SURREALIST GAMES

par Jean-Paul Morel

[Jean-Paul Morel kindly entrusted us with the original French version of his article, sent in March 2004 to the Brazilian publisher Perspectiva of Sao Paulo (Fax: ↑ 3885-8388, email: editorial@editoraperspectiva.com.br), and which has just been published, translated — like the other contributions — into Portuguese, in the collective volume: O Surrealismo, edited by Jacob Guinsburg and Sheila Leirner, 926 p., pp. 773-781.]

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"In the beginning" there were many things... There was certainly "the Word," and it was from the "Word' that the Surrealists, under the guidance of André Breton, in the aftermath of the First World War, intended to start again to rebuild Life. Play was no longer quite in order, or rather, in the face of such an upheaval of values, largely anticipated by Nietzsche, perhaps it was finally necessary to take play seriously. The Surrealists, empowered by the "tabula rasa" operation carried out by Dada on the ashes of Ubu ("Cornegidouille! We will not have demolished everything if we do not even demolish the ruins!" Ubu Enchained), thus promoted play not as a mere diversion, a distraction, a parenthesis in daily life, but as a way of living, even a mode of being. And it is not an exaggeration to see in it the highest response to the wager proposed by Pascal, which no one had dared to denounce until then as a fool's wager. "I have always bet against God," wrote André Breton, "and the little I have won in the world is for me only the gain of that bet. However derisory the stake (my life), I am aware of having fully won" ("God," Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, 1938).

This is the horizon briefly sketched, and which must be kept in mind to understand the true stakes of surrealist games, lest one see in them only one type among other playful activities. It is truly a matter of Life, and of escaping the pure logic of opposites, as Alfred Jarry had already attempted by stating the great principles of his pataphysics (Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, 1898, Book II, Ch.VIII). This is very clearly the point at which the Second Manifesto of Surrealism opens in 1930, the search for a "point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived contradictorily." The hope for determination is found almost identically formulated again in 1954: "The imperative need we felt to put an end to the old antinomies of the type 'action and dream,' 'past and future,' 'reason and madness,' 'high and low,' etc. led us not to spare that of 'serious' and 'non-serious' (play), which governs that of 'work' and 'leisure,' 'wisdom' and 'foolishness,' etc." (Médium, no. 2, February 1954).

In this serious approach to play, to which "it would be absurd to attribute only a destructive or constructive meaning: the point in question is, a fortiori, that at which construction and destruction cease to be brandished against each other" (Second Manifesto), one dimension cannot be forgotten, the dimension of pleasure, as Jean Schuster notably recalled: "The activity of play, in surrealism [...] gives the pleasure principle form and power, what it needs to dialectically confront the reality principle" (La Brèche, no. 3, September 1962) – a joyful détournement, let us note in passing, of the two great principles of psychic functioning established by Dr. Freud...

Play thus comes to be promoted to the highest rank of human activities: a free activity par excellence, inherently unproductive – it aims at an "unconditional exaltation of poetry" – which will nevertheless have its rules, but which, as we will see them practiced, escape the categories in which Roger Caillois tried to confine it (agôn / competition, alea / chance, mimicry / simulation, ilinx / vertigo – see Les jeux et les hommes, 1958). And if "what we have been able to discover as enriching in terms of knowledge came only afterwards' (André Breton, 1954), surrealism was indeed founded at its birth – (first) Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924 – on an attempt to penetrate "the real functioning of thought." It is best here to recall the two definitions then set forth by André Breton:

Another important aspect, rightly emphasized by Emmanuel Garrigues in his compendium of Surrealist Games (Archives du surréalisme, no. 5, 1995): the collective dimension that play brought "from the outset" to Surrealism. "During various experiments conceived in the form of 'parlor games,'" André Breton notes in a footnote to the Second Manifesto, "we believe we have brought out a curious possibility of thought, which would be that of its pooling. In any case, very striking relationships are established in this way, remarkable analogies are declared, an inexplicable factor of irrefutability most often intervenes, and all things considered, this is one of the most extraordinary meeting places." He would return to this in 1954: "Although, as a precaution, this activity was sometimes called 'experimental' by us, we were above all seeking entertainment in it. [...] other considerations prompted us to continue it; from the outset, it proved apt to strengthen the bonds that united us, fostering the awareness of our desires in what they might have in common." And he adds in a note: "In this context, only the development of 'sleep experiments' and the practice of the so-called 'truth game" eventually took on a divisive turn."

In short, "the activity of play" is what welded the group together, and even allowed Surrealism to survive after the Second World War. Its dissolution, let us recall, would not be pronounced until after May 1968, following irreconcilable differences (Jean Schuster, "Le Quatrième Chant," Le Monde, October 4, 1969).

With these theoretical elements established—which, moreover, were for the most part set retrospectively and a posteriori—let us move on to practical work.

"It is today common knowledge that Surrealism, as an organized movement, was born in a large-scale operation on language [...] What was it about? Nothing less than rediscovering the secret of a language whose elements would cease to behave like wrecks on the surface of a dead sea. For this, it was important to remove them from their increasingly strictly utilitarian usage, which was the only means of emancipating them and restoring all their power to them." (André Breton, Du surréalisme en ses œuvres vives, 1962) It is indeed essentially in work on language, which can find many fathers—let us say, to cite a few names, from Lautréamont to James Joyce, passing through Jean-Pierre Brisset, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Roussel—and, let us emphasize, undertaken at a time when linguistics was still quite stammering (first real stone: Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, posthumous, 1916), which also had the chance to cross paths with the great decoder of the mechanisms of unconscious functioning, and therefore of creation, Sigmund Freud (with The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899)—it is therefore in work on language that surrealist games essentially consisted.

And it is indeed that in the beginning was the word: see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages ↑. But in the beginning there was also the image, and, long before Jacques Derrida set out to demonstrate it with his Mémoires d'aveugles ↑, "came to double [these language games], on the plastic level, procedures and recipes immediately made available to all by their inventor: collage, frottage, fumage, casting, spontaneous decalcomania, candle drawing, etc." (André Breton 1954 – and see Louis Aragon, Les collages, Paris, Hermann, 1965). However, except for the famous tarot game to which we will return, it is difficult here to integrate them, having been, like automatic writing, word games and puns, or dream narratives, above all the fruit of individual approaches (Max Ernst, Jacques Prévert, to cite its principal practitioners).

As Emmanuel Garrigues did in his summary (already cited), to a classification that would emphasize principles and neglect the random, we prefer to follow now the chronological order of experiments.

The first of the recorded games appears in the journal Littérature, 1st series, no. 18, dated March 1921, and under the title "Liquidation." It involved the participants—some of whom would form the first surrealist nucleus—very scholastically attributing grades, according to a scale ranging from -25 to +20, to an imposing list of 191 names, presented with the arbitrariness of alphabetical order, and all official values or at least recognized ones. The goal of the game being to "put an end to all this glory," by awarding "to each the praise he deserves," and therefore, less to classify than to declassify. We could not deprive you of delivering the results, better than any analysis or commentary and which will encourage you to continue the game:

The 20 first and the 20 last:

The second game, published in the same journal Littérature, 2nd series, no. 2, dated April 1, 1922, consisted of trying to target the preferences of each person, to naturally confront them with those of others. If poems, "that still and always defends itself. What defends itself much less is the kind of predilection we have for certain things that surround us. [...] Why do you choose this woman, this brand of cigarettes? One would be wrong to believe that this commits to nothing." The questionnaire grouped thirty-seven "subjects' of predilection, ranging from the usual object, animal, flower to the politician, painter, musician, from color to drink and stimulant, from woman to the way of making love. A double game, since one can then try, behind the choices, to find out who made them.

The third game is actually a type of game that will have several variants, itself a variant of the "little papers" game and which announces the most famous, and the most creative of all surrealist games, which will be the "exquisite corpse."

Variant 1: simple Question/Answer game, which can concern a man, an object, an idea, published in La Révolution surréaliste, no. 11, March 1928 (under the title "Le dialogue en 1928"). It is best to reproduce here a few samples.

Q. from Raymond Queneau to Marcel Noll: What is André Breton?
R. from Marcel Noll: An alloy of humor and sense of disaster; something like a top hat.
Q. from Marcel Noll to Louis Aragon: What is fear?
R. from Louis Aragon: Playing one's all on a deserted square.
Q. from André Breton to Suzanne Muzard: What is the kiss?
R. from Suzanne Muzard: A wandering, everything capsizes.
Q. from Suzanne Muzard to André Breton: What is day?
R. from André Breton: A woman bathing naked at nightfall.
Q. from Suzanne Muzard to André Breton: What are the eyes?
R. from André Breton: The night watchman in a perfume factory.
Q. from Benjamin Péret to André Breton: What is equality?
R. from André Breton: It's a hierarchy like any other.
Q. from André Breton to Benjamin Péret: What is rape?
R. from Benjamin Péret: The love of speed.

Variant no. 2, published in the journal Variétés (special issue, "Le surréalisme en 1929," June 1929). The question will open with an "If..." or a "When...," and the given answer will therefore follow in the future or conditional tense. A few examples:

Q. from André Breton to Louis Aragon: If the Revolution broke out tomorrow
R. from Louis Aragon: Being a repeat offender would be an honor for all.
Q. from André Breton to Pierre Unik: If the rabble could have its say
R. from Pierre Unik: Beggars would be buried in the basilica of Saint-Denis.
Q. from André Breton to Simone Muzard: If everything flew away one day in a strong wind
R. from Simone Muzard to André Breton: Sleepwalkers would walk more than ever on the edges of roofs.
Q. from André Breton to Simone Muzard: If God had forgotten to give horns to the Devil
R. from Simone Muzard: The mechanics of the express trains would stop so as not to crush the caterpillars.
Q. from Pierre Unik to Louis Aragon: When a statue is erected to the association of ideas
R. from Louis Aragon: The angel of the bizarre will invent the art of billiards.

Last variant: game enriched with questions-answers, following a visit made by André Breton and Alberto Giacometti to the flea market, published as a postscript to an article entitled "Équation de l'objet trouvé," in the journal Documents34, Brussels, special issue, "Interventions surréalistes," June 1934, under the title "Le dialogue en 1934." Let us give again as examples:

Q. from Marcelle Ferry to André Breton: What is solitude?
R. from André Breton: It's the queen seated at the foot of the throne.
Q. from Benjamin Péret to André Breton: What is "socialism in one country"?
R. from André Breton: It's a cart in a rut.
Q. from André Breton to Benjamin Péret: What is work?
R. from Benjamin Péret: It's the execution of Louis XVI.
Q. from Yves Tanguy to André Breton: What is old age?
R. from André Breton: It's a coward.

We will not dwell on the following game, the most accessible, practicable by anyone of all the games practiced by the Surrealists. We will only recall here its definition, given in the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme in 1938:

EXQUISITE CORPSE – Paper folding game which consists in having a sentence or drawing composed by several people, without any of them being able to take into account the previous collaboration or collaborations.
Which dictionary specifies: the example that gave its name to the game is contained in the first sentence that would have been obtained in this way: "The corpse – exquisite – will drink – the wine – new." Other results will be given in Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, no. 4, December 1931.

Much more sophisticated, and in our opinion the most fruitful (objects moreover for the first time of long commentaries – signed Paul Éluard, Arthur Harfaux and Maurice Henry), are the "experimental researches' conducted over two months, February and March 1933, and published in the same Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, no. 6, dated May 15, 1933. And if one asked oneself questions that the "Messieurs d'Aucuns' might consider incongruous, that is to say outside their usual appropriation? Five "subjects' are thus proposed for testing, based on a battery of questions variable according to the subjects, and ranging from 15 to 30 questions:

1° on the irrational knowledge of the object (in this case the crystal ball of fortune tellers)
2° on the irrational knowledge of the object - bis (a piece of pink velvet)
3° on the irrational possibilities of penetration and orientation in a painting (in this case: The enigma of a day, by Giorgio de Chirico)
4° on the irrational possibilities of life at any given date (fixed by drawing lots to the year 409)
5° on certain possibilities of irrational embellishment of a city (in this case Paris)

The eventual sixth, on the irrational knowledge of the metro (Parisian), at the initiative of Benjamin Péret in the 1950s, was perhaps intended for the collectivity, but does not seem to have been filled out except by Benjamin Péret alone.

Let us give two examples of questioning:

Questions [no.1]
on the irrational knowledge of the object

1. Is it diurnal or nocturnal?
2. Is it favorable to love?
3. Is it apt for metamorphoses?
4. What is its spatial situation in relation to the individual?
5. To what era does it correspond?
6. What happens if it is plunged into water?
7. into milk?
8. into vinegar?
9. into urine?
10. into alcohol?
11. into mercury?
12. To what element does it correspond?
13. To what philosophical system does it belong? -
14. To what disease does it make one think?
15. What is its sex?
16. To what historical figure can it be identified?
17. How does it die?
18. With what should it meet on a dissection table for it to be beautiful?
19. What are the two objects with which one would like to see it in a desert?
20. At what place on a naked woman's body would you place it?
21. and if the woman is asleep?
22. and if she is dead?
23. To what zodiac sign does it correspond?
24. On what part of an armchair would you place it?
25. On what part of a bed would you place it?
26. To what offense does it correspond?

Questions [no.3]
on the irrational possibilities of penetration and orientation in a painting

1. Where is the sea?
2. Where would a ghost appear?
3. Where would an elephant appear?
4. Where would a stork appear?
5. Describe the landscape that surrounds the city?
6. Where would water be discovered?
7. At what place would one make love?
8. At what place would one masturbate?
9. Where would one defecate?
10. Upon arriving at the square, what would you go to see first?
11. Who does the statue represent?
12. What time is it?
13. Who will be the first person arriving at the square? Where will they come from? How will they be? What will they come to do there?
14. How do you see the statue of the woman of the person figured on the square?
15. What advertisement would one make on the main building on the left?

The (second) war past, the new experimental attempts will be far from all being as convincing, or even convinced. The game of analogies, dated 1952, "And if it were an animal?", doubtless seductive in principle, hardly proves enriching – simple café game, it had moreover not been the object of publication. The characters put to the question are less and less heterogeneous, understand, more and more conventional; are declined, without more surprise, the beacons of the surrealist pantheon: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jarry, Nerval, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, Jacques Vaché, le Douanier Rousseau, Apollinaire, le marquis de Sade, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Novalis, Hugo, Poe, Chirico, Jérôme Bosch, Marcel Duchamp, Watteau, Gauguin, Swift, Kafka, Lichtenberg, Huÿsmans, Saint-Just, Xavier Forneret, Charles Cros, Edvard Munch. The "analogy card' game, published later in Le Surréalisme, même (no. 5, spring 1959), which consists in filling by analogy the nineteen categories of the identity card as officially established (in France), will be much more creative. "Photograph" will be given by an animal photo, "date of birth" by a historical event, "profession" by a disinterested activity, "nose" by a perfume, "distinguishing marks' by sexual inclination, etc. Freud, Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Héloïse, Saint-Just, Swift, Watteau, douanier Rousseau, Quincey and Nietzsche will thus be portrayed.

The syllogism game, organized for three or groups of three, in 1953, could have made the mill"s wings turn again. See, as an example: "At Night, all cats are gray / Now the vampire has only limited flight / Therefore progress is a myth", or "All women are mountaineers / Now my wife is a witch / Therefore Troy will be destroyed". Not published, it does not seem to have taken hold and will remain without posterity. The same went for the game "What are the three?", proposed by Jean-Louis Bédouin for the journal Médium around 1954, based on a "questionnaire in 24 questions asking each to designate the three persons, objects or ideas whose disappearance seems most desirable", which therefore presented itself as an amplified remake of the "liquidation" undertaken in 1921. "What are the three attitudes that you hold to be particularly intolerable in women, or in men? The three institutions whose suppression you wish? The three acts that you would refuse to commit?", etc. However, it does not seem to have been conceived piece by piece, hence often partial answers; and perhaps also that their transmission by correspondence did not constitute a sufficient stimulus.

Much better thought out, and therefore more fruitful, had nevertheless been the game "Ouvrez-vous?" launched by André Breton himself, and published for the first issue of this new journal (Médium, November 1953). "Since it happens," he writes in his presentation, "that we are visited in dreams by illustrious characters long since disappeared and that also a persistent fiction wants a small number of others – such as Isaac Laquedem, Nicolas Flamel, the count of Saint-Germain – to persist so well in living that they show themselves, at intervals, in broad daylight, it is not much forcing the slope of the plausible to imagine that, through the crack of a door, following a ring or knocks, we find ourselves in the presence of such a 'noble visitor' (as one says 'noble traveler") issued from our imagery. The interest of such speculation is, abstraction made of the stupor into which this sudden recognition would plunge us – that we identify the arrival immediately or that he must name himself – to precipitate in us, at the second, the feelings quite often complex that we can bear him. The only resources are, in fact, to let in (with more or less enthusiasm) or to dismiss (with more or less consideration)."

Were invited to present themselves: Balzac, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Bettina [von Arnim], Brisset, Cézanne, Chateaubriand, Juliette Drouet, Fourier, Freud, Fulcanelli, Gauguin, Goethe, Goya, Caroline de Günderode, Hegel, Hugo, Huÿsmans, Lenin, Mallarmé, Marx, Gustave Moreau, Nerval, Nietzsche, Germain Nouveau, Novalis, Poe, Quincey, Robespierre, [le douanier] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Seurat, Stendhal, Van Gogh, Verlaine – a superb lineup, which did not fail this time to agitate the seventeen participants.

Beautiful again in principle, since it was a matter of attacking "the narrow subjection of thought to the principle of identity," is the game that was reproduced in the two following issues (Médium, no. 2, February 1954 and no. 3, May 1954), of "one in the other." It rests on "the idea that any object is 'contained' in any other, that it suffices to singularize the latter in a few traits (touching substance, color, structure, dimensions) to obtain the former." But here it is preceded and followed by very long circumlocutions for a game that rests above all on the talents of the mime and also opens the door to "everything is in everything" (and reciprocally!). Benjamin Péret thus starts from a church Swiss to make one guess a shooting gallery, from a woman"s breast to make one discover the Milky Way, but all the correspondences have not been as fertile, and even if André Breton invokes that "we have not encountered a single failure."

We will leave to the loss section the few other games, often moreover unfinished or which no longer even found their "clientele." The vein, enthusiasm, humor, taste for provocation, slowly exhausted themselves. But should we not put on the other hand at the same rank as games, as José Pierre suggested, and for their theatrical aspect, the researches on sexuality, the various surveys, including that on suicide, the various "trials' (Maurice Barrès, Anatole France), the deliberately organized disturbances at certain banquets or shows (Germaine Dulac, Paul Claudel)...? Part serious, part game? Alas, there are no longer enough witnesses today to decide.

We could not now close this panorama without inscribing in it this pivotal experience in the history of the surrealist group, a game against a background of danger... recently re-exhumed thanks to the generous donation that Aube Breton and her daughter Oona made to the Cantini museum in Marseille. I want to speak of the famous tarot game, collectively realized by the Surrealists (provisionally) refugees in Marseille in 1940 and who had some worries to make about the establishment of the Vichy government. A diversion, to be sure, and to cover the sound of boots... The French Revolution had already set about cleaning up the traditional card game – a cleanup that ultimately failed to impose itself, and even in a France that had become republican again. André Breton, and his "gang" from "Espère-Visa" (concretely the villa Air Bel where, thanks to the incredible Varian Fry, they had found refuge), to attack the no less traditional Marseille tarot. The great red and black duality is maintained, but one hastens to dethrone the king, queen and rehabilitate the jack, who become respectively a genius, a siren and a mage. To the distribution and hierarchy in "spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs' – go figure why! – is substituted a still quadripartite distribution, more highly symbolic: Love (red), Dream (black), Revolution (red), Knowledge (black). A new emblem for each of these new "suits': the flame will replace the sword, the star will replace the coin, the (bloody) wheel will replace the cup, the lock will replace the staff. Above all, each of the Surrealists, after drawing lots, goes at it with their colored pencils to redraw the main figures, understanding, of course, to promote the heroes they claim. Which gives the following final "table":

Let us finally specify that, in order to avoid any personalization, all the cards [52 + 2 jokers] were redrawn and standardized by Frédéric Delanglade. Published for the first time in the journal VVV in 1943 in New York (no.3), and exhibited then at the Museum of Modern Art of the same city, they "returned' to France, in 1983, to be published by André Dimanche, successor to Jean Ballard in the premises of Cahiers du Sud... thus sealing the end of a long adventure.

Jean-Paul Morel
March 2004

Essential Bibliography

• Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs, edited by Adam Biro and René Passeron, Fribourg / Paris, Office du livre / P.U.F., 1982.
• Le jeu de Marseille, [game of 54 cards, with reprint of André Breton's text – 1943], Marseille, André Dimanche, 1983
• Les jeux surréalistes (March 1921 – September 1962), presented and annotated by Emmanuel Garrigues, Paris, NRF / Gallimard, collection "Archives du surréalisme", no. 5, 1995
• Jeux surréalistes, exhibition catalog at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, edited by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Madrid, 1996
• Le Jeu de Marseille. Autour d'André Breton et des surréalistes à Marseille en 1940-1941, edited by Danièle Giraudy, exhibition catalog at the Cantini museum in Marseille, July 4 - October 5, 2003, Marseille, Éditions Alors Hors du Temps, 2003

SMALL CHRONOLOGY
March 13, 1921 "Barrès Trial," hall of learned societies, Paris – cf. Littérature, 1st series, no. 20, August 1921.
March 1921 "Liquidation," Littérature (1st series, no. 18): grading game on official glories.
April 1922 "Some preferences of...," Littérature (2nd series, no. 2): preferences game
October 18, 1924 "A corpse," collective tract [versus Anatole France]
August 2, 1925 On the occasion of the banquet in honor of Saint-Pol Roux, at the Closerie des Lilas, Paris, "disturbance" versus Paul Claudel.
January 24, 1928 Second show of the Alfred-Jarry theater, Comédie des Champs-Élysées, Paris: performance of a play that the author formally forbade, at the initiative of Antonin Artaud [Paul Claudel, Partage de midi]
January 27, 1928 – August 1, 1932 "Researches on sexuality" (see Recherches sur la sexualité, presented and annotated by José Pierre, Paris, Gallimard, Archives du Surréalisme no. 4, 1990)
February 9, 1928 Screening at the Studio des Ursulines of La coquille et le clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac, based on a scenario by Antonin Artaud: "disturbance" versus Germaine Dulac.
March 1928 "Le dialogue en 1928," La Révolution surréaliste (no. 11): question/answer game, "What is...? – It's...".
June 1929 "Le dialogue en 1929," Variétés, Brussels (no. 2): new question/answer game, and "If..." and "When...,"
December 1931 "Exquisite corpses," Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (no. 4)
February-March 1933 Games on irrational possibilities, Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (no. 6, May 15, 1933)
June 1934 "Le dialogue en 1934," Documents 34: enriched question/answer game.
1940/41 Tarot game [Marseille], (VVV, New York, no.3, 1943)
April-May 1952 Café game "And if it were an animal?".
Autumn 1953 Café syllogism game.
November 1953 Game "Ouvrez-vous?", André Breton, Médium (no. 1).
February & May 1954 Game of "one in the other," Médium, no. 2 and 3.
1954/1955 Game "What are the three?" [new "liquidation"], Jean-Louis Bédouin, Médium.
Spring 1959 "Analogy card' game, Le Surréalisme, même (no. 5).