SURREALISM: 'BEAUTIFUL AS THE FORTUITOUS ENCOUNTER OF A TRAUMA AND A SEWING MACHINE'?
par Didier Jonchière
Much has been written about the relevance and role of automatic writing in the becoming of surrealism, as André Breton attempted to assume it until his last breath. But the detailed analysis of several motifs from Poisson soluble, compared with certain fragments of the sketch Vous m'oublierez, reveals the unexpected origin of the mental genesis that conditioned the implementation of the procedure. For Breton, automatism is "the great constancy of the surrealist movement and there can be no question of abstracting or sacrificing it"[1]. Yet what was meant to be the major tool of the "surrealist revolution" could well correspond above all, according to us, to the elaboration of a resilience protocol for an "affective trauma" otherwise carefully occulted and whose circumstances have not been brought to light by exegesis to this day.
Indeed, the attentive reading of several of the "stories" of Poisson Soluble reveals the presence of an object in the intimate environment of the child poet, an object that Breton has never clearly evoked as such, that is to say as forming an integral part of his family universe. It is a pedal sewing machine that his mother, a seamstress by trade at the beginning of the century, must have used at her home[2]. If moreover Breton has not failed to speak very freely, it seems, of this tool, if only because it is inseparable from the emblematic series of "beautiful as" by Lautréamont, it remains nonetheless that this pedal machine has never been for him a pretext for explicit confidence. An object with willingly erotic connotations, this machine must in reality be considered as the symbol of a trauma[3] of which the poet would not have made "the disdainful confession", machine located at the center of the web woven around him in an inflexible network of oppressive instances, secreted by Marguerite Breton's sewing activity in agreement with her very personality. But this reading of the latent "soluble" in the Manifesto is only possible in reverse. It therefore seemed paradoxically more logical to us to reread, in a first time, all the manifest surrealist discourse around automatic writing and sewing machines, in the light of our thesis which will only then see its demonstration accomplished in a second part, devoted to automatic texts.
If one is willing to accept with Breton, the spontaneous productions of thought in their natural psychological framework - dreams or half-sleep phrases - as the fugitive and uncontrollable outcroppings of a mental deposit, buried below vivid consciousness, then automatic writing would rather present itself as a voluntary drilling or capture.
The passage to the act of writing seems to be the informal and non-clinical replica of "the recording for the purpose of interpreting dreams and uncontrolled associations of ideas' (E., p. 36-37), practiced by Breton at the psychiatric center of the 2nd army in Saint-Dizier during the war of 1914-1918, with a view to writing "medico-legal reports, beautiful writing of the school type" (E., p. 37). If from a practical point of view, the find seems perfectly opportune, it has considerable subversive resonances in Breton, particularly on the symbolic level. To such an extent that, even when the practice of automatic writing will have shown its limits (E., p. 88), the poet will nevertheless maintain his confidence in it:
"Automatic writing, with all that it entails in its orbit, you cannot know how dear it remains to me". (E., p. 262)
But Breton's fidelity must be sought elsewhere than in the textual "precipitates' of automatic alchemy, of which he will keep a very high idea all his life[4]. It is obviously because its vital contribution resides in the act itself, highly transgressive, independently of the "results' obtained. For what matters in automatic writing, as an object of conjuratory sacralization, is not expressive renewal, but the act as a practice against literary conventions. The irrepressible temptation, either to provoke short circuits, or to derail the perennial convoys of language transporting ordinary meaning, exists there in an obsessive state.
What will constitute a machine to settle accounts with life "mounted on rails' is not just a metaphorical expression: it corresponds to this ideal of reversal that animates Breton. To such an extent that the thread that feeds it, haunts in the proper sense the very principle of automatic writing. Officially, it would be, as Julien Gracq expresses so justly, "the formal beyond of immediate consciousness'[5], but it is above all a conjuratory ritual[6] that aims to liberate language from any sclerosing influence. Beyond the first circle of a pragmatic language that besieges life and rations its access to the marvelous, there indeed exists a "second state" of consciousness that "only asks to be revealed' (E., p. 88). Automatic writing would be its key or switch, a true "antidote" to the poison injected into "human linen" by this machine sewing beings into the rut of fatality. The symbolic analogy is so pregnant in Breton's mind that the functioning of the maternal sewing machine haunts the very text of the manifesto, creating on occasion a form of latency at the heart of the discourse: the beyond of automatic writing and surrealism is also that of a symptomatic projection of the maternal image and its oppressive emblem, which must be taken in reverse.
Let us examine the terms chosen by Breton to designate the act of writing. The term "automatic" derives from the substantive "automaton", origin validated by the founder of the movement, who pushes the analogy even further, going so far as to qualify this writing as "mechanical':
"the surrealist atmosphere created by mechanical writing, which I have insisted on making accessible to all, lends itself particularly to the production of the most beautiful images'[7].
But the most remarkable manifestation of this haunting resides in the "arbitrary" choice of the letter l to restart the "inexhaustible flow of the murmur" (MdS, p. 39) in the chapter devoted to the "secrets of surrealist magic art":
"Following the word whose origin seems suspect to you, place any letter, the letter l for example, always the letter l, and bring back the arbitrary by imposing this letter as initial to the word that will follow" (MdS, p. 40).
The sewing analogy has not escaped Michel Carrouges who notes, commenting on this same passage: "Even if this l which serves as a needle to rethread from time to time the thread of automatism and darn the torn weft of subconsciousness, is itself proposed by automatism seeking to reconnect itself, it becomes much less justifiable to decide coldly to put it back into service every time the thread will slacken or break"[8]. If the critic has well identified the presence of the needle, he has not detected that of the sewing machine which marks its repetitive rhythm against which he nevertheless rebels. Now the fact of advocating the "automatic" use of the only needle-letter of the alphabet, constitutes in itself a conjuratory ritualization which, obeying in this the rule of "turning the adversary"s weapons against himself", corresponds to the image of Breton's childhood memory[9], whose child's eyes have doubtless been long enough at the height of the obsessive mechanism, because repeated mechanically infinitely, of the needle sewing "automatically" the thread in the fabrics. It is therefore quite psycho-logical that he proposes "for example, always the letter l' since everything must happen as if the maternal needle, plunging imperiously into the textile matter became the unique recourse to "the silence [which] threatens to establish itself for little that you have committed a fault: a fault, one can say, of inattention" (MdS, p. 39).
As if to press even harder where it hurts, Breton reiterates his prescription in barometric mode: "[...] Surrealism will allow it to you; you will only have to put the needle of 'Beau fixe' on 'Action' and the trick will be done" (MdS, p. 41). The metaphor here has as its object a circular barometer whose form and mechanical principle recall the steering wheel of the sewing machine serving not only to position the needle, but to launch its back-and-forth.
But making this haunting of the text by the sewing machine readable would not be possible without the recognition of its presence in the latent part of the Manifesto, that is to say in the "stories' of Poisson soluble. It is the corollary of the psychic trauma whose distant but very real echoes traverse the poet each time he is confronted with a form of oppression whatever it may be. The most characteristic image from this point of view is without hesitation that of story 26, which plunges us back into the heart of the traumatic scene:
"On a railroad needle I saw the splendid bird of sabotage alight and in the fixity of the wounds that are still eyes pass the cold obstinacy of blood which is an irresistible gaze" (PS, p. 103).
The image secretly brings back into presence this "haggard and somewhat hunted child' that was the young Breton and his mother, in a painful face-to-face. Thus is revealed fugitively what indelibly and foundationally knots this retrospective impulse of moral sabotage of the psychic springs that armed and rearmed endlessly the maternal "trainer" arm.
This is why Breton has not ceased trying to reverse the steam that blows on the world as it revealed itself to him in its abjections, its compromises, and its cowardices. Sabotages, reverse operations, scandals, disturbances, effervescences (any activity shaking the servile inertia of common sense that participates in the massacre of childhood eager for the marvelous) will always be welcome at the surrealist research office... It is therefore a question of constituting the most powerful machine to settle accounts with "the current state of society in Europe" (E., p. 115). Machine to settle accounts which also calls in the second Manifesto to all those "who refuse the fold' (MdS, p. 141) and enter into dissidence:
"We have dug mines, tunnels through which we introduce ourselves in band under the cities that we want to make explode" (PS, p. 71).
Marguerite Bonnet notes regarding this passage: "Elsewhere the surrealist project of subversion is enunciated in a set of metaphors [...] the inner voice invites to the great upheaval of the world". "We are the creators of wrecks", one reads in Poisson soluble. This last alternative is quite significant of the ambivalence of the desire for sabotage: there is both the will to overturn the established order and to achieve a moral revolution. The pregnancy of the machine-object haunts the project:
"We are the creators of wrecks: there is nothing in our mind that one will manage to refloat. [...] we take place at the aquatic command post [...] of these bad ships built on the principle of the lever, the winch, and the inclined plane. We activate this or that to assure ourselves that everything is lost, that this compass is finally constrained to pronounce the word: south" (PS, p. 72).
We also find this obsessive theme of sewing at the heart of story 19, of which Sarane Alexandrian tells us that it is a metaphor of "automatic" capture:
"A beautiful mannequin will present this winter to the elegant ladies the Mirage dress and do you know who will make the adorable creation triumph? But the source, of course, the source that I lead without difficulty into these parts where my ideas retreat beyond the possible, beyond even the inorganic sands [...]" (PS, p. 90).
The "Mirage dress' is at the antipodes of the seamstress work that mobilizes all the "wills' (PS, p.70) both laborious and imperious of the poet's mother. The image of the sewing machine, far from being reduced to its manufactured referent in its mechanical version of the 1900s, takes, at the center of Breton's mental universe, a determining place in the genesis of his revolt, both poetic and political. To justify and circumscribe it, it is necessary to return in a first time, on the presence and role of such an object in Breton's very childhood, long before he discovered in 1918 the young Mervyn, in the sixth Chant de Maldoror, "beautiful as the retractility of the claws of birds of prey [...] and especially as the fortuitous encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!"[10]...
In the chronology that she establishes, Marguerite Bonnet mentions: "1893 September 2: Marriage in Lorient of Louis Breton, commercial employee, with Marguerite Le Gouguès, seamstress." (ŒC, p. XXVIII). Surprisingly, if an attentive reading of the texts of Poisson soluble did not allow to detect the existence of this artisanal activity in the domestic space, no other biographical mention would suggest the existence of such an object near the young André Breton.
Long before being perceived as a sexual representation of woman, "aggravated' by its use "for onanistic purposes'[11], the sewing machine is in reality for André Breton child, the object with which his mother is most often associated in a sort of symbiotic coupling, without any sexual connotation. The mimetic assimilation between the mother's behavior toward the child poet and the mechanical functioning of the apparatus, can be done almost naturally with this familiar object. Beyond the function of oppression of textile materials, on which it makes reign a sort of Thermidorian Terror, the sewing machine moreover has symbolic connotations of inexpressive coldness.
This analysis is corroborated by a rapid examination of the sketch Vous m'oublierez. We know, thanks to a letter from Simone Kahn of August 25, 1920 (ŒC, p. 1175), that the text is at the center of a sort of cycle of three pieces devoted to love, declining in three times: seduction, conflict between the ideas of conservation and reproduction, pleasure.... Without entering into a detailed analysis of the whole sketch, it is very clear that the juxtaposition of the characters "Umbrella" and "Sewing Machine" refers directly to Lautréamont. But if there is indeed sexualization of the characters, in accordance with the interpretation of Les Vases communicants, the interactions put into play in the sketch recall much more those of a nuclear family with a single child, moreover a boy[12], in accordance with the poet's family model. The role of "Sewing Machine" is obviously that of a mother addressing her son whose name is "Dressing Gown" (let us mention moreover the sewing connotation of the name that Breton attributes to himself as offspring):
"Sewing Machine
crosses her hands: [...] The sun is not set. Dressing Gown! Are you there, darling?"
Dressing Gown searches all around for an unknown object.
Umbrella:
Have you lost something?. [...] Let these spinning tops memories of childhood cease to snore! Dressing Gown worries me. What pin will he see shine again in the grooves of the floor?"[13]
Other elements allow to recognize the maternal character of "Sewing Machine" (ChM, p. 173), even Breton's mother herself, through the rare biographical considerations at our disposal (ŒC, p. XXX). It is not without reason that Breton makes her say: "...and my lips are long venomous fish." (ChM, p. 170), and that he puts precisely between these lips phrases with religious connotations: "The creator told me where all the stars that are missing from the sky are located' (ChM, p. 175), "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (ChM, p, 170), "what have I done, my God?" (ChM, p. 175).
Contrary therefore to what Breton affirms peremptorily in Les Vases communicants, what "alone provokes the seizure here" and "the extraordinary force that can take [...] the famous phrase [...]:" "beautiful as...[...]" (VC, p. 67) does not come from a "contrast between the immediate sexual act and the picture of an extreme dispersion [...]", but rather from a resonance "in the reader's mind' especially when he is named André Breton, between his own "affective trauma" and Lautréamont"s symbolism. The attraction that the formula exerts on him is such that he cannot resist the temptation to partially stage his childhood drama on the dissection table of a theater scene. Certainly the cards have been carefully shuffled and the game is destined to return whence it came; its title moreover, Vous m"oublierez is there to say well what must come of it. This sketch brings us proof that the symbolism of the sewing machine has not always been for him exclusively erotic and onanistic, but rather dramatically linked to the insurmountable conflict that opposed the mother to her son André. No doubt, the tone without reply used in Les Vases communicants aims to erase any trace of this intimate antecedent, an occultation attitude that corresponds to what Marguerite Bonnet supposes of it: "The conflict with the mother has surely played a capital role in his image of woman and his affective orientations", since in this case, the maternal dimension is obliterated by a sexual interpretation, garnished with a very rare mention on "the onanistic purposes' of the use of the sewing machine.
This insistent application to deny any other symbolic value to Maldoror's machine is symptomatic of the repression put into play by Breton to occult everything that could clearly bring back to consciousness the suffering that is attached to it. And when he writes at the opening of story 15 that "in the school chalk there is a sewing machine" (PS, p. 83), we find the symbol of an oppressive public instance inculcating its institutional values to young minds.
This story is in this respect very interesting to study because we see Breton setting up the truant antidote destined to fight against the poison inoculated by the social sewing machine, whose essential function returns to "inculcate" these national values from which one does not recover... The "sewing machine [contained] in the school chalk" of this text, refers, in story 12, to "a latest model torture machine" "hidden in a haystack" (PS, p. 78), the thread of the sewing metaphor being here held by the presence of the "patterns' destined for the reproduction of sewing models:
"patients severely stretched on glass plates embracing the curvatures of their body" (PS, p. 78).
It is quite significant in our perspective to realize to what extent the image of the mother negatively loves the critical field of Bretonian thought, when two characters then appear successively, a woman "in the grip of a shared love and on whom Professor T attempted a progressive depersonalization" and "another patient, about fifteen years old [...] subjected to treatment by images'. Let us recall that this story 12 is built around the theme "of the results of psychic operations still unpublished'. The juxtaposition of the two "operations' also has a symbolic value:
"this woman" is subjected to "the most beautiful sample [...] of all figures of thought of which new varieties, particularly venomous, had just been acclimatized [...] which is to say that the subject was condemned'. (PS, p. 78)
While "the child",
"at each awakening [in] a state of emotionality [...] proper to sudden discouragement"
is vampirized instead of being quenched:
"leeches were brought instead of the glass of water of which he declared having need' (PS, p. 78)
How not to think of the manner in which the young André, weaned of affection, must have faced the vindictive aggressiveness of his mother? One must not look in the Manifesto beyond this "childhood [...] massacred [...] by the care of the trainers' (MdS, p. 15), to understand that this is a very personal allusion.
If this constitutes "the so-called compensation session", the second time of the "treatment" consists in "teaching directly by images as well cosmology as chemistry, as music" (PS, p. 78). One will appreciate that the cure strategically unifies (first and second time) the two major instances of "training", which are family and school, the blackboard "which was to serve for demonstrations", being then "figured by a very elegant young priest who celebrated [...] the law of the fall of bodies in the manner of an office" (PS, 78-79). This requisition of the religious component leads "the very gifted child [to be] incapable of experiencing the most elementary desires' (PS, p. 79) which is a barely veiled way of staging the necessarily inhibitory role of the school environment of the time.
The critical momentum that runs through the text summarizes the young Breton's progressive awareness: he has at the start doubtless, the feeling "of being hunted' - his childhood is the prey of a hunt of which he can perceive neither the stakes, nor the values that inspire it - while in Poisson soluble, (he is 28 years old) burst (in veiled words of course) the revolt and the critical diagnosis (worthy of this black humor of which he will reinvent the treasure) that he makes of his personal journey first, before extending it to all of Western civilization.
This mother a priori treated as the "victim of psychic operations' and not as the instigator of the "massacre"[14], proves however in some way instrumentalized by the dominant figures of thought. The objective tool to which she submits of herself is her own sewing machine, "latest model torture machine". She therefore appears, through this staging, as the automatic vector of the treatment that she inflicts "coldly" on her son and all the values that act her and that she works to impose on him, as a sewing machine imposes on textile materials the forms and seams induced by patterns, are for Breton the very source of the evil that must be fought. Among these values figures in the very first rank the Christian religious dogma that he hates in the strong sense of the word, first because it is one of the constitutive instances of his mother's personality and not especially, as he has always tried to demonstrate, for ideological reasons.
If one now accepts to take into consideration the biographical fact, which makes the mother a seamstress practicing her trade at home, as this transpires through several veiled configurations, both in the sketch Vous m'oublierez and in stories 3, 7, and 12 of Poisson soluble, it is certain that, contrary to most children for whom "the work" of parents hardly materializes except by their physical absence, Breton saw very early, from his permanent return to the parental home in 1900 and outside of his hours of presence at "the Ste Elisabeth house run by the nuns of Saint-Charles' from 1901, his mother exercise her seamstress trade, both in its relational and artisanal dimension.
It is in this context that we suppose that the playful perspective of an imaginary projection on Marguerite Breton's activity is put into play, which underlies a large part of story 7[15] of Poisson soluble, where one can detect the activity of a dressmaking salon installed at home: "(for the central salon rests entirely on a river)" (PS, p. 70). Michael Riffaterre does not dwell much on the continuation of the text, which he evokes very briefly by speaking "of the description of a world of reflection built entirely on a formal convention, which draws from itself its justification". Yet, Breton's citation according to which he says "reliv[ing] with exaltation the best part of his childhood" (MdS, p. 48) gives the key to the text. Thus the "formal convention" on which would be "built entirely a world of reflections" does not draw "from itself its justification", but from the transposition of the scenes of Marguerite Breton's daily labor and all the activity proper to a small artisanal dressmaking salon, transposition made by the eyes of a child aided by a poet "revisiting" these same scenes, some twenty years later, with an imagination fertilized by his readings. The biographeme that feeds Breton's playful reverie is indeed that of a dressmaking salon, in the middle of which a child plays. Placed under the sign of a threatening prohibition, the poem nevertheless reveals from the second sentence the image that underlies it:
"The sonorous apartment! The parquet is an immense pedal' (PS, p. 70).
We are plunged here into the heart of the dressmaking salon with its pedal sewing machine, whose each back-and-forth resonates on the wooden floor, where the child is held to play alone without being noticed or interrupting or disturbing his mother's work... He gives himself names, plays characters:
"[...] the Friends of the Variant. It is the name that we sometimes give ourselves, eyes in eyes[16], at the end of one of these afternoons where we no longer find anything to share. [...] one also plays at addresses and at forces according to cases' (PS, p. 70).
Here, the playful peripeteias interfere with the mother's professional gestures. "The marvelous lasso made of two woman's arms" is a magnificent find to evoke the ritual gesture of the seamstress stretching her arms to pass the tape measure around her clients" waists. Thus, these women "dressed in glass naturally[17]" imaginary, only differentiate themselves by details of clothing order: "hat trimming", "veils", "gloves and parasol", all metamorphosed into materials familiar to the poet who spent two years of his early childhood between Lorient and "the garden of St Brieuc"[18] (1898-1900):
"They are, they too, dressed in glass, naturally; some join to this monotonous outfit one or two gayer attributes: wood shavings in hat trimming, spider web veils, gloves and sunflower parasol' (PS, p. 71).
One will also detect in several other stories, the presence of the sewing machine metamorphosed into "little modern sphinx", enormous wasp that poses enigmas to children[19], in text 3, where also appears the presence of "a woman"s torso adorably polished although it was devoid of head and limbs", dressmaking mannequin which refers us to "the beautiful one-legged woman of the boulevards' already mentioned (see note 16).
This set of "childhood memories' could not aggregate into a circumstantial narrative, relevant to autobiographical confidence. But the conflict never appeased nor resolved that opposes Breton to his mother is incompatible with any direct evocation of her seamstress work. And if absolutely no personal allusion to her mechanized craftwork peppers Breton"s work, it is because the slightest occurrence of this activity would have constituted a sort of takeover of the preserved part of his childhood. There is one of these typically Bretonian prohibitions, but in the case that occupies us, carefully occulted as such and "disdainfully ignored". If the young boy manages to arrange for himself, failing "Indian territory", at least a certain reserve, propitious to reverie in this space devoted to a severe craftwork, which amounts to escaping the vindictive wrath of "the queen of wills", the revolted writer will keep in him all the traces of the oppression of which he was the victim, in the name of the facade propriety to which his mother sacrificed him. There could therefore be no affinity for André Breton with laborious submission...
Finally, all the relevance of automatic writing is founded on the postulate that "the speed of thought is not superior to that of speech and that it does not necessarily defy language [...]". Yet Freud himself has shown, if only by the study of the phenomenon of the slip, that thought precedes speech and that the latter acts at a distance on speech, the oralized discourse being able to be disturbed by an unformulated desire, pre-existing to it. This is why the automatic text never functions better than when it is induced by a theme that pre-exists to it, of which the so-called "propulsive" sentence initiates the shift. Breton makes a sort of confusion between the conceptualization of preverbal thought (the conception of meaning) and its verbalization. He plays on the shift between the latent confusionist feeling and "the words to say it" or rather, he ignores it[20], since for him, "the speed of thought is not superior to that of speech". In doing so, he believes he can situate himself outside personal consciousness, drawing from the "collective treasure" or opening wide the doors of his unconscious, whereas he only actualizes thoughts already present in his consciousness, but not oralized.
Automatic writing is in reality a symbolic activity elaborated by Breton from the sewing machine, both bad mother and inflexible mechanical, to allow him to conjure his affective trauma. What would appear, in a configuration of dark magic, as the source of all the maleficent powers of a "queen of wills" sacrificing her child, must be the object of an enterprise if not of destruction, at least of "symbolic destitution", aiming at a bearable metamorphosis of the "ritual of hatred' of which he is the innocent victim. Beyond, the mechanical automatism of surrealist writing attempts to conjure all the psychological and social instances that preside over the artisanal elaboration of maternal sewing: in the same manner that the sewing machine "writes' its sewing points, it is indispensable for him to validate a mimetic procedure, which can sew words or embroider, not the laborious closure of pieces dictated by patterns, but on the contrary a random weft, fed by what Breton believes to be the "derailing" impulses of the unconscious and which would deconstruct in reverse the web of "the acariatic acarian" in which struggles forever the child that he was.
It would perhaps remain now to rule on the exact psychological nature of the impulse that presides over the implementation of the procedure: are we facing the infinite reiteration of the symbolic staging of an affective trauma, Breton painfully replaying, without managing to surpass it and under cover of poetic invention, the devouring of his childish being by the incessant harassment of the mandibles of the "enormous wasp that [...] posed enigmas to children" (PS, p. 64) or are we in a successful resilience practice, such as Boris Cyrulnik detects in a great number of writers? All things considered, it seems to us that the answer could be read in the poem "Wounded Character" of the Constellations:
"The man turns all his life around a padlocked little wood of which he distinguishes only the black trunks from which rises a pink vapor. The memories of childhood make him surreptitiously cross the old woman that the very first time he saw come out with a very thin bundle of incandescent thorns. (He had been fascinated at the same time that he had heard himself cry, then his tears by enchantment had dried up [...]). This distant initiation leans him despite himself on the thread of daggers [...]. Without knowing how he could have penetrated there, at any moment the man can awaken inside the wood in free fall of elevator at the Palace of Mirages between the trees lit from within [...]. "[21]
Université Blaise Pascal Clermont II
1 — André Breton, Entretiens, Paris, Idées/Gallimard, 1973, p.256-257. (E) ↩
2 — The meticulous cross-checking of the chronologies provided by Marguerite Bonnet (André Breton, Paris, Corti, 1975) and Mark Polizzoti does not oppose the hypothesis that Marguerite Breton, née Le Gouguès, from her arrival in the Paris region ↑, could have exercised this trade. Mark Polizzoti, André Breton, Paris, Gallimard, 1999 for the French translation, first chapter. ↩
3 — One finds in Boris Cyrulnik's remarks around the concept of resilience, a general description of the process, which corresponds in a troubling manner to the "Breton case". See on this point Le murmure des fantômes, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2004, p. 139-140. ↩
4 — It is not the same for all the texts that he had written thus. The opinion that he will express at the end of his life on rereading the notebooks of Poisson soluble testifies to this... ↩
5 — Julien Gracq, Œuvres complètes, Paris, La pléiade/Gallimard, 1989, p. 499. ↩
6 — In the sense that conjuration is a counter-power process, devoted to the destruction of instances in place. ↩
7 — André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, complete edition (including Poisson soluble), Paris, JJ Pauvert, 1972, p. 46. (MdS and PS). In the text of the "Automatic Message" Breton returns to the use of the term automatic: "the 'automatic' or better 'mechanical' writing [...] has always seemed to me the limit to which the surrealist poet must tend' (Point du jour, p. 180-181). ↩
8 — Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme, Paris, Idées/Gallimard., p. 196. ↩
9 — To the extent that one accepts the hypothesis, quite plausible, of the presence of a pedal sewing machine, in the domestic space of the Breton family ↩
10 — Isidore Ducasse, Les chants de Maldoror, Paris, Bordas, 1970, p. 200. The sexual interpretation that will be given of this passage in 1932 in Les vases communicants will arrive well after the family modulation that Breton will exploit in his 1920 sketch Vous m'oublierez. Marguerite Bonnet mentions it in the notice concerning it: "The encounter, not on a dissection table but on a stage, of Umbrella and Sewing Machine refers to Lautréamont, then at the center of Breton"s concerns [...]". André Breton, Œuvres complètes, tome I., Paris, La pléiade/Gallimard, 1988, p. 1175. (ŒC) Let us note that the beauty in question is that of a boy, like that of the sketch Vous m"oublierez: "Dressing Gown", whose existence is objectively the fruit of an encounter between a mother "sewing machine" and a father "umbrella"... ↩
11 — André Breton, Les vases communicants, op. cit., p. 67. (VC) ↩
12 — Since having to wear red pants. This red color is symbolic of the revolt that Breton projects on the image he has of himself as a child, the last scenic image of the sketch moreover echoes it, since a red barrier flag is waved by Umbrella. (ŒC, p. 1179). ↩
13 — André Breton, Les champs magnétiques, Paris, Poésie/Gallimard, 1968 p. 169-170. Vous m'oublierez, scene II. (ChM) ↩
14 — "One can consider this "instance" as the persistence, inside the psyche of each individual, of parental prohibitions, which only refract, at the second degree, the prohibitions of the society inside which the said parents have themselves been raised", René Held, L'œil du psychanalyste, Surréalisme et surréalité, Paris, Payot, 1972, p. 82. ↩
15 — Story 3 is also built on these memories, but in the framework of a confrontation. One will not forget that the "woman's torso adorably polished although it was devoid of head and limb" is of the same nature as "the beautiful one-legged woman of the boulevards': that is to say in fabric and mounted on a varnished wooden foot, like any dressmaking mannequin... The one-leggedness not residing in the presence of a single leg of flesh and bone... as Marguerite Bonnet suggests through her perception of the feminine figure: "[...] it is surely more important [that she] appear there, almost always, not only vague, but incomplete, even mutilated, like 'the beautiful one-legged woman [...] text 5'". Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton, op. cit., p. 400 and 401. ↩
16 — The young Breton, like all solitary children, must have learned to play alone, "eyes in eyes' in a sort of prolonged "mirror stage" where he uses his reflection in the fitting mirrors as a play companion. ↩
17 — Ibid., p. 71: Divers and glass clothes provide, to the child's playful reverie, what to equip without too much effort his "characters' in his underwater world... ↩
18 — Marguerite Bonnet André Breton, op. cit., p. 16: "But during his early childhood, Brittany is above all for him the garden of Saint-Brieuc". Should one ignore this biographical precision provided by the one who has conversed many times with the poet in person, even if "the usufruct" of this garden has left no written trace in the Saint-Brieuc archives? ↩
19 — Ibid., p. 64. The "modernity" of the little sphinx who "had already made quite a few victims' seems well to correspond to the "sewing machine" object, as does the "latest model torture machine" which shortly precedes the metaphorical evocation of sewing patterns "severely stretched on glass plates..." (text 12). Its mechanical "buzzing" "unbearable like a pulmonary congestion" covers that of the streetcars, "whose trolley was a dragonfly". This metaphorization of the "device composed of a pole fixed to the vehicle and a mobile contact organ serving to transmit the current from a conductor cable" (Robert Dictionary, volume 9, p. 515), such a modern electrical apparatus, into a "haggard and hard' insect, tends to show that we are well here in a mechanical entomology. ↩
20 — Accepting the very idea of a shift between thought and speech (caused by a superior velocity of thought) makes obsolete the idea that "what is going to be written" cannot have been conceived beforehand by the conscious mind: there is then no more "beyond' of speech, but Breton must nevertheless start from this postulate to establish the potential existence of a to come of the text, which can engender itself below any pregnancy of consciousness. In the contrary case, which corresponds to cognitive reality (and not to subjective surreality) the immediate to come of the text (or of "speech") remains subservient to what is not spontaneously conscious; it is precisely this shift between the genesis of thought and its oralization that makes all the difference... that Breton has obstinately refused to see. ↩
21 — André Breton, Signe ascendant, Paris, Poésie/Gallimard, 1968, p. 141. Section Constellations. The expression "leans him despite himself on the thread of daggers" nevertheless strangely echoes the description of the child"s room decor, evoked in the preface "Il y aura une fois", of the section of the Revolver à cheveux blancs ↑: "in the third room, which one will have tried to make the most luxurious of all existing children's rooms, only a lacerated cradle and adorned in good place with a dagger will lean, like a ship in distress, on a floor of too blue waves'. Ship in distress which itself recalls the presence, in Poisson soluble, of one of these "tragic toys intended for adults': "in a showcase, the hull of a superb white liner, whose bow, seriously damaged, is prey to ants of an unknown species' (story 11). ↩