TEXTUAL RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN PÉRET AND DESNOS
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Although, in his Dada Surrealism dossier, Robert Desnos makes an unflattering portrait of the Benjamin Péret of 1921 who caused him much embarrassment before introducing him to André Breton, then seated at the Certa[1], the relationships maintained by the two young men are in reality not at all tense. In fact, they make reciprocal winks in their writings. If Desnos gives a role to "Péret's left arm" in the narrative Pénalités de l'Enfer ou Nouvelles Hébrides, Péret, in Il était une boulangère, claims that the heroine of the tale lived, at one point, "rue de Rivoli, in the same house as Desnos […][2]". Moreover, in 1922, Desnos and Péret write together L'Enfant Planète, a short text in automatic writing. Beyond the controversies that the Second Manifesto of Surrealism will arouse upon its publication in 1929, the name of Desnos and Péret appears, for the last time, on the same document in the autumn of 1940. Both then work at the newspaper Aujourd'hui, the first as a journalist, the second as a proofreader. But, as soon as the newspaper was seized by the Nazis, Desnos was censored. Twenty-three friends send a little note to the courageous journalist to show him their solidarity. Among the twenty-three names figures that of Péret.
An examination of the dates of Desnos and Péret's literary production during the twenties leads me to note that it is difficult to know which of the two influenced the other. We can give an example concerning each of the two authors. Péret's Le Grand Jeu, published in 1928, groups together some poems that had already been published in a journal five years earlier. Desnos, for his part, wrote most of La Liberté ou l'amour! toward the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925, but he had to wait a year and a half before seeing his narrative published by Kra[3].
Sometimes, the dates leave no doubt. Thus, the chronicles, in the newspaper Paris-Soir of January 1926, that Desnos devotes to the affair of the order of Notre-Dame des Pleurs, correspond, in December of the same year, to those of L'Humanité, where Péret this time takes as target two provincial priests[4]. However, overall, during the period when Desnos and Péret participate in the surrealist movement's activities, we observe in both an enthusiasm for similar themes. Beyond 1929, the year when Desnos was expelled from the movement, it is not impossible to encounter such and such of his interesting terms embedded in Péret's poetry.
I now approach Péret's Le Grand Jeu and particularly the poem "Les Jeunes filles torturées' of which two details are singular[5]. First a metaphorical relationship unites "anguish" to "a very beautiful woman". "Is she naked under her coat/[…] Yes yes yes and yes'. A little before, the reader can observe the return of an "assassin" with a vengeful air. Now, each of these two characters has a double that presents itself in chapter II of Desnos's La Liberté ou l'amour!. There, Louise Lame crosses Paris at night to go to the Bois de Boulogne. "Naked, she was naked now under her tawny fur coat[6]". Shortly after her arrival, in another quarter of the metropolis, "an assassin[7]" shoots down a night owl. The femme fatale who, through a process of displacement in the text, brings about the appearance of a killer, is a characteristic of Desnos rather than Péret. Indeed, in the first's poem Night of loveless nights, there is an occurrence of the name "criminal' shortly after the poet's "I" imagines his severe mistress saying: "[…] I need this evening numerous servants/To polish my shoes and offer me the coat[8]".
The poem "Qu"Importe" from Le Grand Jeu and narrative 19, "Le chemin de fer […]", from Deuil pour deuil both recount a railway catastrophe. I indicate in the scenario of the two texts the actants and similar words. "Qu"Importe"[9]: "kilometer 1,000", "train", "a savage", "an amazon", "a drowned man", "long teeth" and "mayor". Narrative 19, "Le chemin de fer […]"[10], from Deuil pour deuil: "kilometer 178", "railway", "the train"s engineer", "the blonde virgin", "buried aviator", "freshly torn teeth" and "queen of accidents". The "amazon" is not a new character in Péret, since she also figures in the tale Il était une boulangère[11]. The mayor, for his part, celebrates marriages, a typically bourgeois ceremony. Besides, the fiancés, in other words, the amazon and the savage, in the setting of "Qu"Importe", evoke two zombies. As for the "queen of accidents' from narrative 19 of Deuil pour deuil, she explains her nickname by saying that she presides over the encounters of "tormented lovers'. In Desnos, the maleficent femininity is once again at work.
Dormir dormir dans les pierres by Péret was inserted in the Cahiers du Sud of November 1926. This long poem makes one think of a surrealist version of a song of the unloved. The lack, gaping on the emotional level, has as a consequence withdrawal or else the search for an underground refuge. From this point of view, the bestiary peppering the poem is eloquent: "beaten dog", "sleeping snake" and "moles'[12].
The theme of the rest of death and inorganic matter dominates in Dormir dormir dans les pierres, as well as in the last two narratives of Deuil pour deuil. Indeed, in narrative 22 of Desnos, "Par les soins […]", the word "sleep" has five occurrences, while in narrative 23, "Ci-gît […]", "granite" has three[13]. Concerning Dormir dormir dans les pierres, the mineral lexicon abounds there: "trembling stones", "bitter rocks", "scintillating stones' and "coal'[14]. Added to this is the process of petrification, corollary of the Medusa myth that infiltrates the text:
[…] the king and queen have lost their gaze in the body of the medusa But the medusa flees like a reflection and keeps the king and queen who sleep somewhere under a flint plant[15]
A term that becomes obsessive in Dormir dormir dans les pierres as well as in La Liberté ou l'amour! is "bottle". Desnos uses the term as a springboard, to create stunning images:
[…] the bottles, human bodies buried since the beautiful days of the sphinx in the balmy bandages of the Egyptians […] the bottle, is it not the woman erected completely straight at the moment of spasm, and the dreamer insensitive in the wind[16] […]
In these three images, we observe that "bottle" refers inflexibly to the referent "human body". For his part, Péret includes the term in two "fortuitous encounters' that he arranges in the manner of Lautréamont:
[…] my blood […] is neither less nor more beautiful than the most brutal chance the one that provokes the encounter in the stairway of bottles of an orange and a wallet oh my friend […] you are […] beautiful like the unexpected encounter of a cataract and a bottle The cataract looks at you beautiful bottle The cataract rumbles because you are beautiful bottle[17]
Although "bottle" corresponds to positive semes in the context of Dormir dormir dans les pierres, the outcome of the "fortuitous encounters' does not prove happy. The first encounter turns tragic. The second translates a presentiment of convulsive beauty which in fact never takes form.
The last section of Dormir dormir dans les pierres, "À quoi bon […]", shows the love sickness that brings about the diminution of being. "À quoi bon […]" contains an utterance whose syntax relates the words "sponge" and "torpedo boat":
[…] the moon awaits the torpedo boats that it will never rejoin What's the use torpedo boat your nightmare of sponge since it Will remain nightmare As water remains wind and wind sponge[18]
Precisely the two words are part of the lexicon of Desnos's La liberté ou l'amour!. There, English navy torpedo boats patrol the Channel, at the moment when Corsaire Sanglot heads toward Humming-bird Garden[19]. On the other hand, "sponge" constitutes a key word of the text. To mention only one episode, under the auspices of Bébé Cadum, the "sponge" becomes a sacralized utensil of feminine toilette[20].
I return to the citation extracted from Péret"s "À quoi bon […]". It is not without interest to take into account the naval actions in the Channel during the First World War. At the time, the main belligerent powers had flotillas of torpedo boats. The Belgian ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, fallen into German hands as early as October 1914, served as a base for formidable torpedo boats that put to sea in overcast weather or moonless nights[21]. The "torpedo boat" represents a nagging threat whose cause, without the Desnos factor, would remain unknown. Since "sponge" suggests eros, "nightmare of sponge", its antithesis, would indicate death enveloping love.
Toward the end of his belonging to the surrealist movement, Desnos made a trip to Cuba that filled him with great enthusiasm for the Caribbean region and Latin America in general. Mexico thus struck his imagination. In 1928, in the newspaper Le Soir, Desnos devoted four articles to this revolutionized republic or to certain of its representatives in the fields of painting and spectacle[22]. These writings of Desnos precede the texts that Mexico will inspire in Antonin Artaud, Breton, Péret and others still.
Dernier malheur dernière chance is an opaque poem that Péret wrote in Mexico in 1942. I dwell on some terms that deserve to be compared — or confronted — to those of Desnos. The syntagm of Dernier malheur dernière chance, "a sunny place to strut about"[23] echoes two phrases from La Liberté ou l'amour!: "It was he who misled the strollers on the great sunny squares […]" and "It was Ennui, great square where he had one day ventured[24]". Moreover, upon his arrival at the port, Corsaire Sanglot passes in front of shop windows in which he sees, among other objects, "boats in bottles[25]". This name goes hand in hand with an image from Dernier malheur dernière chance: "[…] ice floes/preserving confit sailboats for marble mantelpieces[26]". Image, of course, full of irony.
In Dernier malheur dernière chance are found the words "bottle" and "sponge". The first, as it is inscribed in the syntagm "to breathe the fresh air of bottle[27]", in fact belongs to the lexical field of alcohol disseminated in the poem, as well as two other words: "wines' and "eau-de-vie[28]". If, once again, in Péret, the word "bottle" conveys a meaning independently of its use in Desnos, on the other hand the latter's intertext enhances the occurrence of "sponge" in Dernier malheur dernière chance:
[…] wild beasts contemplating their master whom a sponge speckled with wild strawberries absorbs[29]
The name "wild strawberries[30]" has meliorative connotations that spread to "sponge", nominal nucleus of the syntagm. The anarchist watchword "neither God nor master" that Péret observes, helps the reader to better envisage whom the "sponge" attempts to erase. However, the power with which the "sponge" is endowed would be ignored, if we did not take into account the episode of La Liberté ou l'amour! where Desnos subverts the function that this object has during the crucifixion[31]. The "sponge" no longer serves exclusively to consume the torment inflicted on Christ. Henceforth it will also be used for profane uses.
Criticism has established in Desnos's texts a liaison between love and maritime adventure[32]. We can even spot this theme in Péret's relatively late poetic production, in Un Point c'est tout and Tout une vie for example. The poetry collection Un Point c'est tout, appearing for the first time in 1946, was very probably written in March 1937[33]. In Barcelona, Péret was then taking a keen interest in a dilemma that Madame Remedios Lizarraga was facing. Remedios had to decide if she wanted to accompany Péret to Paris and flee Spain devastated by war. It was thus not easy for Péret to conquer Remedios. His sentimental doubts translate into the symbol of shipwreck, common currency in Desnos:
I would like to speak to you […] Like a dismasted boat that sea foam begins to invade[34]
In the poem Toute une vie, Péret, having become fifty, refers back to the origins of the surrealist epic. Taking up Breton"s 1922 article, "Lâchez tout", he rewrites it to his liking in some seventeen verses and versets. The following three recall Desnos.
Lâchez tout you said to sail without north and without star through the storms […] Drop anchor the time to fish in the invisible water the Ghost of a cloud Siren of the great depths laughing like a forest[35]
On the one hand Péret revivifies a characteristic trait of his deceased colleague's writings, on the other hand he contradicts him. Indeed, narrative 6 of Deuil pour deuil ends thus:
Perfidious North Star! Troubling South Star! Adorable Adorable![36]
Péret, for his part, by accepting to travel by sea in darkness, surpasses the dialectic of the "South Star" and the "North Star". But, like Desnos, one of the goals he sets himself is the capture of the siren[37].
University of Malta
1 — . See R. Desnos, Nouvelles Hébrides et autres textes 1922-1930, ed. established and annotated by Marie-Claire Dumas, Gallimard, Paris, 1978, pp. 300-303. ↩ 2 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes, t. 3, Losfeld, 1979, p. 204. ↩ 3 — . See Marie-Claire Dumas, Robert Desnos ou l'exploration des limites, Klincksieck, 1980, pp. 439-440. ↩ 4 — . Marie-Claire Dumas has edited these chronicles of Desnos in Champs des activités surréalistes, C.A.S., September 1984. See also Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes, t. 7, Librairie J. Corti, 1995, pp. 127-130. ↩ 5 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes, t. 1, Losfeld, 1969, p. 88. ↩ 6 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, edition established and presented by Marie-Claire Dumas, Gallimard, Quarto, 1999, p. 327. ↩ 7 — . Ibid., p. 328. ↩ 8 — . Ibid., pp. 916 and 917. Marcel Spada connects the feminine avatars in Desnos to Sacher-Masoch's Wanda. See Marcel Spada, Érotiques du merveilleux, J. Corti, 1983, pp. 101-108. ↩ 9 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes, t. 1, op. cit., pp. 183-184. ↩ 10 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., pp. 214-216. ↩ 11 — . See Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes t. 3, op. cit., pp. 214-215. ↩ 12 — . Id., Œuvres Complètes, t. 1, op. cit., pp. 53, 51 and 64. ↩ 13 — . See Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., pp. 218-220. ↩ 14 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes, t. 1, op. cit., pp. 51, 52, 56 and 59. ↩ 15 — . Ibid., p. 57. ↩ 16 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., p. 355. ↩ 17 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complète, t. 1, op. cit., pp. 56 and 60. ↩ 18 — . Ibid., p. 63. ↩ 19 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., p. 382. ↩ 20 — . See ibid., pp. 334 and 369-370. ↩ 21 — . See Paul Chack and Jean-Jacques Antier, Histoire maritime de la Première Guerre mondiale, France-Empire, 1992, ill., 848 p., pp. 246-247. ↩ 22 — . See the edition of Le Soir of May 5, 14 and 29 and August 11, 1928. ↩ 23 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes t. 2, Losfeld, 1971, p. 162. ↩ 24 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., pp. 373 and 371. ↩ 25 — . Ibid., p. 342. ↩ 26 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes t. 2, op. cit., p. 156. ↩ 27 — . Ibid., p. 168. ↩ 28 — . Ibid., pp. 170 and 175. ↩ 29 — . Ibid., p. 172. ↩ 30 — . Cf. ibid., pp. 108 and 190. ↩ 31 — . See Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., pp. 369-370. ↩ 32 — . See, for example, Marie-Claire Dumas, Robert Desnos ou l'exploration des limites, op. cit., p. 460. ↩ 33 — . Cf. Benjamin Péret's letter to André Breton of March 7, 1937, Claude Courtot, Introduction à la lecture de Benjamin Péret, Le Terrain vague, 1965, p. 36. ↩ 34 — . Benjamin Péret, Œuvres Complètes t. 2, op. cit., p. 193. ↩ 35 — . Ibid., p. 237. ↩ 36 — . Robert Desnos, Œuvres, op. cit., p. 201. ↩ 37 — . Cf., ibid., p. 369. ↩