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Poetry in the Object World

Johanna Malt

in Obscure Objects of Desire Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

This chapter addresses what happens when language is introduced into the picture-quite literally-in the form of the poème-objet, which combines text with three-dimensional collage. André Breton's own ... More

This chapter addresses what happens when language is introduced into the picture-quite literally-in the form of the poème-objet, which combines text with three-dimensional collage. André Breton's own practice in the domain of object creation diverges from that of Salvador Dalí and others in one crucial respect: the incorporation of language into the surrealist object. The chapter considers how Breton's own involvement with visual forms of surrealist activity is motivated by particular aims, notably that of including language in the category of phenomena to be reappraised and inscribed in a dialectic of subjective and objective forces. For in seeking to prove the materialist credentials on which surrealism's political engagement relied, Breton created a class of poème-objet in which a power struggle takes place between word and image, between concealment and display, between fetishism and sublimation.Less

Subjectivity and Revolutionary Commitment

Johanna Malt

in Obscure Objects of Desire Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

The point of departure in this chapter is the fundamental question of the possibility of a revolutionary art. What can writers and artists contribute to the cause of a Communist proletarian ... More

The point of departure in this chapter is the fundamental question of the possibility of a revolutionary art. What can writers and artists contribute to the cause of a Communist proletarian revolution? Though this may seem a very general, pragmatic, and perhaps ambitious place to start, it serves to establish the parameters of the debate in terms of Marxist cultural theory. The chapter sets out a brief account of André Breton's theory of the surrealist revolution, and sketches its possible positions in relation to the Communist revolution itself. The chapter's intention in doing this is not to rehearse a set of well-established surrealist tenets, and certainly not to retrace the movement's involvement with the Communist Party, but rather to establish the limitations of an approach based on individual or collective political engagement.Less

The Surrealist Object in Theory

Johanna Malt

in Obscure Objects of Desire Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

Surrealist theory and practice in the 1920s and 1930s was caught between two poles. In the early days of the movement, much of its activity centred on the pursuit of automatism in various forms, ... More

Surrealist theory and practice in the 1920s and 1930s was caught between two poles. In the early days of the movement, much of its activity centred on the pursuit of automatism in various forms, including the automatic writing at which Robert Desnos so dangerously excelled, as well as non-verbal forms such as the game of ‘cadavre exquis’ in which each participant added a new body part to a creature without seeing what previous players had drawn. The early issues of La Révolution surrealiste contained many accounts of actual dreams, and the general emphasis was on the completest possible elimination of all traces of rational construction from the resulting products of the creative process. The various writings of André Breton and others on the question of the object have much to reveal about the surrealists' ambivalence towards the principle of revolutionary action.Less

Breton's Surrealism, or How to Sublimate Cinepoetry

Christophe Wall-Romana

in Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

The theoretician and leader of Surrealism, André Breton, was a much deeper cinephile than he has represented. This chapter argues that Breton took over Apollinaire's Surrealism by purging its ... More

The theoretician and leader of Surrealism, André Breton, was a much deeper cinephile than he has represented. This chapter argues that Breton took over Apollinaire's Surrealism by purging its cinepoetic dimension, replacing the cinema by a host of non-technological constructs such as the Unconscious, automatic writing, the marvellous image, etc. Four sub-arguments are presented: 1) Breton's early experiences with cinema were tainted with queer desire which he evacuated from Surrealism in favour of strict heterosexuality; 2) Breton allied himself with the best cinepoets of the time--Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Saint-Pol-Roux—although he elided cinema in their poetics in favour of the marvelous; 3) Breton campaigned against other cinepoets such as Cocteau, Paul Dermée, Ivan Goll; 4) Breton knew Epstein's cinepoetic theories and even recycled some of Epstein's formulations in order to define Surrealism. Altogether, this chapter presents a radical new genealogy of Surrealism as based on the erasure and sublimation of cinepoetry, its practitioners and theoreticians.Less

Does the Acéphale Dream of Headless Sheep?

Jeremy Biles

in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

In light of his polemical relations with André Breton and his critiques of surrealism, Bataille is widely but mistakenly thought to have an aversion to the dream and the unconscious. Revealing ... More

In light of his polemical relations with André Breton and his critiques of surrealism, Bataille is widely but mistakenly thought to have an aversion to the dream and the unconscious. Revealing important connections between psychoanalysis and Bataille, this essay seeks to correct this misreading of Bataille, demonstrating that for Bataille, dream and the powers of the unconscious are in fact intimately related to his conception of the sacred. The essay adumbrates a Bataillean “heterological” approach to the dream and dream interpretation, arguing that for Bataille, the dream is a crucial element of ecstatic “nonknowledge” and “inner experience.”Less

Europe in America: Remapping Broken Cultural Lines:View (1940–7) and VVV (1942–4)

Stamatina Dimakopoulou

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter discusses the histories of the View and VVV. Charles Henri Ford's View appeared alongside the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City, and found its place in the history of ... More

This chapter discusses the histories of the View and VVV. Charles Henri Ford's View appeared alongside the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City, and found its place in the history of the American ‘little magazine’, along with André Breton's VVV, as the main forum for the exiled Surrealists during the dark years of the Second World War. Surrealism in View encouraged an opening out to mainstream and popular cultures that were elided from the early experiments of the Abstract Expressionists. It is in comparison with View's eclectic ‘favouritism’ that the chapter considers VVV's attempt to relate Surrealism to American concerns.Less

“Pris sur le vif”: The Surrealist Poetics of the Document

Alison James

in The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts

This chapter examines the surrealists’ deployment of the verbal or photographic document as a model that is simultaneously poetic and anti-literary. The surrealists eventually depart from their ... More

This chapter examines the surrealists’ deployment of the verbal or photographic document as a model that is simultaneously poetic and anti-literary. The surrealists eventually depart from their initial understanding of automatic writing as a “snapshot” that captures uncensored thought. Instead, their writings of the late 1920s and 1930s increasingly frame a range of poetic and visual documents within a multi-layered ethnographic discourse, whether in prose texts that attend to urban experience (Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, Breton’s Nadja), or, on the margins of the official surrealist group, in the work of Bataille’s Documents magazine. Finally, Michel Leiris’s reflections on ethnographic display simultaneously reveal the importance of contextualizing evidence and highlight the problematic collection practices that transform indigenous artifacts into cultural “documents.”Less

Red Front / Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon

Carrie Noland

in Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime

This chapter analyzes the poetic choices Aimé Césaire made during the interwar period. On the one hand, Césaire felt the need to satisfy poetic demands: he wanted to live up to and advance the ... More

This chapter analyzes the poetic choices Aimé Césaire made during the interwar period. On the one hand, Césaire felt the need to satisfy poetic demands: he wanted to live up to and advance the technical and rhetorical standards of the twentieth-century print lyric. On the other hand, he was committed to political change; his recourse to journalistic discourse suggests that he was responding to an ethical imperative to testify for a shared experience of oppression. Césaire's Cahier weaves together both referential (journalistic) discourses and self-referential (lyric) discourses, attempting to be situated and to transcend situation at the very same time. The tension between political relevance and poetic transcendence was also at the heart of the Affaire Aragon, a debate between Louis Aragon's communism and André Breton's surrealism that leaves its mark on Césaire's approach to writing the Cahier.Less

Disputes over Territory

Vincent Debaene

in Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature

Whereas chapter 10 turned to the beginning of the twentieth century to gauge writers’ and literary scholars’ reactions to the advent of the social sciences, chapter 11 examines the 1930s through the ... More

Whereas chapter 10 turned to the beginning of the twentieth century to gauge writers’ and literary scholars’ reactions to the advent of the social sciences, chapter 11 examines the 1930s through the 1960s in order to take a more contemporary look at how literature writ large responded to the development of the social sciences. This chapter engages with figures such as Ramon Fernandez, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes, highlighting specific moments (such as the reception of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques) where the figure of the artist coexists uneasily with that of the scientist. The chapter explores how literature sought to define itself and its role in relation to new scientific disciplines that redrew old lines of disciplinary demarcation.Less

A Poetics of Co-Naissance: Via André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon

Emmanuel de Saint Aubert

in Merleau-Ponty’s Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise ... More

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise a genuine poetic art. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh (poetic of the body and desire), a poetic of mystery (which is not primarily what is hidden, but what expresses itself inexhaustibly), and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. These three dimensions touch respectively on the overdetermination Merleau-Ponty gives to the questions of desire, expression, and perception—and are deployed in their corresponding horizons, the first more anthropological, the next more epistemological, and the last more ontological. The bold and broad inspiration that Merleau-Ponty finds in André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon is a particularly rich leading thread in the exploration of this poetic, which plunges us into the heart of the unfinished work site of the philosopher’s last manuscripts, some of which are not yet published.Less

A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Nezval, and Camus

Alfred Thomas

in Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

This chapter examines the reinvention of Prague as a modernist metropolis, focusing on the seminal influence of Guillaume Apollinaire's story “Le Passant de Prague” on avant-garde Czech writers of ... More

This chapter examines the reinvention of Prague as a modernist metropolis, focusing on the seminal influence of Guillaume Apollinaire's story “Le Passant de Prague” on avant-garde Czech writers of the interwar period. The story describes how a French visitor to the city encounters the Eternal Jew as he wanders through Prague. Inspiring numerous redactions of his life story and constantly assuming new pseudonyms across time, he personifies the city-book and its history. Vítězslav Nezval's narrative poem “Pražský chodec,” in which Prague is personified as a prostitute with whom the narrator falls in love, was directly inspired by Apollinaire's story. The modernist theme of the city as woman serves as the leitmotif of this and other poems by Nezval. Apollinaire's foundational story also had a profound impact on French cultural and political responses to Prague. The most prominent French visitor to the city between the wars was André Breton, the founder of French surrealism, who, in March 1935, during a lecture to the Czech Surrealist Group, famously described Prague as the “magical capital of Old Europe.” Unlike Apollinaire and Breton, the twenty-two-year-old Camus felt distinctly out of place and ill at ease in the “magical capital of Old Europe,” but Prague also served as a discursive impediment to his progress as a writer. The chapter also explores Camus's repeated attempts to “unwrite” Prague in order to find his own voice as a writer.Less

Surrealism: An Excommunicated Vessel?

in Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal

This chapter discusses the part played by surrealism as a negative exemplum for the early poetics of language writing. It explains the fault in considering surrealism as expressivism and attempts to ... More

This chapter discusses the part played by surrealism as a negative exemplum for the early poetics of language writing. It explains the fault in considering surrealism as expressivism and attempts to align language writing and surrealism based on Peter Nicholls' account of the so-called modernist poetics of negation. It also considers a positive comparison of surrealism and objectivism and provides an interpretation of André Breton and Philippe Soupault's The Magnetic Fields.Less

Directionality and Duration in Distributed Consciousness: Modernist Perspectives on Photographic Objectivity

Adam Lively

in Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism

This essay begins by exploring how the “immersive objectivity” of the photographic image highlighted by the Surrealists tends to collapse distinctions between what is internal and external to ... More

This essay begins by exploring how the “immersive objectivity” of the photographic image highlighted by the Surrealists tends to collapse distinctions between what is internal and external to consciousness. It goes on to show how, in the photography-incorporating fictions of Georges Rodenbach and W.G. Sebald, perceptual immersion in the photograph engenders a “dysfunctional” state of melancholic stasis in the viewer, problematizing assumptions about agency common in many contemporary accounts of distributed cognition. It concludes by arguing that the internalization of the photographic image by consciousness, as exemplified in these modernist responses to photography, with their topologically unstable dynamics as between that which is “inside” and “outside” consciousness, strikingly demonstrate the relevance to contemporary debates over the “extended mind” of Bergson’s argument that the mind should be conceived not in spatial but in durational terms, as a continuous evolution of heterogeneous states.Less

“That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool”

Dora Zhang

in Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel

Although it is a ubiquitous feature of the novel, description remains undervalued and undertheorized. This Introduction highlights the variety and historicity of descriptive modes, as well as its ... More

Although it is a ubiquitous feature of the novel, description remains undervalued and undertheorized. This Introduction highlights the variety and historicity of descriptive modes, as well as its role in determining or “making up” its objects. Focused on the modernist backlash against the perceived descriptive “excesses” of realism, the Introduction surveys a range of early twentieth-century writers’ hostilities toward description, which are situated within the context of changing epistemological standards, new visual technologies, and developments in the teaching of writing. The Introduction then builds upon Elaine Scarry’s idea of “perceptual mimesis,” the idea that literature gives us instructions for imagined acts of perception in order to broaden thinking about description beyond its reflexive association with visualization and with the prose of things. Although modernist writers turn their descriptive attention away from what was visible and tangible, they in fact continue the realist project of describing a common world, even as the fracturing of “the community of thought and feeling” required new methods in order to do so.Less

A Return to the Face: Anna Coleman Ladd’s Portrait Masks for Mutilated Soldiers

Aaron Shaheen

in Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

The chapter assesses the American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, who crafted prosthetic masks for facially mutilated soldiers in Paris. Rejecting the distinction between ornamental and functional ... More

The chapter assesses the American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, who crafted prosthetic masks for facially mutilated soldiers in Paris. Rejecting the distinction between ornamental and functional prosthetics, Ladd regarded the face, be it of flesh or of galvanized copper, as a conduit for a person’s personality or spirit. This belief offered a stark contrast to the facial representations of surrealists like André Breton, who worked at the same hospital that supplied most of Ladd’s clients. Relying on vitalist principles similar to Henri Bergson’s élan vital, she therefore created the masks to give mutilated soldiers, many of whom suffered shell shock, the emotional confidence to reconnect with their past lives and to see themselves as active participants in the postwar world—finding employment, marrying, and even conceiving and raising children. Ladd’s efforts in Paris were similar to America’s rehabilitation program, which at the same time was being promoted in Carry On.Less

L’Amour fou Revisited: The Surrealist Poetics of Michel Gondry

Sian Mitchell

in ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry

Sian Mitchell’s chapter traces the legacy of Frenchpoetic realist director Jean Vigo (1905–34) in Gondry’s work. Drawing on the surrealist theories of André Breton, this chapter argues that early ... More

Sian Mitchell’s chapter traces the legacy of Frenchpoetic realist director Jean Vigo (1905–34) in Gondry’s work. Drawing on the surrealist theories of André Breton, this chapter argues that early surrealism has influenced not only Gondry’s visual style, but also his thematic interests. This chapter notes how Gondry aesthetically explores the surrealist concept of l’amour fou (mad love), which appears in the way he depicts the intimate relationships of his protagonists as transforming the ontological and temporal qualities of their environments. This chapter examines Gondry’s films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Mood Indigo for traces of this influence and draws connections to Vigo’s iconic L’Atalante (1934), positioning these works in the lineage of cinematic depictions of mad love. This chapter argues that in both Gondry’s and Vigo’s films, l’amour fou is embodied through a love that also challenges normative conceptions of space and time.Less

Under the Sign of Negation: William Carlos Williams and Surrealism

in Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has ... More

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has often been at odds with the canonical representations of it. It compares Williams' The Great American Novel with André Breton's Soluble Fish, which is an example of a surrealist ‘false novel’. This chapter also suggests that the contributions of Williams, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler to the Blues magazine indicates that there is no clear boundary between the orthodox American followers of surrealism and its renegade dissidents.Less

Nelly Kaplan's Le Collier de ptyx: Mallarmé as Political McGuffin

Christophe Wall-Romana

in Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

This chapter provides a reading of another book that reprises the history of cinepoetry, all the way back to its pioneer: Stéphane Mallarmé. Published in 1971, The Ptyx Necklace is a literary ... More

This chapter provides a reading of another book that reprises the history of cinepoetry, all the way back to its pioneer: Stéphane Mallarmé. Published in 1971, The Ptyx Necklace is a literary treatment for a movie blending surrealism, magical realism and film noir, taking place in a made-up South American country ruled by a dictatorship. The imaginary film's McGuffin is a necklace made of a magical substance invented by Mallarmé and which appears as a tattoo on the skin of a young woman whom the dictators kidnap in order to confiscate it. Appealing equally to the history of French poetry (Maldoror and Mallarmé), the political repression in Kaplan's native Argentina and in Chili, visual tricks on the page, visual apparatuses in the narration, even an imaginary excerpt of a real film that André Breton admired, this book implements in writing the new theory of ‘polyvision’ in the cinema that Kaplan developed with her partner Abel Gance in the mid-1950s.Less