ROGER CAILLOIS, THE EDGE OF SURREALISM: A ROGER CAILLOIS READER

Review par John Westbrook

One can only salute the publication of this collection which makes accessible to the English-speaking public a set of texts testifying both to Caillois's contribution to the major debates of his time and to the evolution of his thought. The collection is organized chronologically in three major parts. The first, "Theory and the Thirties," traces Caillois's interest in a virulent sacred and a science of man that aims to be totalizing. The second, "Patagonian Writings," marks the radical change that Caillois's thought undergoes as it evolves toward a defense of civilization and humanism. The last, "Postwar Position-Taking," focuses on the establishment of a generalized poetics and aesthetics in complement to the "diagonal sciences."

For Frank, it is especially through the College of Sociology that the American public knows Caillois. If the importance of Caillois's multiple position-takings inside and outside surrealism during the inter-war period justifies that this period covers half of the collection, this choice also reflects a bias of the compiler, author of a thesis on Caillois in the 1930s. Although the works of Denis Hollier and the review October have helped to emphasize Caillois's importance for the period, the study of Caillois's scientific citations demonstrates that in the American context it is rather the author of Man, Play and Games who has found an echo beyond specialists of French literature until now. This collection will help to broaden the English-speaking public for the hitherto neglected aspects of his work.

In fact, the very rich introductory essay that Claudine Frank proposes to us could have been titled "On the Difficulty of Reading Roger Caillois." Material difficulty, first, because only the few major texts translated in the 1960s are still available in English: Man, Play and Games, Man and the Sacred, Pontius Pilate. Others were translated more recently — The Necessity of Mind, The Writing of Stones, The Detective Novel — but by small publishers and with small print runs. If one interrogates the databases (Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index), citations of Caillois's works in English-language research hardly change between 1975 and 2004. 217 articles on average each decade cite Caillois and the citations mainly concern Man, Play and Games and Man and the Sacred. Not only does the diffusion of Caillois's thought seem strongly determined by the availability of his texts, but also these texts serve mainly as sociological references on questions of play or the sacred. It is interesting to note that according to the same criteria, citations of Bataille's texts go from 195 articles for the period 1975-1984 to 593 for the period 1995-2004. Moreover, Bataille's texts most often constitute the very object of the articles. There, we approach another difficulty which is of a political order.

Claudine Frank notes that Caillois's properly political image had been marked in the immediate postwar period by an article by Meyer Shapiro in the influential Kenyon Review, "French Reaction in Exile." The image of a Caillois obsessed with authoritarian conceptions posed a problem in a post-fascist context. More subtly, Frank notes that as much as his elitist preoccupations and his political ambiguity, his defense of the West and civilization and even his writing style, have provoked a relative rejection of Caillois in France by part of the intellectual left. By ricochet, as "negative double" of Bataille in the eyes of some, Caillois has not benefited like him from the emergence in Anglo-Saxon countries of French structuralist and post-structuralist theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, or Derrida.

The difficulty of reading Caillois is also of an intellectual order. Frank's introductory essay identifies two axes of reading necessary for understanding Caillois's work. First, what she calls the dialogical axis by which Caillois maintains often antagonistic relationships with the various currents of thought of his time. Then, the auto-reflexive axis by which Caillois dialogues with himself, develops or reformulates his earlier ideas. For Frank, the essential difficulty is that in this author enamored with secrecy and paradoxes, this dialogue with others and with himself most often remains half-hidden. The difficulty becomes even greater for English-speaking readers less familiar with the intellectual movements to which he discreetly or even directly refers. Hence the importance of the critical apparatus: each text by Caillois is preceded by a brief essay that situates it both in relation to the scientific, philosophical, literary or political debates of the moment, and in relation to the proper evolution of Caillois's thought.

As I noted, the choice of texts and commentaries privilege the inter-war period. With the "Letter to André Breton," excerpts from The Myth and Man and "For a Militant Orthodoxy," excerpt from Inquisitions, Frank illuminates the disagreement between Caillois and Breton on the scientific dimension of surrealism and emphasizes the emergence of themes that will lead to the College of Sociology. Frank also emphasizes the dialogue between Caillois and Bataille — their mutual influences and especially the first's reticence regarding the latter's mystical effusions. She attempts to lift the ambiguity regarding Caillois's political position with several texts linked to the College and also the important "Preamble to the Spirit of Sects." In this regard, as others have noted, she attempts to domesticate his elitist and anti-democratic thought for an American university public reticent to ideological roughness.

More interesting perhaps is the choice of texts for the second and third parts of the book. The magnificent meditation "Patagonia" which marks Caillois's return toward the praise of civilization constitutes its pivot. Frank emphasizes in Caillois a conception of civilization as treasure resulting from work (and not as unproductive expenditure). In the last part, under the rubric "Caillois moralist," she includes his "Loyola to the Aid of Marx" and notes, following Michel Winock, Caillois's participation in anti-communist reviews such as La Liberté de l'esprit and Preuves, but without developing the links between this political position and the works on play. It would have been interesting also to give the text of his attack against Lévi-Strauss, "The Backward Illusion," because as in his attacks against psychoanalysis and Marxism, it is partly a critique of "false science." Here, one can read the effect of taking into account the American university public to which the collection is destined — public with an often very ecumenical conception of "French theory." Frank notes however that the condemnation of structuralist false appearances is not simply reactionary and also passes through a return toward surrealism through its reconceptualization in "diagonal sciences" and a "generalized aesthetics." With texts like "The Image," "Surrealism as Universe of Signs," or "The Natural Fantastic," she shows us Caillois in search of this "just imagination" which constitutes a rigorous enrichment of surrealism.

In France the rhythm of publications on Caillois had taken a sustained pace in the 1990s but seems to have slowed since. Despite the excellent documentation gathered by Jean-Clarence Lambert for Les Cahiers de Chronos (La Différence 1991), the pointed studies assembled by Laurent Jenny in Roger Caillois, Adventurous Thought (Belin 1992), and Odile Felgine's biography (Stock 1994), a collection such as that built by Claudine Frank is still missing in French. Let us hope that some researcher will propose such an anthology in French of the entirety of Caillois's work endowed with an equally useful critical apparatus.