1713, GODFATHER OF NOVELS

par Martine Monteau

Here we present a few novels where the character of André Breton and/or other surrealists appear. Detective stories, noir novels, fantasy, historical, biofictions—genres of which we are not specialists—since stories from within the milieu, such as Queneau's Odile ↑, where renamed but very real characters and places are transparent, have recently been joined by fictions where surrealism and its spokespeople intrude, are mixed into the plot, or inspire it. These are not surrealist novels, but the surreal or the context serves as a pretext or endorsement for unusual actions or political views.

In his warning: "Beware, André Breton, of appearing later in literary history textbooks [1]," René Daumal had neither foreseen that the poet and his friends might become the (anti)heroes, despite themselves, of noir fiction, nor that the surreal would become material for probative fictions, quests for the marvelous and for eros.

André Breton as a fictional character? There is some paradox or irony in thinking so, knowing the poet's reservations about the genre [2]. I just want to point out a few titles and encourage researchers to question this influence on recent authors and their audience. Is being inspired by surrealism or bringing in Breton or another member of the movement enough to surrealize one's prose or claim a lineage? What, then, is Breton the name of?

Here are summaries of eleven titles, following the year in which the main plot is set.

1925
Gilles SCHLESSER, La mort n’a pas d’amis. Parigramme, 2013. 236 p.

Paris 1925. A serial killer stages his corpses inspired by Max Ernst's painting Rendez-vous des amis. What link unites the victims? Camille Baulay (aka Oxy), a journalist for Le Petit journal, investigates the surrealist milieu, adopting its spirit under the benevolent protection of Commissioner Louis Gardel. In bourgeois salons, social evenings, and Parisian cafés, she mingles with dandies, politicians, and social climbers, cultured circles, and artists. The police receive strangely worded anonymous notes. Surrealist killer? Aesthetic murders? Eager to create, the killer (or collective?) leaves clues. The novel traces various Parisian circles in the context of the time, the mentality, and ongoing societal changes, including women's and sexual liberation.

Surrealism is very present in the background: through Max Ernst's painting, its many members, their meetings, their disputes, games (the invention of the exquisite corpse), their reading and commentary on Oxy's articles, whom Breton nicknames "the Winter Fairy," through dreams and madness. From rue Fontaine to 45 rue Blomet, Camille goes and is initiated into creativity and difference, while returning to her sophisticated world.

1926-1927
Patrick PECHEROT, Les Brouillards de la Butte. Gallimard (Folio / policier, 405), 2001. 283 p.

Four crooks unearth a corpse in a safe at Count De Klercq's, rue Junot. We are drawn into a series of adventures and murders in a picturesque Paris, from mansions to the bohemian poverty of the Butte. Nestor (Pipette, the smoker), the red, stubborn, wisecracking, drinker, brawler, walker of the suburbs and dreamer, improvises as a private detective among several odd jobs. He meets the regulars of the Cyrano and befriends André Breton, who introduces him to automatic writing and the surrealist revolution. In return, invited to a shootout in a cemetery, the poet proves to be a good automatic shooter. The news item and the crooks who pay with their lives or freedom mask blackmailers and profiteers—those industrialists who rushed to buy up German mines and factories in Lorraine after the war, who, after arming nations during the war, profit from reconstruction.

Evoking working-class Paris between the wars, Patrick Pécherot (born 1953) denounces corruption and the seedy underside of history, following the fates of idealists and losers. This novel, winner of the 2002 Grand Prix de littérature policière, is a tribute to Léo Malet, whose language it recreates, and to his character Nestor Burma. The first in a trilogy, it picks up where Malet left off in his unfinished novel Les Neiges de Montmartre.

The setting is the Paris of noir and social novels. Mixing literature, political history, and the labor movement, the detective novel becomes a sociological mirror. While demonstrators support Sacco and Vanzetti, Nestor, poet of the Vache enragée, encounters surrealism. Here is Breton, dragged in despite himself.

1926
Hester ALBACH, Léona, héroïne du surréalisme, trans. from Dutch by Arlette Ounanian, Arles, Actes Sud, 2009. 304 p.

A Dutch novelist reads André Breton's Nadja by chance and becomes passionate about the heroine. In this account, presented as an illustrated journal, the narrator gets involved in the investigation, searching for witnesses, documents, informants. The fiction, based on real elements, gives us the biography of Léona Delcourt, a lost person. From her brief encounter with Breton, she shows early signs of psychological trouble and is institutionalized until her death at 38 in 1941. This first biography, full of empathy, restores her sensitive being. What meaning did this lightning encounter have for Breton? Nadja is the book where the poet deposits the enigma. Dealing with Paris, the encounter, the surreal, an intimate experience, this poetic prose narrative is captivating and difficult to decipher. "Through Nadja, Breton is said to have described in coded language the stages of the great alchemical work." Hester Albach offers her bold reading, based on facts and her esoteric knowledge. Her deconstruction of Nadja gives body and life back to Léona.

On October 4, 1926, André Breton meets Leona Delcourt (Nadja). They see each other until the 13th. She urges the poet to write a novel about her. Retired to the Manoir d’Ango, near Varengeville-sur-mer, in August 1927, with Aragon working on his Traité de style, Breton begins writing Nadja. In November, during a group reading, he falls for Suzanne Muzard.

1924-1930
Raymond QUENEAU, Odile. 1937, rev. 1964. Gallimard (L’imaginaire, 276), 2001.

Here, narrator Roland Travy recounts, in a flippant and funny style, his youthful wanderings. Drafted in Algeria, he is troubled by the gaze of an Arab fixed on what remains elusive to him. Back in Paris, devoting himself to mathematics, the young man, supported by a small inheritance, keeps his distance from the world, women, and his emotions. In a shady circle, he befriends a well-bred girl, Odile, while maintaining the distance that keeps him from realizing he loves her. Compromised in a murder case, Travy decides to marry her out of "camaraderie." Meanwhile, Saxel, a smooth talker, introduces him to Anglarès, the leader of a group of infrapsychic research. The young platonic mathematician, made an associate by default, brings proof of a "mathematical unconscious." Together, they play with the chance of numbers, their music and mystique, the balance between quality and quantity, and practice divination by numerology according to fanciful rules. Another world exists, made of algebra and geometry. Saxel seduces a pretty medium who, in a group of communist spiritualists, channels the ghost of Lenin. He tries in vain to unite the two groups. For the infrapsychics, "dialectical materialism and belief in the immortality of the soul' cannot be reconciled. A pamphlet circulates for Saxel's exclusion, in his absence. Travy, shocked by the text and the process, leaves the group. Listening to the criticisms of another excluded member, Vincent, Travy realizes the childishness of the infrapsychic research, as well as his mathematical daydreams, and thus the futility of his life. Finally, on a trip to Greece, he admits his love for Odile, who takes on form and meaning for him. He regains his "human simplicity." He gives Latin lessons to live with the one he loves. "To be a man in the world where I had to live was already a hard and difficult task... I no longer wanted to refuse a love but to affirm my own." (p. 183).

Raymond Queneau joined the surrealist movement in 1924. From October 1925 to February 1927, he did his military service in the Zouaves in Algeria and Morocco (Rif War). Released, he joined the Comptoir national d’escompte. Among the surrealists, he mainly frequented those of the rue du Château, Prévert, Tanguy, Duhamel (who would create the Série noire), and the future film historian Georges Sadoul. At the end of July 1928, he married Janine Kahn, Simone's sister, wife of André Breton, whose side he took when the couple separated. He attended the Bar du Château meeting in March 1929. On June 6, Queneau and Breton quarreled. Excluded from the group in 1930, Queneau participated in the collective pamphlet Un cadavre against Breton. The second of three autobiographical novels (between Les Derniers jours, 1936; Les Enfants du limon, 1938) and his only roman à clef, Odile, published in 1937, was presented as a document to settle accounts with surrealism. The author settles scores with this period: some passages, though transposed, are reportage: Breton's group (Anglarès) becomes infrapsychism, Saxel has traits of Aragon, Vachol of Péret, Chènevis of Eluard, the painter Vladyslav is Dali, Roland Travy is Queneau himself. He describes the group's meetings at the café (p. 117-120), the use of mediums, and many other practices and ideas of the group.

1934
Fabrice BOURLAND, Les Portes du sommeil. 10/18 ↑, Grands détectives, 2008. 250 p.

Young British detective and adventurer Andrew Singleton comes to Paris to investigate a peculiar mystery: the suspicious death of Gérard de Nerval. He does not believe in the poet's "hanging" suicide, given Nerval's interest in hermeticism and the occult. On the boat to France, as a fata morgana appears, a mysterious young woman who comments on the phenomenon seems to dissolve with the mirage.

Barely in Paris, soon joined by his partner James Trelawney, they are drawn into a strange affair. A sleep specialist, neurophysiologist, and member of the metapsychic society, and a surrealist poet, whose only common point seems to be an interest in dreams, are found literally scared to death in their beds. A man in black visited these victims a few days earlier. Who is this shadowy man? What scheme is he preparing? Who is the beautiful unknown passenger who visits Andrew in dreams, whose appearances and warnings make him more lucid? A chase leads the two detectives from Parisian surrealist circles to a mysterious castle overlooking the Danube, beyond the gates of sleep.

The haunted castle, enigmatic presences, hypothetical creatures floating in the air, recall Jules Verne's The Carpathian Castle. In this story, where metapsychics seek to capture the energy of dreams, the fantastic outweighs plausibility. To the black romantic themes—dreams, spirits, castle, ghosts, evil scientist, found manuscript—are added recourses to surrealism to overcome modern skepticism. Set in the year of André Breton's second marriage, the story features the Fata Morgana, sleeps and dreams, telepathy, A. Breton, the medium woman. In the end, the real culprits are punished.

1938
Patrick PECHEROT, Belleville-Barcelone. Gallimard (Folio / policier, 489), 2007. 293 p.

It's the end of the Popular Front's heyday and the rise of peril in Europe. The far right is active in trying to overthrow the Republic. In Spain, the Republicans are losing, their ranks decimated by Stalinist factions eliminating Trotskyists and anarchists. Paris is a refuge for exiles. At the Bohman agency, Nestor the detective is bored. A well-bred girl has disappeared with her suitor—Piero, an Italian worker whose past as a fighter in Spain will catch up with him. We see Breton leaving his usual haunts to meet clandestinely with anarchists and Spanish Republicans; a secondary character, his presence gives the story an aura. Nestor and his resourceful friends—Yvette the secretary, Breton and surrealists, a magician undertaker, an Armenian restaurateur—face borderless networks, informers, tailings, arms deliveries, red hunts, and political assassinations. Beyond the story of defeat and tragedy, there are heroes eager to align their ideas and actions, the beauty of ideals, commitment, the vitality of the people, constant invention, and dreams. Breton's eye tracks surprises and chance. Love transforms Yvette. Lovers of the possible.

1938
Jean-François VILAR, Nous cheminons entourés de fantômes aux fronts troués. Paris, Seuil (Fictions & Cie), 1993. 476 p.

Here we find Victor Blainville, the photojournalist with three cats, the laid-back hero of Jean-François Vilar's noir novels, investigating on the ground, Katz's journal in hand, caught in a dizzying collision of times and history, in an endless Paris (extended by the maze of Prague and Mexico).

November 1989, the media report the arrival of Victor B. and Alex Katz, two hostages just released after 1,021 days of captivity abroad. The Berlin Wall is beginning to fall, with consequences for the map of Europe.

When they are to meet, Alex Katz is killed a few days later before Victor's eyes, who rejects the accident theory.

The plot thickens as various characters enter the scene. First Solveig, the Czech journalist. Marc, director of "Le Soir," ex-Maoist, old friend of Victor. AbiGaïl Stern, Katz's former lover, who gives Victor a diary kept by Alfred Katz in 1938. Then there's the persistent Laurent, tasked with watching Victor. There are the elders and their memories: Lourcet, a TV director at the end of his career, Lévine, ex-Trotsky's secretary, Gaïl's father, now a prominent professor in the US, Faible, the bookseller with terrible scars.

Everything echoes: places (Paris, Prague), eras (1989, 1938), generations (Alex, Alfred), man and city disfigured, synchronicities. An underground thread structures the story. In Paris, Victor's watch runs backward. In Prague, the little skeleton of the astronomical clock has been chiming for centuries. This city walker treads the thickness of places. Gaïl and Victor walk in their heroes' footsteps, in a Paris in full mutation; she wants to write and stage a play about Nadja. Behind the current decor, the visionary grasps the past: Victor follows in the footsteps of Nerval, Nicolas Flamel and the alchemists, revolutionaries, Parisians of the 1930s, while each evening Alfred Katz's diary makes him relive this Trotskyist militant, his encounter with the surrealists, his love story with Mila, occasional prostitute and model for Man Ray and Hans Bellmer, and his comrades, those "ghosts with pierced foreheads' murdered by Stalin's police. The city, its occult geography, its night, play an active role. We follow, in a single reading, the present drama and the love of Solveig and Victor alongside the events recounted in the diary. The present is caught up by the past: the two stories, 1938 and 1989, gradually merge—amid the destabilization of love, lies, suspicion. Beauty, fear, poetry, the surreal, the political-historical context tend to continue the dream as well as the pursuit. How to escape attackers, tailings, disguised cops, double agents, decoys? And above all, who were Alfred and Alex Katz?

The book, made of correspondences and nesting, is meticulously constructed. Evidence and blur are exchanged. We are gradually caught in these networks where surrealists—great dreamers of Paris—and hunted Trotskyists circulate. Everything ends in Prague, where current events cross the ghosts of the past, where one seeks and loses oneself in the passages and the maze. The snow muffles the velvet revolution of winter 1989. At the risk of turning there endlessly, Victor must tear himself away from the fascination of this magic lantern and leave this giant game of signs and clues.

It is a haunted book. The characters are possessed by their history, which mingles with History. Against oblivion, the present bites into the past until it weaves an inextricable web, unravels an interpretive delirium like that of Jacques Yonnet's La Rue des Maléfices. Nerval as entry and Breton's Nadja offer one of the keys to this story. What, in the unconscious of places, survives the erasure of evidence, traces, disappearance?

The title is a quote from Natalia Sedova; it refers to Aragon's "Front rouge" siding with the Stalinists. 1938, Alfred Katz's diary, allows us to retrace militant, union, Trotskyist circles, the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition, Man Ray, the deaths of Sedov, Rudolf Klément, the machinations of Trotsky's future assassin, Breton's stay in Mexico, the rise of dangers in Europe, the FIARI. 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, upheavals in the East, Vaclav Havel's election, Paris's transformations. And returns, to 1966, Breton's funeral; 1968, the far left, Prague. The elders make the link. The revenants and the obsession with Prague, the shocks in the East, the changes and the oblivion of postmodern society. The way Victor B. collects and reads his photos, which he hangs on the wall, is akin to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. Erudition marks the story, history nourishes Victor B.'s reflection, Vilar's alter ego.

1940
Patrick PECHEROT, Boulevard des Branques. Gallimard (Folio / policier, 531), 2005.

Here we find Nestor, the Bohman agency detective, tasked with watching over Griffart, a depressed psychiatrist as the world plunges into tragedy, war. June 1940, madness reigns, in the chaos of the exodus. A great jumble of humanity leaves Paris. Nestor could not prevent the professor's fatal act. He must not leave Paris during the investigation. While two thousand patients have been evacuated from the Clermont d’Oise asylum, Yvette, the secretary, calls Nestor from Chartres, where, from a strange stopped train from the Oise, she has recovered a call for help meant for him. Arriving at La Charité sur Loire, the hospital is bombed; many evacuees are killed—including Max Fehcker, anti-Nazi German, ex-fighter in Spain.

The investigation leads Nestor from the Salpêtrière to Clermont. He is helped by Riton and a national network of nurses. He faces an unbalanced artist who has faith in Breton, who has read the Letter to the Chief Physicians of Asylums. While Breton and his friends are in Marseille, Dr. Ferdière intervenes to enlighten Nestor on eugenic theses and a social hygiene program, already applied in Germany, that some French doctors want to implement. Prophylaxis to which Dr. Griffart was opposed. Ferdière helps Nestor leave the Clermont hospital; he intervenes in favor of his friend. Other madnesses seize minds: general disorganization, anonymous letters, false searches, abusive internments and dispossessions, all kinds of scams, the hidden gold of the Spanish Republic. The landmarks are gone.

Breton's appearance (awaiting exile in Marseille), Artaud, Freud, is late in the novel; they are present through books in a disturbed painter's studio, through her reproaches: "A friend of Breton shouldn't be like the others!" (p. 160-162). Gaston Ferdière intervenes positively. There are memories of good times on the Marne, Prévert, the filming of La Belle équipe. Nestor's daydreams and speech. The novel recreates the winter of 1940, the exodus, the camps, the restrictions, the newspapers of the time, the Aryanization of Paris.

May 1941-1945
Raphaël CONFIANT, Le Nègre et l’amiral, Paris, Grasset, 1988. 335 p.

This historical novel, set in Martinique from 1939-1945, i.e., Vichy under the tropics, focuses on Creole realities and events. In 1941, we find Claude Lévi-Strauss and Breton stopping over in the Antilles. The Creole language, colorful and baroque expressions, realism and everyday poetry are asserted against the universal. Creoleness sings the totality of the real (quimboiseurs, djobeurs, cane cutters, women of all, children, the colorful shantytown of Morne Pichevin, békés) and breaks the cliché of paradise islands. In this abundant, rhizomatic text, magical thought and "native" surrealism celebrate the encounter with the other. We discover a people attached to their island by all forms and the force of eros and vibrating for the homeland (France) with a mystical love.

The love of language also calls the Antillean. The writer Amédée Mauville criticizes negritude: one must not defend the black man but creoleness, mixture and blending, against any racial connotation. Creole comes from the Latin "creare," to create, to create oneself.

Breton, Césaire (barely mentioned) are there to confirm the voice of the bard of creoleness (against negritude). Confiant evokes Breton's unexpected discovery of Tropiques, and the Notebook for a Return to the Native Land to say that, as French poets, the ex-colonized imitate France. Breton is there without his wife or his companions in exile (the Massons, Mabille, Lam, Victor Serge and his own, etc.), the Césaires and their group are absent. Aube is mentioned regarding the ribbon Breton buys for her when discovering the journal. By returning to Paris in 1931, Légitime défense and Léro are mentioned. In fact, Breton and Lévi-Strauss did not stay together in Fort de France. If he is enchanted by the island, its diversity, the poet is also disillusioned and denounces the dark side, the shadow, the politico-economic situation, the békés, the ugliness in Martinique charmeuse de serpents, which, published in 1948, is not cited. Breton's presence serves a poetic reason—to legitimize this moment of awareness and resistance.

Summer 1945 / 2004
Claudie GALLAY, Dans l’or du temps, Ed. du Rouergue, 2004.

The narrator—unnamed—his wife Anna and their seven-year-old twins spend their summer vacation again in their house in Varengeville, by the beach. Games, snacks, sea bathing. By chance, he is led to a neighboring house where two elderly sisters live. What force will draw him there, where everything breathes the dust of time? While Clémence, the silent one, is busy, he listens to Alice, for whom the moment has come, facing the one who is there: "I always knew someone would come. I might have liked someone different. But it's you, isn't it?" (p. 250). He cannot help but return despite the tensions between them, for Alice, who spares no one and can be harsh, intrusive, who insinuates criticisms about married life and family, exerts a strong influence. Sometimes annoyed, he is soon caught in the web of a captivating story, broader, without borders: war, exile, father Victor Berthier, art dealer and photographer linked to Breton whom he meets again in Marseille, on the "Capitaine Paul-Lemerle" with Lévi-Strauss. They are together in Martinique, in New York. Alice opens her secrets to him: kachina, photos among the Hopi, a blue mask, a toy made by Max Ernst, Don Talayesva's book; she instructs and initiates him into the spirit of the Indians. He is captive to a confession where family past and intimacy mingle with the sacred, traditions, history, daily life with poetry, the marvelous with drama. Both feel the need for each other: he, silent, all ears, she because she needs to speak: the secret of the mask, why time froze for them at Christmas 1946. Alice's free speech, her life force, erode the defenses of her neighbor whose orderly life unravels. At the story"s end, the narrator experiences a crisis. Alice has passed on the "Let go of everything."

This man without qualities is altered, changed. He lives in a dissolution of the self, the death of the old man. On Breton's grave, he is now a "shaman" connected to a story that was not his, that becomes his and surpasses him. The lesson of the wind, the great space, the silence passes.

In the story, André Breton acts, Lévi-Strauss is there, Max Ernst, Elisa, Peggy Guggenheim, Aube are named. The well-informed author includes documents in the text (on the Kachina, Talayesva, Breton 1946-1966, the sale of his collection, etc.), she describes exile in New York, the life and Hopi festivals, the Snake Dance. We feel the poet's fascination for the pueblos, the kachina, and the magnetism of the mask. The past returns to this place where Braque lived and is buried, not far from the Manoir d’Ango. The rain contrasts with the oppressive heat of the West, old age with youth, disorientation and exile with the narrator's days. Breton exerts a transformative action beyond his disappearance.

1980
Jean-François VILAR, C’est toujours les autres qui meurent, Arles, Actes Sud (Babel noir; 20), 2008. 260 p.

Faced with the unpredictable, photojournalist Victor Blainville improvises an unusual investigation.

At his meeting, passage du Caire, Victor discovers the body of a woman in a very studied macabre pose, perfecting Marcel Duchamp's last subversive work, Étant donnés. He takes photos.

Inspector Villon—is he trying to frame him for this aesthete's crime?

A pretty bookseller gives him a second meeting, passage Vivienne. Her name is Rose. That's life. She gives her next meetings as riddles to mislead and finally divert the investigator.

With dark touches of black humor, the escalating plot takes place in the small world of survivors of post-1968 protest movements. Victor, who has moved on, disappointed and anarchic, must revisit his activist years and find old comrades adrift. For these disillusioned revolutionaries, "the question is: how to agree against oneself" (p. 110). Detached from himself and available, Victor faces perverse situations, atypical places, individuals eager to live and provoke artistic acts in reality. The novel also plunges into modern art, with a grand finale happening worthy of the society of the spectacle. The Bachelors have taken art hostage by seizing one of its temples.

Jean-François Vilar (Paris, 1942), journalist at Rouge, ex-Trotskyist activist. Unemployed, he wrote this first novel (winner of the Télérama Grand Prix for noir fiction, 1982), whose title is Marcel Duchamp's epitaph. Victor Blainville (from Duchamp's birthplace) would be the hero of six novels (1982-1993). Vilar places himself under three tutelary figures: Leon Trotsky, Dashiell Hammett, Marcel Duchamp. The plot accumulates clues and references to the latter and deciphers some of his works for us.

* * *

Thus, from novel to novel, we follow a kind of surrealist saga through its eras. The neo-noir [3] and genre fiction thus respond to the myth demanded by Breton.

From the beginning of the movement, noir fiction, Sade, Fantômas, Musidora, imaginary or real crimes have fascinated the group, also closely linked to the tragedies of a century of inhumanity, prey to the death drive. Its black humor and noir fiction are connected through Léo Malet [4] and Marcel Duhamel, creator of the Série noire at Gallimard in 1944.

I refer to the excellent study by Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime [5] and the review by Virginie Pouzet-Duzer. Everything is said about the relationship between surrealism and crime. Would the epistemê and ethics of its aesthetics go so far as to consider murder as one of the fine arts? To the negativity, violence, and political elimination involved in revolutionary praxis are opposed Breton's reluctance and aphasias. If the criminal act attracted the surrealists, the movement's sharp and offbeat spirit seduces noir and detective novel authors. If the French surrealist pulps were influenced by the style of American action novels, widely translated and exported in the Série noire, Duhamel acts as a transatlantic go-between. At the end of his book, Eburne refers to the early stories of Chester Himes [6], whom he ranks among the representatives of a vernacular surrealism. To which his critic objects that "there is certainly a link between the Série Noire and surrealism. But Himes's writing—this renewal of reality made possible via the absurdity of vernacular fragments that Eburne likens to collage—does not seem to us, for all that, surrealist. Moreover, the Deleuzian reading of such writing, as Eburne brilliantly undertakes, mainly convinces us of an almost postmodernity in Himes's novels." [7]

For Eburne, refuting Jean Clair's attack, the surrealist experience was above all an aesthetic attempt to abolish the exploitation of man by man, by provoking an insurrection of the mind. It responds to all forms of totalitarianism. Breton rejects realism, socialist realism, and existentialist phenomenology. For Marcel Duchamp, the spectator completing the work of art becomes one of the pieces of his apparatus. Since it is the reader, the viewer, who make the poem, the painting, it is up to these subjects of art to react as much as to act, to understand how aesthetics, linked to ethics, implies their responsibility and choice. The surrealist work encourages its readers to decipher the signs, to decode as cryptograms the subjective and objective, subliminal and (self-)revealing messages.

Postmodern writers and artists, erudite, informed, are read by a cultivated, knowledgeable audience. Their works, with keys, are addressed to contemporary listeners. The reader is a participant in the work, the collective game, which solicits their intelligence and pleasure. Historical stories, detective novels, biographies transgress the genre here. Through various blends, mixing documents and fiction with writing effects (implicit, deictic, ellipses, breaks, flashbacks, strategies and games, off-text and off-screen). Literalness is enhanced by inventions, levels of interpretive meaning of a liberated subjectivity. Sharing the same horizon of expectation, in collusion, the readership becomes a "co-author." From the rules and codes of the genre, and relying on historicity, each novel reshuffles the cards into new distributions, configurations, and strategies. Engaged in a replay of destiny, the fictional heroes play their part within another story, another scene, embedded in global History.

"The unbridled games of fiction may be the most appropriate response to history," "likewise, with black humor or when it wants to ignore the appearances of reality in favor of a timeless fantastic, [surrealism] does not in truth stray from the very present stormy news... (whether it is the Spanish Civil War, the uncertain aftermath of the Popular Front, or the fate of Ethiopia, History is then joined." [8]

In most of the stories in our selection, the fictional imagination relates literary history, the means of fiction, while following historical meanders. If their heroes or killers may have a surrealist character or behavior, these are not surrealist novels.

Surrealist literature, which cares about language, language effects, is in its form, its imagery, and its distance from realism. Its other scene refers to latent meaning.

Is the recourse to surrealism then only a pretext? a framework to launch the imagination from an enigmatic painting, a book? Surrealism as a provider of dreams, of the marvelous: a material? In these acts of allegiance and rallying are the pleasure of reunion and a way of setting identifiable cultural markers.

However, fiction is not a slavish imitation of external events. Expressing confused feelings, malaise, terror or uncertainty, the wavering of a subject, it acts as a seismograph of deep, underlying tensions and disorders beneath the surface of the story. Noir is, for Breton, symptomatic of great societal and social turmoil.

Art, literature can respond to reality—illuminate the unspeakable, repair oblivion, the devastation of the unspoken, echo current events. It is not a representation of reality, but a representation of the collective imagination.

Rooms, cellars, chests, castles, underground passages, Prague, Paris, the island are places that belong to another world, a symbolic topology; they refer to an inner scene.

Surrealism has rubbed shoulders with networks and groups of affinities or incompatibilities, has caused many splits, tensions, and knots. Our novelists who draw inspiration from it tap into these zones of interference mixed with politics, in facts that took place at the interface of legality and illegality, legitimized violence and calls for non-violence.

The investigation, the crime? Breton denounced war, its horrors, Stalin's purges and trials. He rejects the idea that "the end justifies the means' even for revolutionary reasons. Violence, lies, cynicism, blindness of a time when states and clandestine networks proceed in denial and public denial to settle scores, kidnappings, secret assassinations, mass murders, death camps, genocides, must be condemned and elucidated. Dark history exposes the malaise of the historical situation; what emerges as a "ghost," the return of the repressed, the screen memory, is a cruel act, the cry of a gagged world, a dead person demanding reparation, justice, and restoration of truth. Words are needed to say it, to ward off the risk of repetition.

The investigator prowls in search of the absent, the missing whose mourning is not done. Nerval, Klément, Sedov do not belong to the past but haunt the shadow zone, the crypt of the unspoken, secrets, the unavowed. Traumas that mark a destiny can lead to resilience or bad conscience. Wounds that do not heal, that continue to torment. Survivals (in Didi-Huberman's sense) encrypted in reality, presence, the living haunt places of memory, hypnotize the underworlds, forbid forgetting.

After the binary world of antagonistic blocs, where good and evil, the good and the bad functioned as mirror images, the deconstruction of the 1970s came to question the foundations, demystify. Neither the postmodern hero in his irresolution nor the antihero has mastery of things. The novel experiences the dissolution of the subject, the self, the narrative thread, added to the defeat of meaning, the disenchantment of the world.

How to tell the world as it is? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat becomes abstract, the enemy diffuse. Crises, fantasies, and paranoid fears lead to the derealization of the world. Geopolitical upheavals, the awakening of Islam make us lose our bearings. The hypercomplex technological universe, instant global connections, globalize the data. Cyberwars, cybercrimes, cybercops. The end of History is declared. Everything is already said, accomplished... until the imaginary becomes real, the unthinkable surpasses fiction: with the fall of the New York towers, September 11, 2001. Reality strikes: doubt is revoked. The impact of the Event on minds creates a collective trauma. The attack opened the conflict into a war that does not say its name. Death is hidden, bodies, pulverized, disappeared, are removed from millions of witnesses. Disintegration is worrying.

Through the imagination, it is a matter of bringing to consciousness a haunted century, of thwarting the death drive—the "mortal civilization" trying to annihilate external and internal threats by all means. Yet how many possibilities, spatiotemporal dimensions, and logical alternatives does the multiverse offer, outside the interconnected village!

The city is the symbol of order and current disorder, an unlimited field of play and investigations in constant demolition and construction. Our Paris pedestrians give us their passages in the footsteps of the Living as a writing/reading of the screen-city.

In a logic of the included third, times and places, fiction and non-fiction, milieus are intertwined. Welcoming the exploited, dissidents, losers, deviants, noir fiction knows the places of exclusion, reclusion, margins, shantytowns, these concentrations of social suffering.

Moreover, paraliterature, subversive fiction, outsider art, surrealism awaken repressed human faculties, transgressive pleasures, hindered by education, self-censorship, mutilating and neurotic social conformity. They love slang, Creole and their inventions, joining the verbal finds, play on signifiers (toponyms, patronyms) dear to the surrealists. The surreal deposits its share of dream, magic. Absurdity, humor, self-hypnosis, intoxication, madness, make the familiar strange, fantastic. The primacy of action is replaced by the non-action of the detective reporter: witness, observer at work, recorder, collector, decoder.

Not mere entertainment, fiction, SF, the fantastic, the "bad genre" reflect these fears, this violence that shakes the world. Writing plays with fields of force.

Symbols and archetypes are the active language of myths. For this series of fictions, it is a matter of integrating into the immemorial the myth of history itself. By reusing the springs of the classical myth, beyond a destiny, an adventure seems to continue, renewed, like a new game. This permanent return allows the subversion of categories, relaunches the creative adventure. The surreal creates an event, a meeting between imagination and reality. André Breton as catalyst, Duchamp as master of letting-be, letting-not-be, by virtue of a higher poetic-ethical reason, Trotsky or Léo Malet, embody here a mythical, tutelary presence. They respond to the contemporary rehabilitation of the Other (love or "occult" transcendence). This recourse to the mage, enchanter, juggler, revolutionary, who gives meaning, who polarizes and magnetizes action in favor of the living, has a pleasurable and structuring effect that legitimizes the future of the quest. It straightens, stands up, sets in motion. The return (turning) of the hero, of meaning (positive), of times—after the crisis of the subject—brings him to a changed light, to transvalued values. This third, having blank checks, opens, holds, and gathers. Against withdrawal and renunciation, inner and collective accomplishments can occur.

The birth of surrealism itself responded to this "which demands, after all this human hecatomb, that a dazzling reparation be made to life" [9].

After disappointments, destruction, losses, reason needs the help of imagination, the resources of fiction, a creative vision. André Breton, the man who said NO for a YES, who did not compromise in his refusals, embodies this possibility in literature. The poet who worked to blow up the bastilles of the mind stands before us. His aura galvanizes this intelligence, frees the life drive. We have gone beyond the black.

The true revolution, non-violent, is interior. It is the reintegration of the poetic into life, the city. Change transforms daily life, the gaze, relationships with others. Gratuitousness, reinvented work-leisure, love will create us.

So back to art, to fiction, to what, making us rediscover our original vocation, must "shake us like a child." Surrealism is this passionate, collective quest for an ideal, spiritual treasure: the gold of time.

At its level, each novel marks a completed cycle. A story ends. At the beginning, for the thrill and awakening of the inner child: "there will be a time."

    1 — René Daumal, L’Evidence absurde, Gallimard, 1972, p. 153-159. ↩

    2 — Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Le Surréalisme et le roman, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1983. David Vryfaghs, "La querelle du romanesque au sein du premier groupe surréaliste français", in Contextes, revue de sociologie de la littérature, 10, 2012: Querelles d’écrivains (XIXe-XXIe siècles): de la dispute à la polémique (13 p.): http://contextes.revues.org/5041. Dictionnaire André Breton, ed. Henri Béhar, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2012; entries "Roman", "Duhamel, Marcel", "Malet, Léo", etc. ↩

    3 — Jean-Patrick Manchette (Marseille, 1942-Paris 1995) launched neo-noir in France, noir novel, sociopolitical critique, situationist. His humanity and picturesque Paris are confronted with counterculture and far-left terrorism. ↩

    4 — Léo Malet (1909-1996) created his hero of the Nouveaux mystères de Paris, popular detective novels, Nestor Burma in 1942. Arriving from Montpellier to Montmartre in 1920, among a thousand jobs, Malet recited verses at the cabaret La Vache Enragée. He frequented anarchists and became a surrealist poet (1930-1949). His last novel, Abattoir ensoleillé, 1972, is about the disappearance of Rudolf Klément, Trotsky's secretary: he leaves Léo Malet's home, 224 rue de Vanves, and, between July 14 and 16, 1938, disappears forever. Malet joined the FIARI. ↩

    5 — J. P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008, 344 p. (cover features Jacqueline Lamba's card "L’as de la Révolution": a wheel splattering blood). ↩

    6 — Chester Himes (1909-1984), African-American author, experienced the harshness of life young: poverty in Harlem, accident, bad luck, prison. He discovered the Anthology of Black Humor. His first novel, in 1945, went unnoticed. He left for Paris in 1953, met his translator and publisher, Marcel Duhamel, in 1957, who commissioned a book; La Reine des pommes won the Grand Prix de la littérature policière in 1958. He denounces the condition of blacks in the US and racism. Violence and comedy double the side of social and existential realism disintegrated by misunderstanding: in offbeat mental universes, black American culture is seen as subversive. Himes joins the political and real plan only by the dissonant way. The effect of black aesthetics is linked to this gap and the notion of black humor creating what will be called the absurd. ↩

    7 — Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, "Surréalisme: crime exquis", online in Acta fabula, vol. 10, no. 6. Reading notes, June-July 2009, URL: http://www.fabula.org/revue/document5095.php, page consulted August 24, 2013. ↩

    8 — A. Breton, O.C., III, p. 1339, "Roman noir", note by E.-A. Hubert. ↩

    9 — A. Breton, O.C., III, La Clé des champs (Limites non-frontières du surréalisme), p. 667. ↩

©Mélusine 2013