Review in Literary Stories, n° 58, July 2014.

Surrealism through texts, edition by Henri Béhar and Michel Carassou (Classiques Garnier, 2013, 313 p., 29 €). The Classiques Garnier label amuses and pleases regarding a subject like surrealism. It is in fact only the reissue of previous editions (1984 and 1992), little modified by the two heavyweights in charge, Henri Béhar and Michel Carassou, whose other works on the subject have already impressed and intimidated us by the wisdom and the cleaver of their judgments. Approaching surrealism through its texts is obviously a good idea, since, despite the surrealists themselves — especially Breton —, the movement was above all literary, particularly at the theoretical level. Apart from Max Ernst, surrealist before his time, it will indeed take a few years of uproar before painting gets involved in the movement. Too bad, moreover, that the great Max is forgotten in this compilation and its references: is he not the main author of The Misfortune of the Immortals, revealed in concert with Éluard? In 1922, two years before the Manifesto, it was yet, by anticipation, one of the most surrealist of all the works that marked the movement. It was poetry and not theory, the authors of this Surrealism through texts will tell us. On the conceptual level, Henri Béhar and Michel Carassou are unbeatable and deliver the paradox from the first lines of their introduction: Breton's surrealism wanted to be anything but a literary school, but a thought, an intellectual attitude, a philosophy too. It will be, certainly, but what remains finally, are on the one hand the literary texts, on the other hand this painting moored later with the slogan — or the Bretonesque watchword — that it should especially not worry about beauty. The present work therefore concentrates on what was written, dividing its approach between morality, knowledge and expression. In the midst of the contemporary profusion of poorly documented essays (except on the navel-gazing of their authors), Surrealism through texts is a beautiful tool that associates the "hard" data, not tampered with a posteriori, of surrealist theoretical writings, and the subtle and learned comments of the two editors.

Review in Literary Stories, n° 58, July 2014.