The question has been raised since the birth of surrealism: if it privileges automatism and spontaneity, is it not, however, tributary to a certain formalism? Now, the study — and practice — of conventional forms in French literature is precisely the work of the journal Formules, which has beautiful achievements to its credit. It was thus that one day Bernardo Schiavetta and Alain Chevrier came to see me to take stock of the subject. From which resulted the colloquium of the Sorbonne Nouvelle of which I want to emphasize the work of Alain Chevrier who then took care of publishing the proceedings. It was understood between us that these proceedings were to appear in a joint issue of the journal Mélusine and Formules. Unfortunately, the Age d'Homme editions did not follow my instructions, so that only the name of Formules appears on the cover. But the important thing is that all the interventions have been well published, in excellent conditions, and that it is always possible to read and appreciate them.

Announcement and program of the colloquium (text format only):

COLLOQUIUM "SURREALISM AND FORMAL CONSTRAINTS"

University Paris III, October 13-14, 2006 in Sorbonne (17 rue de la Sorbonne, Paris V°) Organized by the Center for Research on Surrealism (Paris III-CNRS) and the journal Formules

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Argument

As the ultimate avatar of romantic turmoil, surrealist writing wanted to be a liberation from traditional forms deemed constraining. A literary constraint can be defined as an additional rule, distinct from the laws of language and the rules of discourse, as well as the rules defining the various canonical literary genres. (Cf. Bernardo Schiavetta, "Defining the Constraint" Contrary to the futurist trigger and certain manifestations of visual or sound poetry that can be found in modernism and Dada, the movement instituted by André Breton respected these laws and rules. But did it not introduce, in a very conspicuous way, new constraints with a creative aim such as those of "surrealist games," from the exquisite corpse to the game of "one in the other" passing through surrealist dialogue, — constraints themselves derived from certain social games, such as notation, preferences, small papers, enigma, etc.? Do Robert Desnos's games on the sound and meaning of words anticipate those of Oulipo? Can one periodize these different games, without omitting those of the Belgian surrealists, beginning with Paul Nougé? More deeply, automatic writing, "surrealist speaking," is it not, itself, a constraint in aiming to prohibit both the ordinary use of discourse and its traditional poetic use? Its failure does not seem to have been noted by the imitation of the different types of discourse corresponding to mental illnesses. What relationship does the search for affective spontaneity have with the intellectual poetry of nonsense? Has dream narrative been a new genre in prose? Did the prose poem experience a period of efflorescence at this time? Does poetic narrative or surrealist theater announce the liberation of certain new forms of novel or theater? Has the poetic maxim in Robert Desnos and René Char, or the moral maxim in Louis Scutenaire, not been renewed? Has the presentation of literary theory, in the form of manifestos, and that of criticism itself not been modified? In the domain of metrics, has the disappearance of the musical charge of the symbolist verse, in the name of the quest for the image, or even the expression of ideas, not reinforced the hegemony of a free verse of the most flatly "syntactic" in French poetry? Should one not nevertheless reconsider the blank verse in Éluard, the alexandrine in Desnos, the oral verse of Aragon? What hidden poetic forms can one detect in these two latter poets? Has surrealism engendered the "great poems" that had been awaited since the Parnassian constriction? Can André Breton's Ode to Charles Fourier still be defined as a surrealist poem? The similarity of result between surrealist text and oulipian text in the detournements of proverbs or classical texts, or in certain texts with a combinatory base, like those of Péret or Jean Arp, leads to posing the question of the criteria for recognizing constraint in a text, whether it has been explicated or not. Should one bring together or distinguish the productions of "mental automatism," unconscious or preconscious, whether personal or resulting from collective work, and random automatism, like that of the S + 7 method or current computer procedures? What is the share of each of the two automatisms in the alphabetical games of E.L.T. Mesens, the phonic variations of Ghérasim Luca or the rousselian composition from syllabic games of Guy Cabanel? For surrealism, it will not be useless to review the links with the constraints of plastic arts, or even the constraints of cultural or political intervention, like leaflets, tracts, but also the art of insult and scandalous manifestations. To what extent has Oulipo been and remains a mirror image of surrealism, both with regard to its decoupling from revolutionary political avant-gardes in favor of a often playful escapism of postmodern appearance, and with regard to its internal functioning which it displays as non-conflictual? Its conscious art of prestidigitation, with the unveiling of its tricks, which other writers can take up, is it not the opposite of the invocation to magic, weakened form of secular religion, from which surrealist activity started and on which it ended? What is the share of surrealism, and of "the anxiety of its influence," in the work of Raymond Queneau? How to understand the trajectory of Noël Arnaud? And of poets at the border of surrealism like Henri Michaux, or Jean Tardieu, or André Frédérique, have they not also explored literary constraints? So many questions to which it seems to us that the moment has come to try to bring answers.

Interventions

Henri Béhar (University Paris III): "Surrealism: bad genre"

In continuation of my article on the explosion of genres in the 20th century: "There are only two genres, the poem and the pamphlet," in L'Éclatement des genres au XXe siècle, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2001, pp. 61-80, and taking up the corpus of works on which was built the chapter "Lieux-dits, les titres surréalistes," in Les Enfants perdus, essai sur l'avant-garde, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 2002, I intend to show how the surrealists work the notion of genre: presence and contestation.

Willard Bohn (Illinois State U.): Critical poetry of Benjamin Péret

Examination of Benjamin Péret's critical poetry, poetry constrained to respond to other works of art (including poetry) using imitation, citation, translation, transposition and other literary principles. Three texts in particular: published in Les Feuilles Libres in April 1922, the first deals with Tzara's Calendrier cinéma du cœur abstrait; appearing in Littérature in September 1922, the second evokes Giorgio de Chirico's painting. Entitled "Les Cheveux dans les yeux"; the third served as a preface for the catalog of a Joan Miro exhibition in June 1925. In each case, I propose to analyze the relationships between the original work and Péret's text that it engendered.

Bernard Bosredon (University Paris III): Surrealist painters: liberated titlers?

Does the titling of surrealist paintings participate in the liberation of specific linguistic forms of the surrealist movement? Is the status of the painting title itself the object of a displacement or transformation, or even a specific questioning? Using linguistic analysis, we propose to examine the nature, scope and limits of surrealist action in the invention of titles. We will measure the impact of the image/text relationship in this production. We will also observe the variety of choices according to the painters, analyze the semiotic-linguistic games they engage in and appreciate the possible liberation they testify to. We will finally try to identify the discursive and semiotic unity of this titling beyond even the choices of the titlers.

Alain Chevrier (Rouen, Formules): Surrealist sonnets

The sonnet plays the role of a revealer in the history of poetic forms. The claimed subversion of the values of classical culture, maintained elsewhere by the living fossils of traditional poetry, but also the regrettable ignorance of the place of the sonnet in the literatures of neighboring countries, count among its main factors. Based on a corpus constituted of the three small "surrealist sonnets" published by Breton, Éluard and Aragon in the journal La Vie des lettres et des arts in 1921. These poems make one question the notion of literary constraint: does it then lie on the side of the sonnet-form or on the side of surrealist style? And what problems does this coexistence with automatic writing raise? In what way can the latter be qualified as "automatic"?

Frédérique Joseph-Lowery (Emory): Constraint by body, in the written work of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí presents three kinds of constraints: the first takes the form of black patent leather shoes too tight. It is a formal constraint in that the firm grip of the foot is the condition for taking the floor at the opening of his Journal d'un génie. The too tight shoe is strictly the incipit of the text. The second invites us to consider the question on an organic plane. During a long performative metaphor, Dalí shows that the force called coaction exerts its constraint on the antique motif of the acanthus leaf whose plastic variations he follows to our days according to delirious interpretations. Finally comes the paranoid-critical method. It is a physical constraint: the tongue, the muscle in the mouth must push back the hairs that grow on it from below. Thus from foot to tongue, to the fetus ball, the body forms a loop and offers an image of a surrealist writer for whom literary constraint is inseparable from the carnal envelope it strives to contain. The most surprising thing about this device is that the constraint works with and against what seems least appropriate to its task: delirium.

Caroline Lebrec (University of Toronto): Cutting, collage and "de-collage": OuLiPo, Surrealism and Dada

Between puzzle, chess game, go game and exquisite corpse, we want to demonstrate the difference of the two approaches, oulipian and surrealist, and thus twist the neck of the concept of "gratuitousness" that surrounds oulipian practices. The playful approach allows us to embrace the oulipian practice of formal constraint in all its potentiality: game with words, game with language, game with literature, and finally game with the reader. This approach also allows us to make a link between what has been published on paper, but also on the Net.

Delphine Lelièvre (University Paris XII): Noël Arnaud, Analytical Dictionary

This communication will be based on a totally unpublished manuscript fund, kept at the National Resistance Museum of Champigny sur Marne: some tracts published by the group La Main à plume, and pages of the Analytical Dictionary, a work born from a collaboration between Noël Arnaud and André Stil. The definitive articles bear the surrealist imprint and at the same time hide a mathematical-type constraint in their manuscript elaboration, but without ever envisaging to make visible or even known this approach of reasoned automatism. It seems that material constraints were used for creative purposes, with jubilation and pleasure, by certain members of La Main à plume, opposed in this to several of their companions who chose rather to keep silent, refusing to submit to external obligations perceived then as brakes to creation.

Sophie Lemaître (University of Cergy): The use of the dictionary form by the surrealists

In the surrealist conception, the dictionary determines an intolerable code, and presents only a derisory succession of restrictive semantic equivalences, of frozen contents. It therefore seems astonishing that surrealist authors have published works in the form of dictionaries, subjecting themselves to casting their great linguistic freedom in one of the most standardized molds. We propose to study the use of the Dictionary form by the surrealists, notably in Michel Leiris's Glossaire j'y serre mes gloses and in André Breton and Paul Eluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme. These surrealist dictionaries, where words are torn from the rut of meaning, implement an extravagant practice of the dictionary form and reveal, according to Julien Gracq's formula, "the latent energy in power in the vocable."

Jean-Claude Marceau (University Paris VIII): The anagrams of Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer

The practice of anagrams plays an essential role within the Hans Bellmer-Unica Zürn couple. For Bellmer, "the body is comparable to a sentence that would invite us to disarticulate it, so that its true contents recompose through an endless series of anagrams." Would this be the cause of the major interest that Unica bears to anagrams? We will further question this practice of the letter in these two artists from this other remark of Lacan in Lituraterre: "Between knowledge and jouissance, there is a littoral that only turns to literal at what this turn, you can take it the same at any moment."

Ioanna Papaspyridou (University of Athens): Dream narrative

The corpus established by Frédéric Canovas (Narratology of dream narrative in French prose from Charles Nodier to Julien Gracq) allows us, henceforth, to definitively and systematically integrate surrealist dream narrative into a set of texts. The question then arises of the narrative constraints introduced by the surrealists. What distinguishes Bretonian dream narratives in Clair de terre, for example, or in La Révolution surréaliste, from other pre-surrealist narratives? Are they scraps, debris, pure mental automatism? Finally, what about interpretations, the role of allegory or the presence of the archetype as Lacan defined it?

Gérald Purnelle (University of Louvain): Regular verse among the surrealists: inside or outside?

Global approach to the inscription of regular metrics in the aesthetic journey and in the practice of several surrealists. This would allow comparing those who practice it first to reject it, those who totally exclude it, those who integrate it into their first works, the passage from alexandrine to free verse, the specific functions of regular verse in such poet; but also to compare French and Belgians, and, among the French, the two generations of surrealists. More precisely, it will be a matter of testing several of the following questions: from what aesthetics does one come when one integrates (even temporarily or discreetly) regular metrics into the nascent practice of surrealism or when one rejects it from the start? how does this practice combine with other forms (prose, free verse, surrealist games)? how can it underlie a poet's evolution toward his own post-surrealist aesthetic? how can practice be confronted with discourse on form? does each poet have "his" regular verse? do these differences make sense on the formal or poetic plane? do the Belgians differ from the French? This study will be based on specific cases: Breton, Éluard, Aragon, Desnos, Artaud, Leiris, Queneau, Tzara, Goemans, Colinet, Chavée, Scutenaire.

Christophe Reig (University of Perpignan): Leiris/Roubaud – Rules of games, Games in the Rules

At a few decades' intervals, Roubaud the oulipian shares with Leiris – whose name remains attached to the surrealism of the first half of the 20th century – the autofictional concern. A priori, one finds oneself facing two very dissimilar writings, two writers from two antagonistic literary groups. The treatment reserved for the dream (let us not forget that the "project" "grand incendie" is a dream) thus reveals itself exemplary of the differences between our authors; while in one, the oneiric activity, the preponderance accorded to desire, allow the spark of words to emerge, to push back the limits dictated to the "I" by social constraints, in the other, the oulipian springs seem at the same time to tighten around numbers and letters, in order to draw in hollow the self conjugated in the past. In both cases, the search for the self is not necessarily and absolutely opposed to formalism – term to be taken in all senses. The shadow of Leiris's enterprise cannot be absent from the "memory treatise" that is Le Grand Incendie. In Roubaud, as in Leiris, one will thus find the taste for detour, for number and many common points: an avowed mistrust of autobiographical narrative, a reticence towards its codes and conventions... Hence the intervention of "constraints," which will be subject to changes. "Critical autobiography," "autobiography under constraints," one like the other have launched themselves, for different reasons, perhaps asymmetrical, into the fabrication of devices, of logomachic montages that cannot – more or less voluntarily – but fail, of writings that live from their traces and which sometimes die from returning to themselves.

Effie Rentzou (Princeton University): Constraint and poetics: the proverb in the Surrealist Manifesto and The Immaculate Conception

If from a stylistic and rhetorical point of view, the proverbial form is close to other brief sententious forms, like the aphorism, the apophthegm, the slogan, and even the lexicographic definition, from a semiotic point of view the proverb is closer to myths and tales. In surrealist poetics the loss of interest in proverbs is counterbalanced by a growing interest in myth, which becomes one of the central concerns of surrealism during the thirties. This double function of the proverb as miniaturized and distilled language on the one hand, and as oral discourse of cohesion of a given community, like myth, on the other, seems to be reflected by the use of the proverb in the last part of The Immaculate Conception. This text presents itself both as the last great automatic work, in the vein of Magnetic Fields, and as an opening to the great scope of the thirties. The Immaculate Conception can be read as a long commentary on surrealist writing and ethics. If "The possessions" "would advantageously replace the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the headless and tailless poem and other obsolete genres," thus forming an inventory of possible surrealist "genres," the last part, "The original judgment," forms a manual of surrealist ethics.

Jacques Roubaud: the formalist verse of the surrealists

We will defend the following hypothesis: The rejection of traditional versification, particularly the alexandrine, by the Surrealists, and especially by André Breton, gave verse only a very relative freedom. It is the mark of a rigid and formalist poetics.

Gabriel Saad (University Paris III): Surrealist use of language and writing under constraint in A.P. de Mandiargues

As I have already demonstrated regarding Luis Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, there exists a precise link between the surrealist use of language and the constraint chosen to build a poetics (see G. Saad, "A phantom runs through language, it's the phantom of liberty", La Licorne, University of Poitiers, 1993). I would like, now, to show that this relationship is determining in André Pieyre de Mandiargues's prose works. The three colors of the Italian flag govern the discourse of "Marbre," for example. To this are added constraints derived from translation, rewriting or the choice of certain geometric forms (ellipse, spiral, e.g.) and, above all, a particular attention paid to the materiality of writing. The word "blanc," e.g., is constituted of four consonants and only one vowel. This makes it an exceptional word in our language. It thus introduces a constraint: the use of monovocalisms in "a" (Safara, Barbara Bara) and a semantic network around white. This constraint clearly governs the discourse of "Armoire de lune" and, associated with the game of translation ("Ropero de luna") allows Mandiargues to construct an erotico-thanatic narrative in which the quest for the supreme point results, precisely, from the chosen constraint. "La marge," "Le lis de mer" and many of Mandiargues's short stories allow highlighting this particular use of writing under constraint.

Bernardo Schiavetta (Paris, Formules): "The unfunny jokes"

The 19th century produced caricatures of the "moderns" of the time, which have sometimes been paralleled with the serious works of subsequent modernity (surrealists, dadaists or avant-garde). Wrongly, because these examples (due to the Incohérents, Scapigliatti and other facetious ones) are not historically "precursors" of surrealism in the same way as, for example, primitive art works are. However, the obvious similarities between these caricatures and subsequent serious works are not, in our opinion, fortuitous; they gain from being approached as structural aesthetic possibilities of certain subcategories of the comic (and the grotesque). These detournements gain from being approached as aesthetic possibilities actualized by a change in horizons of expectation and therefore dependent on the historical avatars of aesthetic reception. Since Antiquity, they have known very episodically partial actualizations, but their effective actualization in the 20th century, and their hegemony, seem to us to be linked to a historical problematic of the reception of the serious and the sublime.

Paolo Scopelliti (Rome): Surrealist M. Jourdain, or the constraints of prose

Breton always displays "natural" respect for syntax: like M. Jourdain, the surrealists make (automatic) prose unwittingly. On the other hand, it is indeed to the poetic meter that they gauge their own texts. Now, if this last ambiguity can be reduced to the "classical" definition of constraint, which attached it essentially to poetry, the two ambiguities taken together refer to the idea of a rhythm inherent to language and linked to a notion of flow that precedes that of meter. This definition, perfectly suitable for the flow of surrealist automatism, but drawn from a reflection on language in itself, shows that the analysis of surrealism's relationship to the very idea of formal constraint cannot be separated from that bearing on surrealist theory of language. The latter, inspired not only by Freud, but also by Vico and Rousseau, establishes a chronological primacy of poetry over prose: at the same time that it attributes rules to the former, it is indeed to the latter that it attaches the notion of constraint.

Hans T. Siepe (University of Düsseldorf): The constraint of recursivity in surrealist poetry

By "recursivity" I understand: which can be repeated an indefinite number of times by the application of the same rule. I therefore refer to the syntactic constraints of this type:

Migraine (to be continued) The decay is the ground The ground is the homeland The Battery is the soft The Kohl is the pretty The embolism is the neck (R. Vitrac, in: Littérature, n.s. 11/12)

Interests The dead rat one has in the brain and the brain of the stomach The stars of the Zambezi and the bird of the lips American virtue Skin alcohol and bread of the eyes The wealth of the rich and the vice of winter The tepid laugh and the urine algae The water of sad knees The small decayed bones And the ladies of the blood reeds Tamtam of the baby bottle and candy of the heart (G. Ribemont-Dessaignes)

This verbless poem rests on a very simple principle of syntactic structure of substantives and attributes or appositions. One will think of many others like Breton's "Union libre," "Allô" and other poems by Benjamin Péret, etc. Vittorio Trionfi (University of Colorado): The automatic model in Antonin Artaud's cinematographic theory Through an analysis of Antonin Artaud's cinematographic theory (which goes from the enthusiasm of 1927 to the rejection of cinema around 1932) I propose to highlight his critique of the automatic model both as a formal associative process and in its recourse to accomplished forms (verbal or visual). This model gives rise, according to Artaud, to a signifying practice just as constrained and limited as that submitted to the logic of speech. The failure of this cinema is thus announced from the first texts of 1927. But it is only at the beginning of the thirties that he will face the evidence of this failure. And it is from this reflection that he will then lead that can be apprehended most clearly his thought on the limits — of cinema as he conceived it, certainly — but also of automatism.

Download Formules, n° 11: (PDF) Formules journal nº 11 (complete) "Surrealism and formal constraints" | Bernardo Schiavetta – Academia.edu

or else my article reprinted in the collection: H. Béhar, La Littérature et son golem, tome II, pp. 57-71: Classiques Garnier Numerique (classiques-garnier.com);

Extensions:

cf: (PDF) Novel and surrealism: history of a (bad) genre | Marie Baudry — Academia.edu