstaƟc infractions irrupt into the mirror of the ‘sacred as regulation’ (or profane reality) thereby changing the affective values attached to identity and reality. Carpentier, Carrington and Naum subvert the rationalised norms of colonial definitions of ‘civilisation’, definitions of ‘acceptability’ by authority and Soviet-style communist definitions of ‘care’, respectively. Through their engagement with novelistic ekstasis, each writer details the reclaiming of expelled elements from the margins of society and, in so doing, alter the affective coding of social identities. * International surrealist prose fiction offers a new way to interpret both the dissident surrealism of the Collège and official surrealism, to see their points of contact and differences. Carpentier, Carrington and Naum have provided illustrative examples of how the conventional dating and definition of surrealism may be widened, and the ways in which official surrealist ideas may be rechannelled through attention to sacred-social affects of ekstasis. The alternative surrealist novel reflects many formal surrealist features: its rejection of utilitarianism, authority and rationalism and its projective attitude that looks to the past for examples of nous in order to reshape the future. The surrealist novel is not restrained by genre or chronotope and draws on many narrative styles, including that of Breton’s recommendation for (fictionalised) autobiography. Utilising the surrealist proclivity for generic borrowings, and inflected by local traditions already adept at fusing narrative styles, each novel reuses and reshapes official surrealist ideas. Each narrative is in some sense rooted in fictionalised autobiography. Carpentier’s political activity resulted in his house arrest in Cuba and escape to Paris. After his return to Hispanic America and the Caribbean, during a time of a growing desire for political change in the region, he wrote The Lost Steps. This political involvement is present in the novel, as his adept surrealist application of kairological generic collage and his use of the medieval morality play demonstrates opposition to surrealist and Western European images of, and impositions upon, the postcolonial subject. He presents a poetic ekstasis that is integral to fé, therein exposing the deeply flawed utilitarian, mechanistic, regulatory suppression of living ritual. Carrington fled her restrictive upbringing and parentally sanctioned incarceration in a mental hospital to settle in Mexico. This fight against authority becomes, in The Hearing Trumpet, a comic reworking of official surrealist uses of myth, quest, collage, the gothic, chthonic Goddess or muse, to reveal the living deity. Here the liberty afforded by ekstasis appears in comic, ecological and feminist terms to critique modern regulatory authorities.

210 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

Naum, immured in communist Romania, published in Zenobia an exceptional expression of aesthetic freedom, thereby expressing his resistant spirit. He evokes surrealist oneirism and amour fou to draw an unfaltering sacred image of the Romanian surrealist concept of objective love, predicated on its genus in medieval romance and scholastic realism, through which Naum exposes the communist imprisoning nationalist ‘love’ to speak of Romania’s despair. This ekstasis, gained through love, serves to expose political repressions forwarded in the name of social progress. In their respective geosocial contexts the surrealist framing of such rejections and revalidation of the margins in the novels exemplify a particular brand of ‘transitional modernism’: indicating how international surrealists have specifically contributed to Hispanic American, British and South-Eastern European areas of literary study. In each novel one can find real moral, political or ideological restrictions arising from the authors’ own experiences of social repression. Each instance imbues international surrealist literature with a social resonance different to the Parisian surrealist context and even to that of France in World War II. In these novels the presence of nonnaturalism is infused by autobiography, just as the marvellous divin fou is informed by wider social realities. These alternative surrealist practices exchange the cognitive supreme point for an affective contact point to explore social relations. As such, the novels express, as Bell states, that ‘[a]rt can be a means of ideological obfuscation or a means of understanding a communal purpose’ and their ‘own narrative suggests we may recover a deeper mythopoeic root beneath the artistic tradition’.9 The alternative, occluded surrealist representations of release, brought about by divine madness, reveal not only this mythopoeic root but, in a sense, continue the intent of such traditions, which Eliade details: [R]esearches have brought out the role of creative individuals in the elaboration and transmission of myths. In all probability this role was even greater in the past, when what is today called ‘poetic creativity’ was bound up with and dependent upon an ecstatic experience . . . It is the specialists in ecstasy, the familiars of fantastic universes, who nourish, increase, and elaborate the traditional mythological motifs. (MEMR 146)

In each novel the writers adapt official surrealism through their attention to the sacred and moments of ekstasis, and thereby give voice to a projective (inter)national social imaginary. * The moment of infraction theorised by dissident surrealists as ecstasy or represented by alternative surrealists through ekstasis can be ontologically profound, as seen in the reformulation of the surrealist watchwords of poetry, liberty and love as symbolic routes to the primary sacred. Although it may appear on the surface to offer little development to the social ego, the release of affective distress or tension through the symbolic analogy of the sacred

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occasions a communication that moves the participants from abjection to adjecƟon and exorcises basanos from the group, as suggested by the theories of the Collège. Indeed Eliade notes, ‘we may say that symbolism is an indication of man’s need to extend the hierophanization of the World ad inĮnitum’ (MEPS 448). Ancient and indigenous knowledge communicated in myth and symbol is aware of the ability of sacred rituals to affectively alter social attitude and ontology. The Collège identifies this social fact and the novelists here example this, just as psychologists detail that the reactivation of mythic symbols in the imagination alters affects and impacts on ego-development. These alternative surrealist expressions, once recognised, expose not only surrealism’s extended role in transitional modernism but also its interaction with the concerns of literatures outside Western European surrealism. Complementary to the Collège’s theory of ecstasy, the proposition of a surrealist category of novelistic ekstasis as divin fou looks at an alternative surrealist practice that liberates social tensions through sacred symbolic analogies, thereby adapting the official surrealist ‘grid’ through which liberation is gained by the projection of the internal unconscious onto the world. In the alternative surrealist prose fictions considered, the cycle of tension and release reinforces a critique of rationalist categories of causality, memory and logic through nous. The release provided by the sacred symbol, like the release offered by ritual or official surrealist philosophy, may incur criticism for offering only a temporary change. Such objections fail to value that the tempo of social life is the very thing that is a permanent indicator of social behaviour, change and development – a factor that indigenous societies, ancient Greek philosophy, Durkheimian sociology, Worringer’s theories on the shift between literary naturalism and nonnaturalism and the theories of the Collège each recognise as vital to our cognitive and affective understanding of the self and the socius. The ad inĮnitum oscillation of infraction and regulation, symbolic death and ecstatic renewal, tension and release, reveal that myth and ritual have a very real position in defining and reshaping social identity and instigating social change. Surrealism, as an artistic movement, engages with mythic and ritual symbols (nonnaturalism) as a way of altering attitudes and thereby identity. In addition the Collège theories indicate why a rising interest in the sacred, nonnaturalism and positional thinking – respectively detailed by Fenn, Worringer and Jameson – occurs in such times of social disequilibrium. With the intention of illuminating the sacred affective dynamic at the centre of social repression, the Collège uses the Freudian theory of psychic defence and mastery, tension and liberating release, to contribute to our understanding of artistic and sacred reactions to social instability and stress. Each surrealist novel here demonstrates that each fleeting moment of ekstasis serves to analogically critique social realities. The image of the sacred is not simply an abstraction in these novels; rather it is accessed through a particular type of interaction with the material world, demonstrating, as Bataille states, that ‘[t]he sacred is precisely the opposite of transcendence, that the sacred is, in a very precise way, immanence’.10 This is the alternative surrealist image of sacred reality: a state of consciousness alive to the intuitive, emotional knowledge experienced in ecstasy, the anguish through which it is gained and

212 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

the dual affects arising in reaction to the sacred which augurs its hierophany. A divine madness which is not fully apprehended by discursive knowledge or reason, in which ‘they are beside themselves, and their experience is beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing’ (Ph 250a–b). Official or formal Parisian surrealism understandably dominated the field of surrealist study, and became the measure by which other countries surrealist manifestations are discussed. Now that the Western Eurocentric leanings of Bretonian surrealism are coming under critique the opportunity presents itself to validate the insights of its dissident and international periphery. Recent specialist and regional studies in surrealist theory and literature offer new ways of interpreting this material. The exploration into dissident practices of surrealism outlined in this book aims to connect to and highlight the polyphonic concerns of contemporary literary study. Here one methodology is proposed using the concept of sacred sociology, which indicates the potential relevance of surrealist contributions to modern discourses of postcolonial, gendered, and anti-communist literature. This wider understanding of the surrealist periphery in Paris and international surrealism does not negate the Bretonian core of surrealism; rather it expands our understanding of the ideas it raised and the responses it generated. It is through such comparativist approaches to international surrealism that the field can be fully charted. If the ‘individual’ can be said to frame the official surrealist quest for a creative altered state of consciousness then in the case of the Collège a sacredsocial dimension to this surrealist quest was configured. The Collège and Bataille extend surrealist ideas through the critical severity applied to sacred-social ecstasy, it is therefore possible to view their work as in battle with surrealism. However, their work also exhibits a dynamic concrescence with surrealism, for intuitive knowledge, the unknown, the incommunicable, or nous, directs both methods, as Bataille states: ‘Nothing is more essentially fleeting than the sacred or the poetic, both of which contain, at one and the same time, plenitude and the ungraspable brevity of the instant’ (GBAM 151–52). The exploration into dissident practices of surrealism discussed here aims to highlight the polyphonic concerns of contemporary literary study. The apotheosis of these theories appears in international surrealist prose from regions, groups and countries requiring social liberation and renewal, which reconfigure official surrealism’s search for the symbolic stone of the philosopher into the alternative surrealist quest for the wings of the philosopher.

Notes 1

Gk Ⱥɸʘʌɹʘ, to behold.

2

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965 [1958]), p. 4.

3

Ambrosino et al., ‘Foundation of a College of Sociology’, in College, ed. Hollier, p. 5.

4

GBAM 64, quoted in Richardson, Bataille, p. 126.

TčĊĔėĊĒ, TčĊĔėĎĊ, TčĊŜėĊŜ 213

5

Richardson, Bataille, p. 102.

6

Clifford, ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’, 559–60, my emphasis.

7

Huggan, ExoƟc, pp. 20–21.

8

Kirsten Strom, Making History: Surrealism and the InvenƟon of PoliƟcal Culture (Lanham, NY and Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), p. 127. Richman makes this observation in reference to the Collège in Sacred RevoluƟons, pp. 194–211.

9

Bell, Literature, p. 194.

10

Georges Bataille, ‘Evil in Platonism and Sadism’, trans. El Albert, in Must We Burn Sade?, ed. Deepak Narang Sawhney (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 246. Bataille’s use of the term ‘immanence’ here is not to be understood in the sense Breton uses it, for example in Surrealism and PainƟng (1928).

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IēĉĎĈĆęĎěĊ PĚćđĎĈĆęĎĔē HĎĘęĔėĞ

THE LOST STEPS Carpentier wrote Los pasos perdidos while living in Caracas, Venezuela, following his travels into the interior. It was originally published in Mexico, by Edición y Distribución Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, in 1953. Exercising a wide appeal, the novel has been translated into twenty languages and published in nearly as many Spanish editions. A French translation of the novel by René L.F. Durand was published in Paris by Gallimard in 1955, under the title Le Partage des eaux, which was reprinted in 1976 and 2006. Le Partage des eaux received the ‘Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger’ in 1956. The English translation by Harriet de Onís, titled The Lost Steps, was published in London by Gollancz and in New York by Knopf in 1956. Further editions of Onís’s translation were issued as follows: Britain by Penguin Books, 1968; New York by Noonday Press, 1989; London by Minerva, 1991; Minneapolis, by the University of Minnesota Press, 2001. The Italian translation, I passi perduƟ, by Maria Vasta Dazzi, published in Milan by Longanesi in 1977, was followed in 1995 by Angelo Morino’s translation published in Palermo by Sellerio. A recent translation of the text into Romanian by Dan Munteanu Cólan was published by Curtea Veche Publishing in Bucharest in 2008, under the title PaƔii pierduԕi.

THE HEARING TRUMPET Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet either during the 1950s or 1960s in English while living in Mexico. The novel was translated into French by Henri Parisot and first published in Paris by Flammarion in 1974, under the title Le Cornet acousƟque. The novel went on to gain a following in France, and was subsequently published in New York by St Martin’s Press in 1976 and in Britain by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1977. In 1991 The Hearing Trumpet was republished in Britain by Virago and in 2005 by Penguin. Further US editions were published in San Francisco by City Lights Books in 1985 and in Boston by Exact Change in 1996. A Catalan translation by Roser Berdagué was published in Barcelona by Edicions de l’Eixample in 1991, with the title La Trompeta acúsƟca. A Polish translation by

216 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

Maryna Ochab emerged in 1998 under the title TrČbka do sųuchania, published in Warsaw by Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

ZENOBIA Naum began writing Zenobia in Romania in 1979 and it was published in Bucharest in 1985 during a time of communist censorship, being reissued in Bucharest in 1991 and 2003 by Humanitas. As a successful translator and author of children’s stories Naum brought many skills to the writing of this text. The novel appeared in a number of translations, including the German translation by Georg Aescht published in Salzburg by Wieser Verlag in 1990, and a Greek translation by Victor Ivanovich, titled Zhnobia, published in Athens by Editura forma in 1992. During this period Naum was in correspondence with Franklin and Penelope Rosemont of the Chicago Surrealist Group, and in 1995 the US Northwestern University Press published an English translation by Sasha Vlad and James Brook. Also in 1995, a French translation by Luba Jurgenson and Sébastien Reichmann was published in Paris by Maren Sell/Calmann-Lévy.

BĎćđĎĔČėĆĕčĞ

PRIMARY TEXTS Carpentier, Alejo, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet De Onís (London: Penguin, 1968 [Sp. edn, 1953, En. edn, 1956]). ———, The War of Time, trans. Frances Partridge (London: Gollancz, 1970 [Sp. edn, 1958]). ———, ‘On the Marvelous Real in America’ [Sp. 1967 revised prologue], in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 75–88. Carrington, Leonora, The House of Fear: Notes From Down Below, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Marina Warner (London: Virago Press, 1989). ———, The Seventh Horse and Other Tales, trans. Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan, intro. Marina Warner (London: Virago Press, 1989). ———, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Penguin, 2005 [Fr. edn, 1974, En. edn, 1976]). Naum, Gellu, Zenobia, trans. James Brook and Sasha Vlad (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995 [Ro. edn, 1985]).

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Abélard, Pierre 160, 175 abject 13–15n69–70, 24, 82, 109n57, 126, 137, 208, 211, 143, 189 and adject 15n69, 52, 109n57, 120, 124, 127, 137, 141, 178, 190, 195 as ontological development 23, 208, 211 absurd, Bataillean 195 Romanian 157–8, 161n38, 163 surrealist (official) 133 affect 16, 86, 128–9, 133, 136, 143, 144–6, 198, 165n6, 208 Balkans 156 Bataille and Collège (social deregulation, expenditure) 15–18, 21, 26–7, 54, 67n29, 78, 86, 92, 110, 126, 205, 206 community 53, 67, 73, 88, 89, 91, 137–8, 164, 207 contact points 205, 210 expulsion (other, social) 211 ontological break 24, 66, 116, 123, 134, 209 stories 69 see also abject and adject alchemy see gnosis altered states of consciousness 6, 15, 18, 20, 25, 127, 212 surrealism (alternative) 18, 20, 30, 49, 61, 77, 89, 116, 127, 143, 212 surrealism (official) 5, 8, 9, 18, 77, 116, 139, 189, 205 (see also divin fou; ecstasy) amour fou see love; madness anguish (basanos) xv Bataille 21, 26, 64, 195, 207–8 Collège 86, 164 Socrates 26, 64, 188, 207 surrealism (alternative) 27n120, 208, 210–11 see also ecstasy

anthropology 5, 46, 105, 107 see also ethnographic Arreola, Juan José 33, 107 attitude shifting, surrealism (Bretonian/ official) 5, 16–18, 23–4, 51, 71 surrealism (dissident/alternative) 78, 125, 135, 180, 198 and the sacred 50, 52, 211 via heterology 139 automatism 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 30, 74, 104 criticism 44 sacred 179 surautomatism 161–2 avant-garde viii, 3n4, 5, 6, 26, 46, 118 apocalypse and creation 139, 163, 173, 186 British 118n10 European 6, 11 Hispanic American 44n2, 50, 92 Mexico 106–7 limitations 45, 159, 163 and postmodernism 11, 171n1 ‘primitive’ 79 Romanian 157–9, 162–4, 171n1, 175 see also chaos; myth ba da 161, 163, 183, 197 Balkanism (Southeastern Europe) 29, 155–9, 171, 190, 210 Bataille, Georges i, vii, 4 absence (self-loss) 20–1, 26, 54, 81, 116, 180, 205 anguish then ecstasy 26, 64, 195, 207, 208 Cadavre, Un (1930) 10, 47, 50 capitalism 61 chaos 122, 207 community 85, 179 CriƟque 11

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Dionysian ecstasy 87 criticism of 78–9, 86, 92 Documents 10, 13, 47, 48n29, 49 fiction 125, 162 heterology 14–15, 17n85, 82, 117, 129, 156, 207, 208 impossible and extreme limit (of the ‘possible’) 21, 52, 69, 77, 87–8, 110, 115, 125, 206 knowledge and non-knowledge 20–1, 77, 78, 179, 205–6 contact point 205, 210 new 26, 64, 73, 78, 208 point of balance 14, 206 laughter 20–1, 115, 124 Mauss 12 Medievalism 188 project and intimacy 67n29, 76, 85, 115, 123, 126, 181, 194 sacred 11–13, 17, 24, 84, 110, 122, 188, 211, 212 silence 74, 181 witch 124 see also reason; unknown Benjamin, Walter 11, 19n98, 27, 73, 145, 160, 175 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 18, 53n64, 77, 110, 194 Brauner, Victor 158, 159, 164, 164n64, 197 Breton, André 5–10, 11, 18, 81n76, 103, 125, 207 Caillois, Roger viii, 4–5, 10, 13, 19n96, 26, 84, 87, 128, 172, 181n35, 183, 186 effort 66 see also ritual Carpentier, Alejo (General) viii, 4, 24, 29, 47–50 El Nacional, Venezuela 48, 49n35, 50n38, 80n70 Grupo Minorista 47, 62 Kingdom of this World 50n36 Machado regime 45, 47 mundonovismo 53, 79 nativismo (primitivism) 44, 47, 48, 53, 65n15, 80, 92 surrealism 29, 48–50, 52, 80, 87, 93 Carpentier, Alejo, (Lost Steps, The [Pas perdue, Los]) xiii, 4, 28, 29, 47, 48, 50, 52n53, 54, 110, 116, 129, 209, 215 allegory 64–7, 70, 75–6, 91 allegorical plays (morality) 67–9, 71, 76, 82–3, 89–91, 93, 209

baroque, neo-baroque 52, 65–6, 65n21, 106 estado límite [extreme state] and fé [faith] 52, 53, 61, 66, 68, 77, 80, 84, 90, 92, 93 history 25, 65, 67, 70, 72–5, 78, 82, 89, 92–3, 129 indigenous (Amerindian) 62–75, 65n15, 80, 82–6, 90–3 initiation 88 M-O 80 music 62, 64, 65, 69, 79, 82–5, 87–9, 208 myth 65, 67, 71, 73, 76, 82, 89, 92 nature 62–4, 69, 73–6, 78, 80, 82, 86–90, 92 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) 88–9 real maravilloso [marvellous real] 29n127, 50, 52–4, 65, 69, 70, 73, 78, 80, 86–90 release 62, 72, 74, 84, 88 travel journal 65–7, 86 trial 64, 66, 88, 92 vacation as festival 62 war/violence 62–3, 67, 71–6, 82–4, 90–1 see also death Carrington, Leonora (General) viii, 4, 28, 29, 105–6, 209–10 female 64, 67, 108–10, 141, 142 fiction 27n122, 104, 106–9, 118 humour 109, 123 hybrid 107, 109 Mexico 106–7 Carrington, Leonora, (Hearing Trumpet, The) xiii, 4, 28, 29, 54, 104, 109–11n58, 209, 215 altered state of consciousness 116, 129, 139–42, 143, 145, 208 Celtic 110, 119n16, 121–5, 135–6n77, 143 criticism 54, 122, 143 ecocriticism 109, 121–2, 130, 142–3, 209 feminism 122–3, 136, 143, 145, 178 flight 134–5 God 119–22, 121n22, 126, 132, 136, 142, 144 Goddess 116, 119–21n22, 125n43/44–7, 130–1, 136, 139–43 Queen Bee, hierophany of 127–8, 132, 135 homology, anthropo-cosmic 132–6 indigenous 107, 116, 121, 122, 129, 135, 146 initiation 130, 133–8 Institution 116, 119, 123, 131–3, 138, 140 logical inversions 123, 138–9, 144–5, 209

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myth 110, 116, 118, 122, 128, 130–42, 145, 173 as Sephirá 120, 122, 132 as Nahualism 107, 121, 136n77, 207 pneuma 116, 119–21, 128, 134, 142, 144 Priestess and sorcerer’s apprentice 125–6, 130, 145–6 release 127, 131–6 ritual, irruption and dance 64, 121, 123, 130, 126–31, 143 see also grail quest; hybrid; liberty chance (objective) Dada 157, 177 errance 7, 62n6, 173, 174, 179, 180, 181–2 receptive (Naum) 62, 172, 174–7, 179, 180–1, 193, 196 Romanian 161–2, 183 surrealist (official) 7, 12, 27, 72, 74, 176, 181, 183 chaos, archaic and traditional 22, 142, 163–4 avant-garde 22, 139, 164, 186 Bataille 122, 207 Caillois 19 Carpentier 79 Carrington 131–2, 135, 139, 143 Collège 15, 21, 81, 130, 142, 163 Naum 185 see also Eliade; myth; symbols city and countryside 207 Carpentier 62–76, 81–3, 90, 91, 92 Naum 172–3, 195 see also nature collage Carpentier 48, 63, 65–9, 72–6, 90, 91, 209 Carrington 115, 119, 136, 138, 142, 144, 209 surrealist (official) 6, 9, 27, 65, 138 Collège de Sociologie [College of Sociology] viii, 4, 10, 17, 20–1, 49, 77, 117, 177, 212 attendees 10n46, 11 being 16, 18, 21, 51, 77, 85, 89–90, 118, 145, 208 binding 17, 18, 26, 28, 78, 126, 128, 211 chaos 15, 21, 81, 130, 163 coincidence, points of 15, 51, 206 community 12n60, 13, 53, 121n25, 128 critical severity 13–14, 105, 162, 163, 205–6, 212 dialecƟcal monism 23–4, 81, 123, 143 attraction and repulsion 13, 14–16, 110, 117, 181 distress into strength series 14, 26, 64 irruptions/infraction 14, 16–19, 21, 27, 84, 123, 125–6, 206

Durkheimian school 12, 14, 15, 18, 85, 117, 137, 207, 211 myth, living 23, 85, 116–17, 128, 135, 184n46, 208 sacred 5, 11, 13–17, 80, 86, 104n9, 183–4 active function 14, 15, 18, 19, 52, 85, 120, 127, 198, 211 see also death; rejuvenation Dada, Zurich 5, 7, 11, 50, 103, 157–8, 159, 161 Hasidic mystical tradition 157, 179 other Dada sites 177 Unknown 157, 177, 179, 180, 197 see also under unknown dance see Carrington; ritual death 15, 16, 21–2, 65, 68, 81–93, 128, 130, 163, 186, 209, 211 Desnos, Robert 7, 8n35, 29, 47, 73n53 divin fou (narrative ekstasis) ix, xv, 28, 30, 49, 61, 64, 77, 84, 93, 183, 184, 207–11 Carpentier 47, 61, 66–7, 76, 91–2 Apollo 84–9, 92 Dionysus 86–9, 92 ecstasy 54, 73, 74, 78, 85 Muses 72, 88–9, 92 Carrington 118, 125, 126, 131, 137, 141–3, 145 Apollo 140–2 Dionysus 121, 127–36, 142, 144, 146 ecstasy 110, 125–6, 131, 136, 142 materiality 198 Naum 29, 180, 189, 195–8 Aphrodite 188–93, 196–7 Apollo 194 Dionysus 186–8 ecstasy 162, 183–4, 188–9, 197 Muses 195, 196 dream/waking-sleep state see oneiric Durkheim, Emile 10, 12–13, 24, 26, 71, 126n49, 127, 137, 181n40 ecstasy i, 16, 137 Bataille 19–20, 52, 64, 78, 115, 144n102, 207, 208 experience 20–22n104, 24–7, 181n40 impossible, the 110 materiality 24, 84–5, 137 nature 87–8, 186, 207 self-loss 81n76, 186 unknown 54, 77, 135, 191, 194, 197 Callois 49, 206–7, 208 Collège i, 15–28, 30, 86, 117–18, 135, 136, 177, 198, 206–8

246 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

Eliade 21, 79, 134, 206, 210 Freud 51, 84, 206 ekstasis (ancient, divine madness) 24–5, 27, 54, 126, 207 Socrates 24–5, 24n113, 28, 30, 52, 78, 189, 207 Aphrodite (love) 25, 128 Apollo (shaman, prophecy) 25, 140–1 Dionysus (nature, mystic rites) 25, 86–7, 126–7 fortune 26, 54 Muses (creative inspiration) 25, 15, 138 Sophocles 127 Eliade, Mircea 1, 5 artistic universes 1, 22, 25, 210 dialectic 87 Desoille, Robert (see symbol) ganz andere 13, 77, 178–9 hierophany 18, 87, 160, 185, 186–7, 211 homology 22, 133–4, 164 temporality 19–20, 76, 79, 142 see also symbol errance see chance estado límite see Carpentier ethnographic Marxism 49, 54, 76, 79, 80, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93 ethnographic surrealism 48–9, 50, 52–4, 65, 80, 84, 89, 92, 104 everyday, the 6 Bataille 77, 137 British 105 Collège 18, 208 surrealist 6, 12, 18, 157, 205 female 8, 16, 49, 108n44–50 femme-enfant 108, 116, 139, 178n28, 189 femme-sauvage 108 femme-sorcière 124–6, 145 hysteric 27n122, 108, 174 Fenn, Richard 22, 27, 211 festival see ritual Freud, Sigmund 5, 7, 15, 16n79, 17, 22, 46, 53, 211 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 15, 51, 53, 82n80, 125n47, 128 coincidences 104 dreams/myths 51, 145 expulsion 16 humour 51, 84n86, 124 madness 51 tension-release, ecstasy 84, 125, 206, 211 unconscious 27 Frye, Northrop 27n120, 64n8, 173n6, 174–5, 182n42

Gascoyne, David 103, 104 genre 22, 53, 91, 155, 198, 209 autobiography (confession) 9, 64, 116, 173–5, 179, 209–10 epic 1, 25, 65, 71 (see also muse, Naum) gothic 9n38, 16, 104, 109, 118n53, 119n15, 120, 122, 125, 144, 162n53, 210 romance 22, 27, 53, 65n20, 174–5, 179, 182, 188, 192, 210 trial, features of 1, 22, 27, 64, 66, 88, 92, 142, 175 see also Carpentier, morality; play; collage; humour ghosts (spirits) 182 Bataille 182 Carpenter 63, 70, 71, 76, 83, 89 Collège 182 Naum 172, 180, 182, 185, 187, 193, 192 surrealist (official) 179, 182 Gift, Bataille 12n56, 78, 207 Collège 207 Mauss 12 novels 67, 115, 144, 181, 208 Socratic 25, 26, 54, 78, 195, 207 surrealist (official) found object 12 gnosis 4n10, 160, 107, 127, 129, 134, 136, 141, 164n64, 181n38 Carrington 107–10, 116, 118, 120, 124n39, 125, 130, 132, 135, 141, 145n104 Lepetit 79n64, 177 Naum 178, 179, 181, 186 surrealist (official) 23, 30, 117–18, 120, 124–5, 132, 138–9, 144, 145 gothic see genre grail quest 1 Carpentier 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 91 Carrington, Goddess cup 116, 118–22, 128–30, 132, 141, 142–4 crucible 135 surrealist (official) ix, 1, 6, 11, 77, 118, 145, 206 surrealist (dissident) 27, 49 Hearing Trumpet, The see Carrington Hertz, Robert 12, 14n67, 15, 84, 110 Hollier, Denis 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 125n47, 138, 139n87 humour Bataille 20, 115 Carrington 109–10, 123–4, 130, 138, 144, 145 Freud 51, 84n86

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knowledge see reason

Freud 124, 211 Naum 164, 192, 195 surrealist, alternative 30, 131, 209, 210–11, 212 dissident 17, 28, 122 Hispanic American and Caribbean 44, 46 official 7, 9, 49, 104, 108, 195, 206, 207 Romanian 161, 162 see also love; poetry; surrealism, poetry-liberty-love liminality (threshold) xvi, 20–2, 139, 164, 180, 182, 184, 192, 196, 205 see also ritual; symbol Lost Steps, The see Carpentier love 7, 28, 30, 87 mad, surrealist (official) [amour fou] xv, 8, 20, 30, 108, 116, 162, 174, 189–91, 196, 205 philosopher’s stone 120 medieval 192 objective (Naum) 29, 164, 188–93, 195–7, 198, 172, 208, 210 communication 179 death of 144, 193, 197 political/paternal 67, 192, 194, 197 tragic 173, 192–5 objective (Romanian group) 161–2, 189 reclaimed 67 Socrates’ Phaedrus and Aphrodite 24–5, 25n116, 162, 189, 196–7, 208 see also muse, Naum Luca, Ghérasim 157, 158, 159, 161n45, 162n51, 163, 183, 189

Lacan, Jacques 50–51n46, 88, 129n61–62, 136, 209 language and restrictions 7, 77, 178, 194, 198 aesopic (see Naum) artistic 22 Blake 139 Balkan 157 forgotten 83 Naum 163n60, 175n18, 175–9, 182 surrealist (official) 7, 160, 176 surrealist (Romanian) 161 see also symbol Lévi-Strauss, Claude 11, 77 liberty/liberation 163 Carpentier 66, 78, 88 Carrington 29, 67, 121, 130, 141, 145–6, 208, 209 cults 18, 93

madness (clinical) 51 Romanian 162, 173–4, 180, 183, 184, 187, 192 political 183n43 Socrates 25, 183, 208 surrealism (official) 5, 6, 8, 16, 25, 30, 49, 183, 189, 207 female 108–9, 141 Nadja 174 see also surrealism (official) madness (divine) see divin fou; ekstasis; ecstasy manifestos, surrealist (official) 5, 7, 8, 11, 47, 106 British 103n4, 105 Carpentier 29n127, 47, 62n4 Mass-Observation 105 Romanian 161n42, 161–2, 183, 189, 192, 198

Naum 172 sacred 123–4, 138 surrealist (official) 7, 109, 143, 144, 205, 206 hybrid Carrington 141 sacred Sephira 120–2, 132, 133, 134–5, 142, 144, 145 therianthrope 107, 109–10, 119, 121, 142, 145 surrealism ix, 109, 110, 121 illogical see real; reason imaginary, national 44n5, 163 novels 53–4, 69, 73, 79, 89, 93, 163–5, 183, 195 social 51, 76, 129, 137, 143, 156, 184n46, 210 imagination 7, 51 creative 25, 72 Lacan 129 surrealist (alternative) 88, 142, 145, 162, 164, 191, 194 surrealist (dissident) 5, 10, 17, 122 surrealist (official) 5, 7, 7n27, 10, 117, 120, 123, 205 criticism of 5, 10, 52 festivals 117, 123 see also symbol, active imagination initiation see ritual Jameson, Fredric 22, 27, 53, 70, 87, 93, 211

248 SĆĈėĊĉ SĚėėĊĆđĎĘĒ, DĎĘĘĎĉĊēĈĊ Ćēĉ IēęĊėēĆęĎĔēĆđ AěĆēę-GĆėĉĊ PėĔĘĊ

Mass-Observation 29, 104–5 Freud 104 surrealist observers 104 margins, reclaiming viii, 89–90, 138–9, 175, 208 novels 4, 43, 44, 67–8, 108, 136, 156, 209–10 marvellous 174–5, 182 Hispanic America 50, 93 medieval 188 surrealism (alternative) 11–12, 90, 184 Carpentier 50–3, 72, 78, 90, 92 Carrington 118, 122, 126, 142 Naum 178–9, 191 surrealist (official) [merveilleux] 7, 27, 30, 52, 116, 144, 205, 210 Mauss, Marcel 12, 19n96, 181n33 Medieval 4, 19n98, 67, 75, 136, 160–2, 174–5, 179–80, 182, 188, 198 see also real miracle 52, 53, 54, 92, 115, 174–5, 178–9, 182, 190 modernism 3, 3n4, 6, 92, 142, 163, 173, 210–11 Balkan 157, 158, 171 British 103–5 Hispanic American/Caribbean 44, 47, 49, 93 (see also ethnographic Marxism) see also avant-garde moment see time muse-lover-goddess 136 feminist revisionism 110–11, 116, 136, 143, 174, 190–1, 196, 209 Naum 64, 174, 184, 189–92, 196 as warrior 189–90, 195 Zenobia 178, 182, 185, 189–93, 196 surrealism (official) 8, 25, 108, 138, 144, 174, 189–91, 198 see also divin fou, Muses; ekstasis mystic 1, 15, 25, 122, 125, 130, 134, 144, 188 critique of 116, 140 Dada 177 surrealism 180 traditions 81, 103, 157, 164, 185–6 myth 1, 6, 23, 26, 82, 184, 186, 210–11 Bataille and Caillois 117, 136 Collège 19, 21, 110, 126, 128, 143, 182, 183–4 Eliade 1, 23, 92, 93, 133–5, 142n97, 163–4, 183 camouflaged 51, 77, 198 chaos and renewal 20, 22, 81, 117, 142, 164, 184, 185, 186

creativity 164, 210 living 19, 92 models 19 Freud 51, 145 literature 22, 27, 51, 64, 72, 92 misuse of 163 sacred, material interaction with 77, 90, 160, 198 surrealism (official) 9, 27, 27n121, 53, 117, 122, 137, 141, 145, 163 themes of ‘quest’ ‘isles of Paradise’ 1, 51, 71, 76, 91–2, 179 ‘primordial waters’ 1, 64, 88, 172, 182, 184–6, 188, 206 see also grail see also Collège; myth, living; novelists nature/animal, relation with human 18, 66, 207 Bataille 121, 131, 137, 180, 182, 186, 188 Carpentier 62–4, 69, 73–6, 78, 80, 82, 86–90, 92 Carrington 104, 107–10, 119, 121–2, 127–8, 130–2, 136n77, 142–4, 209 Dionysus 86–7, 121, 126–7 Socratic 25–6, 86, 127, 131, 134–5, 180, 186, 208 Naum 175, 183–8, 193, 195–8 see also city and countryside; hybrid Naum, Gellu (General) viii, 4, 28–9, 159–64, 159n32 communism 155, 163–5 Naum, Gellu (Zenobia) xiv, 4, 28, 62, 144, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 210, 216 active indifference, law of 179, 190, 192, 196 aesopic xv, 163, 176, 179, 183, 185, 187–8, 190, 192, 194–5, 196 aithein xv, 180, 185, 186n53, 193, 196 ambiguity, zone of 178–9, 182, 187, 192, 196, 198 Dada 177 ‘Films’ 172, 176, 178, 180, 193, 196–8, love 188–93, 195 nature, all-containing 183–7, 188, 195, 196–7 receptiveness 180–3, 187, 193–5, 197 imprisonment 187–8, 192, 194–5, 197, 210 initiation/rebirth 64, 164, 183–5, 186, 188, 196, 198 myth/Mioriԕa 164–5, 175, 183–6, 188 release 183–4, 195

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surrealism (official) 173, 179, 183, 196, features 173, 181, 182, 189–91, 195, 198 thought-language 178, 179, 182 (see also love, objective; muse; real; reason) nonnaturalism 27, 51, 68, 73, 76, 137n82, 143 features 176, 198, 211 see also Worringer object 64 Bataillean 14, 17, 74, 84–5, 88, 144n109, 181, 191, 197 Caillois 181n35 Collègean 85 psychological 16, 70, 129, 156 sacred 13, 14, 25n116, 50, 77, 110, 160, 181 Carpentier 85–6, 87 Carrington 115, 116, 132–4, 138 Naum 180–1, 187, 196 subject 7, 21, 50, 73, 116, 138, 191 surrealist (official) 8–9, 17, 65, 143, 181, 181n34/36, 206 fetish 27n122, 79, 85, 197 found [objet trouvé] 7, 12, 181, 181n33, 194 objective love (absolute) see love occult see gnosis oneiric: surrealism (alternative) 52, 140–3 oneirize life 160, 161, 162, 164, 179–81, 189, 196, 210 surrealism (official) 5–8, 16, 106, 109, 116, 205, 207 ontology 13, 16–20, 23, 143, 189, 198 Bataille 21, 63, 70, 84, 156, 179 Caillois 66 Carpentier 52, 54, 89, 93 Carrington 133–4 Collège 26, 80, 135, 145, 184n46, 189, 196, 206 colonial 73 Eliade 19, 20, 21, 23, 54, 81, 133, 184–5, 198 Lacan 50–1 literature 23, 28, 29, 176, 183, 207 Naum 186, 193, 196, 198 social 52–4, 72, 82, 118, 143 surrealism (official), absence 182 see also Collège, being Otto, Rudolf 13, 128n58, 178 Păun (Paon), Paul 159, 161, 162n51, 163 Péret, Benjamin 8n35, 107, 119 Plato’s Phaedrus see Socrates

play ix, 3n4, 6, 9, 11, 17, 115, 119, 122, 138, 176 pneuma 116, 119–21, 128, 134, 142, 144 poetry Bataille 20–1, 212 Carpentier 29, 49, 87–9, 90, 92–3, 208, 209 Eliade 25, 164, 210 Naum 163n60, 174, 191, 195, 196, 198 Romantic 104 Socrates and Muses 25, 72, 195, 208 surrealism (alternative) 28, 30, 210 surrealism (official) 4, 7, 8, 25, 160, 175 postcolonial i, vii, 3, 4, 28, 43–7, 73, 89, 156 Carpentier 29, 48, 65, 69, 72, 90, 209 ‘primitive’/primitivism 22n106 avant-garde 44, 65, 79 Carpentier 29, 49, 54, 64–5, 69–70, 72, 80, 85–6, 93 dissident 13, 30, 69, 80, 125 Eliade 19, 92 homeopathic 72 Naum 164, 175, 182, 186, 190, 197 surrealism (official) 8, 16, 46, 49, 79–80, 85, 90, 175 prophecy 18, 25, 90, 207, 208 Carpentier 67 Carrington 120–1, 140–2 Naum 140, 164, 182, 192, 193–5, 197, 198 Socrates and Apollo 25, 140–1, 194, 208 surrealism (official) 140, 164, 194 Rabinovitch, Celia 9, 79, 104n9, 181, 189, 207 real maravilloso (marvellous real) see Carpentier Real, philosophical (admissible, the) 7, 22, 51, 52, 125, 145, 178, 182, 211 ancient 24, 89–90, 134 Bataille 117, 188 Collège 30 Dada, Zurich 157, 177 ecstasy 21, 136 Eliade 16, 19, 23, 133, 178 Heraclitus 23 indigenous 83, 86, 107, 186 medieval scholastic 160, 160n37, 174–5, 180, 196, 210 relation to Plato 160 modern 5, 160 narrative 22, 82, 137 novels 47, 53, 80, 91, 110, 126, 140, 187, 198 time 90, 142

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reason and unreason (discursive) 8, 68, 81, 89–90, 205–6, 212 modern 5, 9, 13, 46, 82, 124, 146, 160, 205 reason and unreason (non-discursive) 8, 77, 177 ancient 27, 68, 81, 184, 195, 211–12 avant-garde 171–2 Bataille 14–18, 115, 131, 139, 146 Collège 18, 54, 78, 196, 206, 212 illogic 7, 14, 16, 23, 85, 175, 182, 198 intuitive 89–90, 141, 190, 205 irrational ix, 8, 11, 20, 46, 51, 79, 84n85, 141, 206 nous 89–90, 135n76, 137, 146, 173, 179, 208–9 novels 29–30, 46, 68, 79, 109, 138, 156, 161n38, 176, 179 surrealist (official) vii, ix, 5, 8, 9, 10, 16, 73, 90, 117–18, 160, 175, 205 rejuvenation 8, 18, 23, 50–1, 53, 72, 77, 163, 198 affect 23, 51–2, 127, 164, 185, 208 Bataille 21, 81, 163, 186 catharsis 54, 72, 76, 131, 207, 208 Collège 15–16, 18, 25–6, 89, 117, 206–7 divine inspiration 25–6, 52, 84, 126, 183, 198, 207 materialist criticism, of 26, 143 Eliade 20, 22, 81, 117, 142, 164, 184, 185, 186 ritual 15, 77, 127, 143 repression 7, 17, 18, 76, 108, 126, 128, 142, 144, 183n43 and derepression 28, 205–6, 208, 210, 211 revolution, consciousness 5, 26, 51, 131, 143, 160, 161, 164, 205 criticism 143, 208 effervescence 12, 17 social 12, 26, 48, 63, 72, 106, 130, 192, 198 see also attitude shifting Richter, Hans 157, 177 ritual/rite (coherent) xi Bataille 14, 15, 19, 27n121, 110, 128 Caillois 15–16, 17, 26 Collège 126, 206–7 dance 19, 87–8, 118, 126–30, 129n63, 131 Eliade 1, 19, 117, 137n82, 164, 184, 198 festival rite 17, 62, 117, 122, 123–4, 123n33, 126, 130, 143 Christian 63, 130 Durkheim 12–13, 15 humour 144

initiation 1, 51, 133, 135, 137n82, 145, 182 music (poetic) 85, 88, 128, 208 privations 15, 26, 74, 83, 181, 185 purification 25, 64, 127, 131, 208 traditional 18, 24, 50–2, 110, 211 Socratic 134, 162 see also death; rejuvenation romance see genre sacred 12 active function 14, 15, 18, 19, 23–4, 27–30, 77, 84–6, 90, 92 basic content (see abject) Carpentier 84 Carrington 115, 124, 128 Naum 83, 181, 192, 198 primary 12–17, 18, 20, 23, 26, 123, 125–6, 206, 210 Carpentier 68, 71, 85–6, 92 Carrington 117, 128, 137–9, 141, 143, 145–6 Naum 175, 180 (see also Naum, muse) secondary 12, 15, 21, 68, 69, 71, 86, 91, 125, 128 wholly other [ganz andere] 13, 20, 22, 53, 77, 88–9, 136, 178–80, 207 shaman (magician/priestess/sorcerer) 18, 124–6, 128, 130, 145–6 Socrates, Apollo 25, 84, 140, 164, 207 sociologie sacrée [sacred sociology] see Collège Socrates 5 anguish to bliss 26, 188, 207 gift 25, 26, 54, 78, 195, 207 love (Aphrodite) 24–5, 25n116, 162, 189, 196–7, 208 madness (clinical) 25, 183, 208 poetry (Muses) 25, 72, 195, 208 prophecy (Apollo) 25, 84, 140–1, 164, 194, 207–8 ritual 134, 162 see also ekstasis; nature Spengler, Oswald 81n78, 90, 91 surrealism (alternative) 3, 4, 8, 137, 139, 176, 198, 206, 212 criticism 161 novels 14, 17, 27–9, 69, 93, 109, 125, 138, 160–1, 194, 205, 209, 211 sacred, living 181 see also dissident surrealism surrealism (Bretonian/official) i, xv, 206 Arcane 17, 124, 126, 145 Bureau of Surrealist Research 6, 9, 14, 206 Cadavre, Un (1924) 47, 50

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cognitive/constructivist 16n78, 17, 67n29, 78, 138, 180, 206, 210 criticism 13–14, 20, 73n54, 78, 92, 212 critique 47, 48n29 esoteric 30, 49, 79n64, 107, 124, 125–6, 132, 145, 179 grid/screen 20, 177, 181, 211 Heraclitus 7, 23, 161 hysteric 27n122, 108 language 7, 160, 176 Lost Steps, The (1924) 7, 50 materiality 205 Mexico and FIARI 106 Nadja 137, 173–4, 175, 189n58, 191 novels/novelists 4, 8n35, 9, 9n37, 29–30, 64, 73, 118, 209 poetry-liberty-love 7, 29, 30, 209, 210 Romania 158, 160–2, 181, 184, 189, 198 Romanticism 124 stones 181n36 supreme point 7, 13, 53, 138, 162, 205, 210 symbol 8–9, 30, 79, 120, 160, 176, 208, 211 ‘who am I?’ 206 surrealism (British) viii, 29, 103–5, 118, 119, 143 Birmingham 103 London and London BulleƟn, The 103 Romanticism 104–5, 109, 118, 142 second wave 105 see also Mass-Observation surrealism (Hispanic American/ Caribbean) viii, 9n38, 44–8 baroque/neo-baroque 52, 65–6, 106 Cuba 45, 48, 66 Mexico 66, 106–7 and Modernism (Venezuela), Arturo Uslar Pietri 50n43 surrealism (international novels) vii, 3, 8, 9, 9n38, 11, 15, 30, 198, 205, 210 cohesive thread 45–6, 49 surrealism (Romanian) viii, 103 pre-war 158–9 Romanian surrealist group 159–63, ‘ba da’ 161 critique of surrealism (official) 159, 161, 162, 163 Freud 161 love, objective (absolute) 162 manifestos 161–2, 161n42, 183, 189, 192, 198 oneirize life 160, 162 surautomatism 161

symbol (primary sacred) 9, 18–19, 23, 54, 143, 176, 183, 206, 211 active imagination 137, 144, 208, 211 ascent 126, 173 flight 132, 134–5, 137, 145 inspiration 25, 69, 73n54, 126, 132, 141, 173, 196 mimetic-metamorphosis 17, 79–80, 88, 131 nature 64, 82, 92, 121, 128, 142, 184–8 void (crucible, cave, cauldron) 15, 128, 135–6, 139, 142, 144 analogy 19, 73, 77, 80, 86, 89, 126, 133, 210 efficacy 69, 77 language 53, 93, 128n58 thinking 76–8, 194 Eliade 18, 19–20, 23, 77 Desoille, Robert 23, 50, 128, 198 mundi 126, 133, 135, 146, 173, 208 Greek divinities 25, 78, 86, 92, 127, 140 non-symbolic result 76–8, 80, 86, 89 novel, medium 9, 51, 53, 72, 207 ontological 23, 82, 184, 209 psychoanalytic 23, 82n80, 209 wings 128, 132, 134, 158, 177, 187, 212 temporality (sacred/mythic) xvi Carpentier 53, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 90, 93 Carrington 117, 118, 120, 122, 130–1, 135, 139–40, 142 Collège 15, 19 Eliade 19–20, 54, 76, 79, 117, 142 Naum 184, 185 temporality (unconscious), avant-garde 6 capitalist 27, 76 Freud 27 regulation/deregulation 6, 75, 76 surrealist (official) 7, 12, 27, 28, 48, 52, 73, 74, 90, 176 time, moment (sacred) 13, 27, 52, 54, 210 Bataille 12, 19, 20, 26–7, 81, 84, 117, 207, 212 Collège 13–15, 19, 26, 27, 54, 69, 90, 126, 135, 148, 210 Medieval 19n98 release 19, 76, 207 Trost, Dolfi 159, 161n45, 162n51, 163, 183 Tzara, Tristan 5, 157, 158, 159, 177, 179n29 absurd 157n14 unconscious 6, 51, 90, 69 Dada 157–8 Freud 7, 27 heterology 117

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informé, sacred-social 11, 13, 14, 46, 90, 125, 135, 180, 182–3, 193, 207 M-O 104 political 53 surrealist irruptions 6, 9, 14, 17, 27, 123, 182 Ungar, Stephen 11, 137 unknown vii, 21 Bataillean 20–21, 54, 77, 80, 84, 177, 186, 191, 194, 197 Carpentier 64

Dada, Zurich 157, 177, 179, 180, 197 Naum 164, 177, 179, 181, 186, 196–7 surrealist (official) 21, 181, 184 Varo, Remedios 107, 109, 110, 121n22, 124n39 Worringer, Wilhelm, via Frank 22n106, 27, 53, 76, 93, 142, 211 Zenobia see Naum