ELZA ADAMOWICZ, SURREALISM. CROSSING/FRONTIERS

Review par Henri Béhar

The editors warn us: this collection of articles, whose title is inspired by that of the conference given by André Breton at the London exhibition in 1936 "Limites non-frontières du surréalisme" [Non-frontier Limits of Surrealism], emphasizes the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement more than the zones of exclusion or division. The majority of contributions come from interventions at the colloquium "Surrealism: Crossing/Frontiers" held in London in November 2001.

In a very British way, I mean very pragmatic, surrealism is here considered in its trajectories, by radically questioning the notion of frontier, rather than as a body of fixed doctrines. Hence the emphasis on crossing, a central concept for a reading of the dynamics of forces at work in the movement. The variety of approaches and itineraries makes their grouping into a beautiful, well-ordered ensemble difficult, if not impossible. Upon reading, one thinks more of the non-Euclidean movements of a fly depicted by Max Ernst. This is why Elza Adamowicz, the organizer of this collection, has chosen to present these explorations as so many chapters or personal journeys within the works, not without having analyzed, in the introduction, Breton's London conference, justified by the necessity of internationalizing the movement.

An inveterate walker, Roger Cardinal strives to follow André Breton's various journeys and qualify their productivity. Not without skill, he starts from the paradoxical complexion of the poet, both homebody, loving nothing other than daily café meetings, to which are opposed his wanderings, his aleatory nomadism, his "business" trips, in the interest of the movement, to Prague, to London, to Tenerife, etc. and those that passion animated. He notes his traveler's curiosities, his exaltation before the real, while being surprised that the art lover collects Oceanic objects without ever having sought to visit the region of their production. Considering his important collections, he rightly concludes that Breton, in a permanent state of alert, was an adept of mental nomadism.

For his part, starting from urban encounters, David Pinder analyzes drifts from surrealism, notably in the Situationist International. Despite the denials and criticisms formulated by Guy Debord, he shows the kinship, if not the debt of the latter toward surrealism, in a true movement of attraction-repulsion, obliging him to "kill the father" in order to exist. This allows him to trace new itineraries, and to provoke new "situations."

Interested in Joyce Mansour, Marie-Claire Barnet treats desire and the blurred love that animate her. The pun is brilliant and seems justified if one considers the poet's biography and especially the tears, the conflicts highlighted in her work. The fact remains that writing poses a definitively insoluble problem: what authorizes the reader to identify the "I" or the "you" with a man or a woman? A trait by which black humor points a diabolical ear.

Mixing psychological considerations with analysis of pictorial work in a whirling course, David Lomas examines the labyrinth and vertigo in André Masson. He highlights a war trauma, having given rise to abundant medical literature at the time, which takes on particular relief at different moments and in certain circumstances of the painter's life, notably during a visit to the monastery of Montserrat, which gives rise, simultaneously, to a poem and a painting, commented on by Georges Bataille. In turn are summoned the painter's favorite readings, from Heraclitus to Nietzsche, to lead us to the image of the acephalous whose stomach, it should be noted, is labyrinth-shaped.

In a completely different trajectory, Johanna Malt is concerned with recycling, contamination and compulsion in the surrealist practice of the object, which we know is another way of resolving antinomies.

From content to container, we come to the closed and bloody chamber examined by Jonathan Eburne. Following this mysterious title develops a fine critique of the passage from the Manifesto of Surrealism where Breton cites Dostoevsky while erasing from the description everything that relates to crime. There follows a whole reflection on the surrealists' taste for Le Mystère de la chambre jaune and its Oedipal enigma. As the author quite rightly says, such a development could only be conducted by association of ideas and not by logical deduction.

Jacqueline Rattray's study, "crossing the Franco-Spanish border with José-Maria Hinojosa" brings us back to a more familiar case. It is a matter of showing that this poet, shot by Spanish Republicans two days after Lorca's assassination, was indeed the introducer of surrealism in Spain, with his six collections published between 1925 and 1931. As proof, an excerpt from La Flor de California, which itself is characterized by the crossing of the frontiers of the real and the imaginary.

That limits are made to be crossed, and that English surrealism has not deprived itself of this, is what Michel Remy demonstrates in his analysis of genres applied to the writings, paintings and sculptures of Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings, Conroy Maddox McWilliams.

What is the space of the other in the eyes of surrealism? wonders David Bate, like Michel de Certeau. He takes the example of two photos reproduced by Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 2, the one showing three children at the Soviet Congress of children in Berlin (1930) and the advertisement for the journal Détective, wickedly captioned by the surrealists: "A singular evolution. M. Parain, former manager of Détective, is currently in charge of the book section at l'Humanité." He concludes from this (but one would have suspected it without recourse to the heavy Freudian apparatus or even to the concepts of the Jesuit on duty) that textual space constitutes a network in which messages and meanings remain without closure.

Finally, and this is the object of the 10th chapter, Elza Adamowicz enjoys considering what is outside the surrealist map (Le monde en 1929), the spaces summoned by international exhibitions that mock frontiers, and also the frequent slippages from one territory to another in Breton or Paalen, an index of their homology, finally everything that constitutes the space of the unconscious, the impression of déjà vu, otherwise named false recognition. But there is more: what is announced, for example, through L'Europe après la pluie (1933) by Max Ernst. And to conclude on this warning from Breton in Nadja: "It may be that [...] I am condemned to retrace my steps while believing that I explore, to try to know what I should very well recognize."

Our reader will not have forgotten the third volume of the review Mélusine, itself subtitled "Marges non-frontières" [Non-frontier Margins], bearing as epigraph this quotation from the same Breton: "A road like the one surrealism proposes would be imperfectly defined if one limited oneself to what it crosses and where it goes. There remains still to make known the sort of mobile that travels it." I thus presented the articles composing this dossier: "Refusing exclusives, outlining the configuration of surrealist groups abroad (Egypt, Japan, Greece, Iceland, Sweden, Spain, Peru), far from any annexation, specifying the facture of neighbors, marginals or dissidents (Roussel, Fondane, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Bousquet, Le Grand Jeu, Iman), outside any concern for exhaustivity, any ranking, any polemic, the studies gathered in this issue intend to contribute to the determination of the invariants of surrealism." One will measure the gap between these already old remarks (they date from a quarter century) and the works gathered here. Generally better known, topography now gives way to another form of geography, more dynamic, a psycho-geography, if I may say, sticking as closely as possible to the approach of the surrealists themselves and their works.