UNIVERSAL REPORTAGE, PAPERS COMPILED BY MYRIAM BOUCHARENC, MÉLUSINE, N° XXV

Review par Gérard Farasse

One does not engage "with impunity, in one of the most perilous activities there is, journalistic activity", fulminates André Breton, in the Second Manifesto, against Robert Desnos. By approaching the mainstream press too closely, one runs the risk of being contaminated by its impurity and going astray. Between automatic writing and universal reportage, what is there in common indeed? Here, on one side, is the avant-garde, concerned with breaking with the past and changing the ways of figuring the world and here, on the other, is the mainstream press, a brain-numbing machine in the service of mercantile society, which adopts the frozen molds of academicism. Beyond these general ideas, was it not appropriate, however, to enter into the detail of these relations of repulsion and attraction – of fascination to say it in one word – that surrealism maintained with journalism, so as to propose a finer approach to it? This is what Myriam Boucharenc undertook by bringing together the studies of this very substantial issue of Mélusine. None more than she, undoubtedly, both author of a beautiful essay on Philippe Soupault (The Failure and its Double, Champion, 1997) and another on The Writer-Reporter at the Heart of the Thirties (Presses du Septentrion, 2004), was better able to carry out this task.

Some general studies open the issue on the "exit of mediums" and the "entrance of media" (Daniel Bougnoux), the sociology of the surrealist journalist (Norbert Bandier), "The press in Breton's first books" (Patrick Suter), The Surrealist Revolution (Nicolas Surlapierre); a second part examines the relations of surrealists with certain press organs: Paris-Journal (Nathalie Limat-Letellier), Combats and Arts (Gérard Roche), the left-wing press (regarding the surrealists of Brussels, Estrella De La Torre Gimenez); the third and last part sketches the portrait of certain surrealist-journalists, whether they were so occasionally or more durably: Roger Vailland (Christian Pietr), Raymond Roussel (Pierre Bazantay), Roger Vitrac (Henri Béhar), Aragon (Maryse Vassevière), Philippe Soupault (Myriam Boucharenc), Andréas Embiricos (Ionna Papaspyridou), Georges Henein (Marc Kober); a study on Denise Bellon and her photo-reportages closes the ensemble (Alain Mascarou): it would have been a pity, indeed, for photography, present in Nadja as in major reportages, to have been excluded from this reflection.

With the mainstream press, surrealism shares the taste for the day, the immediate, the document, the unusual: the press goes to meet. The daily marvelous archives everything that pertains to the "modern mythology" dear to the author of The Peasant of Paris. Surrealism has known, for its part, how to make its publicity and use it as a sounding board. Is not the vocation of the manifesto, with its shock formulas, its taking sides and its cutting judgments, so characteristic of the press of the time, to display itself in the latter? Whether it abhors it or not, surrealism takes its existence into account and finds itself impregnated by it, like its reader. The newspaper, subjected to poetic criticism that subverts it, becomes an art material. The surrealist exploits such a snippet of article, composes poems from press titles that he cuts out and glues, plays with its typographical variety and its layout procedures. Very appropriately, the cover of this issue of Mélusine echoes this dismantling of the press by offering to our eyes a collage of newspaper fragments, which makes rise, behind this so ordinary information – "Monthly Review" –, a "Monthly Eve", how much more intoxicating!

Behind each surrealist, it seems that there was a journalist, even if he remained dormant. A hybrid writer, he writes both with his left hand and his right hand, either by taste for the real, or because one must live. Each has his way of making the poet and the freelancer, the avant-garde and mass culture cohabit within him. It would be surprising, to say the least, for these two practices to remain foreign to each other. They are, rather, as we observe, communicating vessels: with diverse modalities, surrealist experience nourishes press writing as press writing nourishes, in return, surrealist experience. If Maryse Vassevière titles her study "Aragon journalist at L'Humanité: from reportage to writing", Myriam Boucharenc gives as title to hers "Soupault at Excelsior: from novel to reportage". Between document and fiction, writing comes and goes. Besides the interest this issue presents regarding the study of literary forms, their formation and deformation, it offers the advantage of also showing us the surrealist writer plunged into the life of his time, in contact with its newspapers, grappling with the ordinary difficulties of existence. The artist is a real man.

One will find in this issue much unpublished information on press articles never before collected in volume. One is happy to have at one's disposal documents like these extracts from Paris-Journal (p. 81-86), these reproductions of Excelsior (p. 171-172 and p. 175-176), or this chronicle by Roger Vitrac published in Faces of the World: "Two in the morning at Les Halles" (p. 143-145). Doubtless, one will say, we are moving away from the living center of surrealism by examining this uncertain frontier, this place of passage from one to the other, this no man's land of transit texts of uncertain status, articles by writers and what's more surrealists; but is it not by observing these margins where it seems to come undone that we have the best chance of renewing the understanding of what was its heart? Is it not at the very moment when it seems to denature itself that we have the best chance of grasping its spirit? Would we know who Mélusine is if we had not seen her, that terrible Saturday, transform into a serpent? Whatever the case, all amateurs of surrealism and the curious about journalism will rejoice in this publication.

    1 — Reading note published in the Revue des Sciences Humaines, The rest, the relic, n°278, spring 2005. We thank the author and the review for having authorized us to reproduce this article. ↩