Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose

Vivienne Brough-Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367881023
  9781472456595
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317060154
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 non-French 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 affects 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.

PART I

THE BREAKTHROUGH OF DISSIDENT SURREALISM

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

1

THE COLLÈGE DE SOCIOLOGIE AND DISSIDENT SURREALISM

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 ant-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 mult-site analysis, look to the theoretical periphery of Parisian surrealism, or develop an alternative surrealist methodology to precipitate such analysis. This shift towards a mult-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 ant-(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 Carpenter’s (1904–80) Los pasos perdidos (1953, The Lost Steps); the British expatriate surrealist, Leonora Carrington’s (1917–2011) Le Cornet acoustique (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 (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 Critique (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 atitudes 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 pattents suffering from what would be diagnosed today as post raumatic 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 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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Haft Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Part I: The Breakthrough of Dissident Surrealism
• Part II: The Explosion of Surrealism in Hispanic America and the Divin Fou of Natural Time
• Part III: The Manifestation of Surrealism in Britain and a Sociological Divin Fou
• Part IV: The Rise of Romanian Surrealism and Amour Divin Fou
• Part V: Surrealism’s Revolutionary Consciousness: The CollÈge de Sociologie’s Extensions to Surrealist Theory and Reading International Surrealism
• Indicative Publication History
• Bibliography
• Index