THE SURREALIST AND DEATH

par Catherine Dufour

In light of contemporary conceptions of death (Ariès, Morin, Freud) and some of its literary representations (Madame Bovary, The Guermantes Way, The Plague), Thierry Aubert started from the observation that the surrealists, in their concern to invent "a modern mythology," had wanted to enlighten the individual about himself by appropriating the experience of death. Abandoning the conceptual discourses of the authors, felt as defensive counter-discourses, he chose to read death in their living works. Through a corpus defined in the foreword (Breton, Péret, Desnos, Vitrac, Eluard, Aragon, Crevel, Tzara, Duprey, Mansour, Le Brun), he studied the various treatments of the tension, inherent in the lethal phenomenon, between death-annihilation - the irreparable disappearance of the Subject - and surreal death - the elaboration of this event by the living Subject.

A first part is devoted to the network of mortiferous signs that designate death as an ordeal, suicide notably, which is also paradoxically a putting to life. Hanging can thus reveal an access to self, a surpassing of the human condition, a recovered sexual power, an eroticization of the universe, while firearms, jumping into the void, drowning or poisoning propose infinite variations. Other paths of access to the mythical universe of death are provided by erotic ecstasy, amorous dereliction, sensitive approaches or the figures of the Double, including the androgyne, which in Breton surpasses the Freudian duality Eros/Thanatos through the poetic breach opened in the apparent univocity of the real.

This quest of the Subject at the extreme of itself has produced the mortiferous creatures founding the surrealist imagination: Devil, vampire, Medusa, sirens or sphinx, these last three disrupting the representation of death inherited from Antiquity. Some of these creatures do not maintain a fruitful relationship with death - the vampire for example - because too linked to the anguish of death-annihilation. Human creatures fallen into afterlife - dead, revenants, remains or drowned - likewise arouse ambivalent reactions according to their capacity for surreal surpassing. Thanks to these representations, the Subject lives death without being annihilated, to the rhythm of the triad Poetry Love Freedom.

Belonging to another category of mortiferous signs, surreal space and time break with the rationality of being born to die. A new temporality is suggested by the osmosis between instant and eternity or the simultaneous seizure of fugacity and the timeless, which disorganize the fixed categories - memory/remembrance, date/duration, past/present/future. In the surreal space of death, the cemetery, place of social simulacrum, is negatively connoted, but the tomb and the grave are ambivalent according to whether they designate bourgeois death or the presence of a fascinating gap. The scythe, the epitaph, the coffin, as well as the oneiric spaces of the sea, the ocean, ruins or the desert, sometimes threaten the Subject, sometimes make pacts with marvelous death. Finally, the mortiferous signs respond to the ideal stated in the first Manifesto, which declares itself both "against death," according to the common acceptance, and closest to it. Through this double postulation the surrealists reconnect with the myth of Orpheus.

A second part analyzes dying in itself. A tight journey leads us into the labyrinth of motifs of illness and accident in Mansour or Vitrac, but also of capital punishment - hanging, stake and guillotine - and analyzes the erotic and sacrificial force of the Passion and murder. The methods of criminals are scrutinized - the dagger, strangulation or sexual cannibalism - and their belonging to three distinct groups: the partisans of bourgeois crime and the murderers of children or women. Do the latter prove right Xavière Gauthier who connects them to the machist order or Annie Le Brun who valorizes the free submission of women to their assassin? Murder is in any case invested with a positive value and refers to the infantile stage of dismemberment imaged by the myth of Osiris, indispensable according to Breton to the advent of this new "god" that is the Subject integrated into the surreal world and rebellious to the social order.

In the chapter of interpretations of death, Péret and Breton embody two antagonistic conceptions. Breton sees in it a force necessary to the maintenance of surreality and has drawn from it the recurring motifs of the hunter and the "Great Transparents," as well as the themes of an evolutionary surreal eternity and an imperishable woman-child. Péret on the contrary envisages death as a perversion of life, where desublimated love, conscious of its mortality, produces a disorganization of the Subject favorable to the surreal, but also an anguish of limits that leads both to "carpe diem" and to a hedonism of death.

Faced with the surreal vertigo aroused in Breton and Péret by the lethal presence, Desnos and Eluard attempt to take distance and emphasize the individual to live, while Aragon and Vitrac yield to a fascination with the mortiferous void that orients them toward the individual to die. Desnos has the certainty of a fundamental solitude of the Subject exposed to death, while Eluard attempts to supplant it through amorous passion and to distance it from the poetic sphere. In Aragon, the fascination with death is such that individuality flourishes in a generalized macabre. The permanent attention to death, privileged form of subjective activity, invades existence by poetic necessity. The body to die experiments with plenitude in urban wanderings and venal love. In Vitrac death is no longer an artifice, but a fundamental dimension of the living. The suicidal impulses that inhabit the work belong to the sacred. All experiences that conjugate the degradation of the body and voluptuousness - illness, the sadism of lovers - can substitute for love. The Subject lives for his death while knowing his irreparable end, which supposes entire faith in existence.

After Breton's prophetic return in 1946, Duprey and Mansour make a synthesis between the first surrealism, which situates death in a beyond of self, and the conceptions of Tzara and Crevel who, at the end of the 1920s, seize it to give death its human dimension, conferring a surrealist scope within existence (Tzara) or seeking to break the discordance between death and life (Crevel). Descended to the underside of life, Duprey's Subject loses his identity in a complete surpassing witnessed by stylistic distortions. Mansour expresses her morbid vision of existence through the preeminence of an aquatic and lethal space and a Subject who realizes himself in the path of amorous, vampiric or morbid agony. Annie Le Brun finally, sensitive in the 1960s to the limit experiences of a life free from death, postulates with more or less success forgetting as the ideal of dying.

It should be noted that, while considering dying as a mode of participation in existence, the surrealists propose no interpretation on the reason for dying and reject any idea of beyond, as well as any prenatal before in service of a myth of origins that would allow to illuminate the reasons for this curse that is human finitude.

A third part attempts to identify the work of surreal death in the very body of writing. In Breton, Aragon, Vitrac, Tzara, black humor, allied to love and objective chance, places writing at the heart of the lethal phenomenon. Its subversive power holds death-annihilation in check thanks to the modalities of enunciation, modeled on the Freudian principles of condensation - in which paronomasia participates - and displacement. In Aragon, the unusual that results from humor inspired by Vaché, Jarry or Lautréamont, suggests the reign of death. In resonance with the Subject's finitude, The Peasant of Paris reveals the artifice of the text through narrative and typographic ruptures and the parody of the real. In Vitrac, humor and poetry, among the stupefacients that give to see, develop a cruelty that accompanies the unstable balance between life and death, while Tzara's laughter expresses the Subject's malaise.

Literary genres are inevitably subverted by the surrealist work of death. To free themselves from the novelistic framework, the surrealists resort to various procedures including narrative incompletion, stylistic translation of the conflict between surreal death, present in enunciation, and death-annihilation, metaphorically inscribed in the completion of the book. Poetry inscribes itself in the alternation of plenitude and finitude thanks to poetic collages or automatism, reflection of the Subject's fugacity, while the political debate of the 1930s questions its vocation, hitherto exclusive, of exploring surreal death. The double nature of theater finally - textual linearity on one hand and disruption induced by play on the other - facilitates surreal work, through simultaneous reference to death-annihilation and surreal death, in a dynamic tension that enlivens the forces that pull at the dramatists and keeps the spectator alert.

One understands that the clausula has been used as an essential moment of the surrealists' work on death, either that it initiates a movement beyond the inscribed text or that it on the contrary bounds the textual space. It can express a rupture text/existence or on the contrary a continuity text/surreality on the model of the amorous relationship. When it limits the text, it signs the abandonment of the surrealist experience faced with nothingness, while conferring on the work the status of active production and not static object. The completion of the text rarely coincides with the Subject's death, but the disappearance of the Beloved sometimes devotes him to memory which, in Capital of Pain, makes him "living endlessly." Suspension then takes value in itself and the text no longer needs a beyond. One notices that in Breton mourning is not limited like in Eluard to the antithesis disappearance/reappearance, but makes the statement timeless, due to amorous plenitude, corollary of textual plenitude.

In this tension that denies nothingness, writing makes the text turn back on itself. Thanks to the freedom he exercises in the act of writing, the Subject can consent to his death on the individual level, while the diversity of discourses of death connects him to the collectivity. Despite the surrealists' hesitation between two conceptions, one libertarian and individualist, the other mythical and collective, the lethal phenomenon is always understood as a space of mutation in which a free speech creates a volatile modern mythology, in the image of the indefinite of individual freedom. The surrealists finally refused a mythology guaranteeing the stability of the universe to invent one that conceals no longer some immortal divinity, but mortal individuality.

At the end of his study, Thierry Aubert suggests some paths for the interpretation of death in the plastic arts, in Marcel Jean, Dalí or Masson, and recalls the place accorded to the mortal body in The Minotaur.

In a chapter placed in appendix, he moreover explains the reasons why war was the occasion for a denunciation by the authors more than an inscription of the theme of death in their works. One encounters however in Breton, Péret or Crevel the antithetical figures of the soldier, associated with a shameful death that betrays freedom or love, and of the assassin, gratified, like his victim, with an important charge of surreal death.

Let us not forget that Péret in 1945 in The Dishonor of Poets, recognized in surrealist poetry, outside of any explicit engagement, a revolutionary and mythical dimension, which ceaselessly revives the contact of human finitude with freedom.