'REALISM/SURREALISM', STUDIES COMPILED BY HENRI BÉHAR, MÉLUSINE, N° XXI

par Nathalie Limat-Letellier

Is surrealism "a sort of outbidding of realism" or its "absolute antithesis"? (Philippe Hamon, p. 97)? The twenty-first issue of Mélusine examines the kinship, too often misunderstood, between the radical "realism" and its derivative, "surrealism". The juxtaposition of the two concepts, taking into account elements of continuity and rupture, marks the overcoming of a reductive opposition, beyond old quarrels. Even though each problematic remains quite distinct historically, their confrontation results in redefining their specificity, insofar as certain phenomena of intertextuality and writing procedures bring them together. It therefore offers an essential heuristic interest, new to this day.

Two international specialists of Zola first highlight this convergence effect that still departs from our horizon of expectation... Thus, Philippe Hamon explains why the indexing of description in the first Surrealist Manifesto was not observed, since in fact, Lautréamont, Aragon, Gracq, and Breton himself describe with undeniable jubilation. The grievances formulated by Breton are due to a confusion with realist prose (whereas descriptive style is rather characterized by affinities with poetic discourse) and to a supposed restriction to the referential universe (whereas the register of the marvelous or the unusual also abounds in descriptions). As for the aesthetic of the disparate that surrealism has credited to the Songs of Maldoror ("beautiful like the chance encounter on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine"), it is also a realist-naturalist topos that one would find in Flaubert, in the Goncourts, in Zola, in the early Huysmans (p. 101). For his part, Henri Mitterand would like us to put an end to a misunderstanding about Zola's doctrine, and to perceive the writer as he was, a rebel and a "definitive dreamer": in The Rougon-Macquart, the omnipotence of desire, the very metaphorical imagination and the emergence of modern mythologies can be read as a prefiguration of surrealist values.

In this extension, Maryse Vassevière reports on the significant importance of the Zolian intertext in The Peasant of Paris (1926), with the description of Parisian places and the reference-tribute to Nana, and she reveals its trace in The Defense of the Infinite (1923-1927) which played a matricial role for the novels of the "Real World". Thus, Aragon appears as a flagrant counter-example in relation to the "radical antinomy" of surrealism and realism whose 1924 Manifesto established "the canonical model" (p. 199). That he situates himself at the confluence of two compatible problematics is what the writer himself must prove, especially from the 1960s onwards, and what creative practices like collage attest to in his work.

Could the Aragonian refutation of a generally accepted cleavage not be compared with Soupault's point of view or Éluard's case in poetry, which were not studied in the present volume? Nevertheless, other surrealists here illustrate this dialectical position that is difficult to maintain and sometimes concealed insofar as it transgresses a Bretonian interdict. Thus Claude Foucart analyzes how René Crevel, in The Broken Novel, finally rallies to Zolian realism, provided that it does not dilute into "bric-a-brac", but that it always claims a critical aim and a "revolution of knowledge" (p. 108). According to Masachika Tani, Michel Leiris is torn between the aspiration to the marvelous, this challenge to the real, and the impossibility of an escape from reality, which he experienced as an ethnologist: only art manages to capture the sacred in its nascent state, in daily life, which requires confronting the real, doing violence to it, making it undergo a transmutation (cf. Picasso, Francis Bacon); always sacrificial, the work produces both a sensation of immediate presence and distance, of gaping. In any case, no "interior model" leaves it complete autonomy.

Some actors of the movement could still, by their relationship to the world and to language, let the constitutive traits of a "realist experience" of the surreal show through, but they remain, in various ways, more marginal than the previous ones. Such, for example, the Belgian surrealist Marcel Lecomte, "writer of the instantaneous" (p. 126), attentive spectator of things and beings, analyzed by Estrella de la Torre Giménez: he finally recognized affinities with Robbe-Grillet's objectal realism. Or the poet and painter Jean Raine, who qualified himself, with a touch of irony, as "subrealist", and whose tragic destiny Mady Ménier retraces for us. Such finally the "cooper-poet" Pierre Boujut, Director of The Tower of Fire, a magazine he founded and animated in Jarnac with constant dynamism: his role allows us to grasp more concretely the effectiveness of cultural initiatives in their context, that is to say "the surreal in action", to use the title of Daniel Briolet's study. Yet, as Dominique Combe reminds us at the opening of the volume, Breton himself found himself in constant sympathy with naturalist novelists. From the generation of the Goncourts, of Zola, of Huysmans, did he not inherit the taste for the human document taken from life and the tone of medical observation? On the other hand, he casts anathema on "the realist attitude [...] made of mediocrity, hatred and flat self-satisfaction", because it evokes for him only the "imperious practical necessity", an intolerable submission to common sense, whereas he wants, on the contrary, to exalt the poetic powers of the imagination, in the lineage of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. In fact, surrealism enlarges the field of the real, it only rejects its conventional representations in Western literature and art. The exploration of mental life catches out the "little reality", the insufficiency of a narrow rationalism. We must therefore not treat the condemnation of realism in absolute terms but take into account how the Surrealist Manifestos distance themselves from literary ideology and the philosophical field, in the 1920s-30s.

On the side of literary poetics, several studies in the volume determine the specificity of surrealism in relation to realism, and more precisely the characteristics of a surrealist treatment of the real. Thus, although she incriminates Aragon's biases, Elza Adamowicz is interested in collage because it always poses the question of the real in avant-garde art (cubist, dadaist, surrealist...). Dina Mantchéva notes that surrealist dramaturgy does not deny a discursive referent familiar to the public (the dictionary, the press, current events, melodrama codes, famous works...), but that the emergence of the unknown compromises the mimetic or the plausible to the point of dissolving the traces of this semantic real. Freed from mimesis, theatrical aesthetics can throw a bridge between the subjective and the objective; it privileges neither dream nor reality, but their entanglement. For his part, Joseph Fahey indicates how the ontological status of the object allows differentiation between realism and surrealism. Indeed, in the poems of Earthlight, Breton's writing does not endeavor to represent a prior object, "already ready-made", but it does not result either, conversely, in a derealization, as Ferdinand Alquié supposed. It rather tends to suggest the existence of a certain relationship to the world, but in a radically different mode from the positivist attitude. According to a concept from Husserlian phenomenology, it manifests to perceiving subjects the still incomplete, reversible and unstable constitution (p. 114, p. 123) of an object to be identified. This process confronts readers with discordances, syntactic or semantic blurrings, or even an absence of anaphoric return to things or actants designated in the text.

Regarding the philosophical substrate, D. Combe also shows that Breton's position oscillates between a temptation of absolute idealism (Berkeley, Fichte), insofar as the exploration of the psychic world emancipates itself from the external object, and a will to appropriate the sensible world, in its immediate manifestations, which indeed already resembles Husserlian phenomenology. Similarly, Paule Plouvier considers that surrealism undertakes a quest for the real, as such "ambiguous and susceptible to being reversed on the side of idealism" (see the famous "Discourse on the Little Reality"), or "transformed a bit too quickly into critical materialism" because of its "radical immanence" (p. 149). In a psychoanalytic approach, she emphasizes that indeed the lightning of objective chance and the freedom of the imaged signifier in surrealist writing could not represent a pre-existing real, but that they aim to arouse the real by means of a practice of desire where the junction between the subject (the self) and the external object operates. Should we therefore infer that the magical dimension prevails over the experimental dimension of the quest? Marie-Laure Missir, regarding surrealist erotics, confirms that the real is recreated according to the laws of desire, but observes that beneath subjective projections, the Research on Sexuality also testifies to a spirit of observation close to the clinical gaze.

Certainly, the dissidences of surrealism add other facets to the philosophical debate. The disagreement between Breton and Caillois, Guillaume Bridet explains, comes from the fact that, for the former, imagination, this emancipatory faculty par excellence, grants objective reality to the psychic world. Caillois, on the other hand, submits the delirious or traumatic productions of the unconscious to scientific rationality, as if it were necessary to protect oneself from them through intellectualization. For her part, Marie-Christine Lala analyzes this "challenge of the lowest real" (p. 52) from which Breton turns away, but which crosses Georges Bataille's thought, in hatred of lyricism: the unleashed forces of sexuality, stirring threatening shadows for sublimation... Jean-Michel Heimonet sides with the materialism of the latter because he admits the heterogeneity between subject and object, between language and world, far from believing in their possible fusion in surreality.

However, the second section of the volume, where the "Variety" section appears, could not entirely dismiss this major theme that is the correlations of the real and the surreal, even beyond the bipolarity between realism and surrealism. The inexhaustible problematic returns there. Thus, Cyril Bagros's study, which refers to Philippe Hamon's work on realism-naturalism, identifies how the disturbed and fantasized topography of the surrealist narrative overturns the "representative model endorsed" by the 19th-century novel. Carole Aurouet reconstructs the history of an unpublished scenario by Prévert, "The Ghost Metro", where the hero tips from the real to the surreal to finally return to the real. Nadia Sabri analyzes, based on an authentic childhood memory, how the mysterious space of the forest became for Max Ernst a catalyst for his pictorial imagination. Regarding Breton's hostility towards the art market, Mohamed Aziz Daki returns to the subversive role of collage and the model of moral purity that applies to poetry. Regarding hallucinatory states, Alain Chevrier establishes from what sources, in the field of psychopathology, Breton had learned as early as 1916 during his stay at the Neuro-psychiatric Center of Saint-Dizier. Finally, at the other end of reception phenomena, Paolo Scopelliti illuminates the influence of two Romanian surrealists, Ghérasim Luca and Dolfi Trost, on the anti-Oedipal schizo-analysis of Deleuze and Guattari.

The "Documents" section follows, which delivers an interesting unpublished text by Tristan Tzara, "Surrealism and the Literary Crisis" (p. 307-317). This 1946 text was found in the Archives of the foreign commission of the Union of Soviet Writers. It makes an eloquent assessment of the dada-surrealist movement, where historical stakes are highlighted, and initiates a dialogue with Péret and with Sartre with the intention of promoting a new "literary humanism". Its presentation by Éléna Galtsova (p. 295-306) also teaches us that the censorship of the Stalinist era refused its publication, and that the author rewrote another version for his conference at the Sorbonne in 1947.

Finally, in the "Critical Reflections" section, this already particularly substantial volume offers us two detailed reviews: the first, by Joseph Fahey, specifies, according to Norbert Bandier's work, the contribution of a sociology of surrealism whose orientation differs from previous "institutional approaches". The second, by Annie Richard, concerns Scandalously Theirs: published by Georgiana Colvile, this anthology of 34 women linked to the surrealist movement serves the cause of their recognition; it also takes stock of the advancement of research in this field.