CRYSTAL AND SEMPERVIVUM: ALLEGORICAL WRITING IN ANDRÉ BRETON'S L'AMOUR FOU
par Alain Trouvé
There exists in Breton's work a powerful and multiform allegorical vein whose course can be followed from Nadja[2] to Arcane 17[3]. L'Amour fou ↑, the last great text of pre-war surrealism, offers an interesting version that explores the links between amorous encounter[4], word discoveries, and objects. The seven chapters of quite heterogeneous content alternate between the registers of poetic digression and interpretation: the writing of this book can thus be placed within the rhetorical tradition of allegory, an ambivalent figure of enigma and unveiling. It is this inscription barely recognized by the author and commentators that we would like to question here.
Doubtless Breton proclaims very loudly his atheism, by which he seems to distance himself from the theological use of allegory. But if transcendence has become immanence, Truth has only changed poles, its quest remains stronger than ever; the Revelation born of Love or Poetry, it's all one, preserves the sacred charge once attributed to divinity. Haunted by the desire for transparency and unity, Breton's "surrealist poetry" would be, as Julien Gracq has emphasized, "not creation, but unveiling, bursting of a crust of opacity[5]." This movement toward light, by which one would define an undeniable idealist temptation, admired by some, criticized by others, would tip the allegorical balance toward the pole of clarity. But the images maintain a residual degree of obscurity that permanently contests the poet's pretension to speak the Absolute. Among them, the sempervivum, this "autochthonous species' of the Canaries, endowed with "the frightening property of continuing to develop under any conditions': perhaps the germ of anarchy.
We will follow this oscillation of poetic speech between transparency and chaos by taking as reference points three forms of allegorical expression: mythology, dream, and textual metaphor.
"Modern Mythology[6]"
The soil of ancient mythology
The attention paid to the modern world does not make a clean slate of the Ancients: the narrative of passion – encounter, dazzlement, discord – draws from mythological tradition. The lovers' journey in the enchanting landscape of the Canaries, in chapter V, brings a poetic evocation of the Golden Age ↑ announced by the allusion to Orpheus, guarantor of harmony ↑. "The white ships [that] dream in the harbor, Ariadnes by all their starry hair and their armpit of climates' ↑, refer, by metaphor and metonymy, to the amorous experience and the myth of Theseus. The Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality ↑ already compared the poet to Hercules and Theseus[7], not to reproduce the old myths but to transform them. Chapter VI opens with the legend of Venus "wounded by Diomedes' then chosen by Paris, thanks to the golden apple offered by Discord, on which he had engraved "the fateful inscription: TO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL" ↑. The allegorical dimension of mythology is here expressly emphasized:
Before the force of such a myth, whose immediate power of expansion and persistence until our time guarantee us, we cannot doubt that it expresses an eternal common truth, that it translates in allegorical language a series of founded observations that could not admit any other field than human existence. (ibid.)
What does this mean? In one sense, Breton renews with the allegorical reading of Homer already present among the philosophers of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity. But he does not thereby adhere to the old exegesis that led, for example, a Porphyry to interpret the fictions of the Iliad, against Plato's own reservations, in the direction of a religious and philosophical neo-Platonism[8]. It is rather, in the continuation of German romanticism from Jena, a matter of refounding a modern mythology that prolongs and surpasses the heritage of the Greeks.
Schelling and Schlegel corrected?
"The literary absolute[9]" sought by the writers of the Athenaeum would be this transcendent speech surpassing the traditional opposition between literature and philosophy to give access, through the invention of a new mythology, to a superior truth. Thus one reads in Schelling's Aesthetic Texts: "The representation of the Absolute by the absolute indifference of the universal and the particular in the particular = art. The universal material of this representation = mythology[10]." Schlegel, for his part, writes: "Our poetry lacks that center which mythology was for the Ancients' […] "what is any beautiful mythology other than a hieroglyphic expression of the nature that surrounds it, transfigured by fantasy and by love[11]?" But for these authors mythology approaches more closely the symbol which they conceive, in Goethe's wake, as "living and instantaneous revelation of the unexplorable[12]." Allegory, figure of decipherment, suspect of schematism and abstraction, is only an intermediate stage of thought. This leads Schelling to conclude: "Mythology ends as soon as allegory begins[13]." Criticism itself becomes poetic in these authors, placing absolute knowledge under the dependence of a transgeneric category, Poem or Novel.
In contrast, Breton associates, without quite confusing them, the two voices of lyrical emotion and decipherment, of automatic writing and "concerted exposition[14]." One formulates by poetic means the modernized myth, the other is charged with unveiling its kernel of truth.
Enigmas of love and the city
The city and the woman are the figures of this modern mythology that articulates the collective and the singular. Love and poetry will give it expression. Breton draws an erotic cartography of Paris, with its privileged places. During the mythical "Night of the Sunflower" that follows the encounter of May 29, 1934, the two lovers stop before the Tour Saint-Jacques, celebrated in 1923 by Breton in an automatic poem precisely entitled "Sunflower." This flower, emblem of the tower, now appears to him as an image of the woman who has just entered his life: the poem has therefore prefigured the encounter! Similarly, the spoon shoe bought at the "Flea Market" (chapter III) maintains mysterious relations with her. The leitmotif of the enigma punctuates the narrative[15]: knowing how to extract from daily life the "minor discoveries' that found the marvelous is trying to orient oneself in a "forest of indices' ↑; the vertigo of love is associated with "the approach of the sphinx[16]" ↑; the occasional causes of amorous behaviors preserve a "greatly enigmatic" character ↑. The city, moreover, – the Tour Saint-Jacques in particular[17] – is charged with alchemical significations: the colors of the city recall the "shifting from blue to red in which resides the specific property of the reactive sunflower" ↑.
Toward a new light
Faced with these signals recorded by the poet, the discourse tends to posit the principles of an interpretive program whose coherence we will not judge here, contenting ourselves with describing its ambition. It is a matter of somehow alternating the means of intuition and those of scientific reason, as shown by the retrospective endorsement of physicist Gustave Juvet:
It is not I, it is M. Juvet who, in The Structure of New Physical Theories, writes in 1933: "It is in the surprise created by a new image or by a new association of images that one must see the most important element of the progress of physical sciences, since it is astonishment that excites logic, always quite cold, and obliges it to establish new coordinations." ↑
The insurrection against ordinary logic, represented by the 1924 Manifesto and automatic writings, is doubled by the aspiration to a superior logic whose flexibility would allow understanding man by making room for the apparent manifestations of the irrational. As has often been remarked[18], Hegel's philosophy provides the intellectual framework for such understanding. No longer the young Hegel of the Jena circle, but the mature philosopher, founder of dialectics and the historical method in the philosophy of art. Chapter I refers in its passage on the crystal to The Philosophy of Nature, – I will return to this. It claims to explain and justify by dialectics the quest for absolute love through the multiplicity of encounters:
Yet I believe I glimpse a possible synthesis of this idea [unique love] and its negation. ↑
But Breton wants to surpass Hegel: this new science that would extract from its own mythology an essential kernel of truth, he has oriented for several years toward a Freudian-Marxist synthesis[19] illustrated here by allusions to Engels – The Origin of the Family – and to Marx – The Communist Manifesto ↑. "Objective chance" already evoked in Nadja constitutes its pivot:
Chance would be the form of manifestation of external necessity that makes its way into the human unconscious (to attempt boldly to interpret and reconcile on this point Engels and Freud). ↑
The use of italics marks the quasi-textual repetition of a passage from Ludwig Feuerbach[20]. Breton borrows from Cournot the idea of "independent series in the order of causality" to realize the grafting of the Freudian unconscious onto Engels's materialist analysis. Chapter II, commenting on a question posed by Éluard and himself on "the capital encounter of your life," enunciates "the two causal series (natural and human)" ↑ that preside over these determining chances. The ultimate chapter returns to this decisive weaving of "natural necessity," on the one hand, and "human necessity, logical necessity" ↑, on the other. It is a matter "of extracting the law of production of these mysterious exchanges between the material and the mental' ↑ observed by poetry.
The aim of this modern mythology is therefore universal. Revolution (Marxist) and access to the surreal (unconscious), the superior Good and the True, constitute its horizon, outside of any divine revelation, since thought claims to be atheist, rid of the "dualism of good and evil' ↑. Already in 1930, the Second Manifesto evoked this "point of the mind' toward which surrealist activity tends, "where 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[21]." The "sublime point," in chapter VII of L'Amour fou, still echoes it. The philosophico-scientific discourse thus tends to posit the principles of an interpretive program as a promise of elucidation.
Obscured Truth
But we will note, to finish with the mythological dimension of writing and against this will to clarify its meaning, the density of the intertextual network to which it refers. To the ancient repertoire are indeed added diversified artistic referents. Thus, remarks Marguerite Bonnet,
the association of the ancient heroine Ariadne with the ships could have been born from the memory of several canvases by Chirico: The Afternoon of Ariadne ↑ where the character's statue, lying on a pedestal, raises her right arm behind and above her head, in the pose consecrated by statuary, so as to reveal the armpit.[22]
Similarly, the Golden Age evoked by the description of the Orotava valley is associated with "the film by Buñuel and Dalí," "the only enterprise of exaltation of total love as I envisage it" and, by the ricochet of a note, – "no longer the only one, but one of the two only [enterprises]" – with the film Peter Ibbetson by Henry Hathaway, made in 1935 from Georges Du Maurier's novel. Doubtless one can envisage the scheme of absolute love as the common vector of all these representations. The diversity of references nonetheless complicates the interpreter's task. "The breadfruit tree," mark of "inexhaustible natural generosity capable of providing for the most diverse human needs' adds still other literary referents to the Golden Age myth, uniting on the same page Roussel, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Rimbaud. The richness of intertexts comes to densify and perhaps star the meaning of the mythical material[23].
The ambition of clarity is therefore at the very least thwarted by the thickness of the palimpsest on which the modernized myths are written; the Truth of the new myth remains moreover programmatic, implicitly referred to the community of interpreters to which it is destined. There is however one domain in which the writer seems to want to advance further: that of the "Science of Dreams[24]" of which his writing claims to be the faithful recorder.
Dream and Freudian Hermeneutics: Limits of Self-Analysis
The Freudian unconscious: substitute for God?
The interpretation of dreams is the second degree of allegorical writing/reading. Freud's work serves here as a hermeneutic key, no longer this "key of dreams' mocked by the founder of psychoanalysis at the beginning of his master book Die Traumdeutung, but the theory of the psychic apparatus that invites reading in the dream the expression of an unconscious desire. Would modern analysis be the substitute for ancient oneiromancy? Science rid of superstition preserving the privilege once held by the Pythia of being the spokesperson of a superior Truth. Jean Starobinski, commenting on the study on "The Automatic Message" reprinted in Point du jour ↑, has emphasized the kinship between psychoanalysis, Breton version, and the parapsychology of Myers or Richet:
The position that Breton takes is […] to preserve almost integrally the marvelous of spiritualism, while applying himself to refusing its dogmatic premises. But this does not go without question[25].
No doubt, nevertheless, that Freud's thought finds in Breton an exceptional echo, already attested in previous texts, in particular Les Vases communicants, and again verifiable here.
Freud's rival
References to psychoanalysis take multiple forms: citation, allusion, lexical contamination by analytical categories, practical work of application, finally, about which the question of self-analysis will be posed. The book opens with a vision, a "fantasy" ↑ showing the characters of a "mental theater," "at nightfall […], as if they were submitting to a rite, […] wandering without a word at the edge of the sea" ↑. And Breton notes in parentheses: "I do not hide from myself that here psychoanalysis would have its say," before evoking a little further on, regarding this "egret of wind at the temples, […] veritable shiver" felt before certain works of art, the "profound repressions' that would have to be overcome to pierce their precise erotic content. Follow other borrowings from the Freudian lexicon: "censorship" ↑, "latent content" ↑, "human libido" ↑. Breton cites Freud from The Ego and the Id[26]: "Of Eros and the struggle against Eros!" ↑ and mentions as a model "the admirable communication of Freud: A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci" ↑.
His ambition is to surpass in self-analysis the Viennese master who practiced this exercise, but recognized in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess that he could not carry the investigation to its end[27]. Les Vases communicants ↑ constitutes an important stage:
I see nothing in all the accomplishment of the dream function that does not clearly borrow [I emphasize], for little that one wants to take the trouble to examine it, from the sole data of lived life, nothing that, I could not return to it too many times, subtraction made of these data on which the imagination exercises itself poetically, could constitute an appreciable residue that one would attempt to make pass for irreducible. (OC, II, p. 134)
We will return to this "residue" that makes the whole problem of interpretation. Let us recall that this book develops a non-orthodox Freudianism[28]: rejecting the cut established by Freud between dream thoughts and reality, Breton applies himself to showing that the two planes "communicate," waking life being still governed by the fantasy that determines its singularities. The idea reappears in L'Amour fou, which makes the link, in the form of self-citation, with the 1932 book:
The finding of an object fulfills here rigorously the same office as the dream, in the sense that it liberates the individual from paralyzing affective scruples, comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle he could believe insurmountable is crossed. ↑
It is precisely in this chapter III, regarding objects bought in the company of sculptor Giacometti at the "flea market," that an important part of self-analysis will be exercised. Breton's "elective" choice falls on
a large wooden spoon, of peasant execution, but quite beautiful, it seems to me, quite bold in form, whose handle, when it rested on its convex part, rose to the height of a small shoe making body with it. ↑
The pages that follow undertake to decipher this choice, to extract its sexual signification through associated memories – the unsatisfied request addressed to Giacometti to realize the glass sculpture of Cinderella's slipper – and through the decoding of "symbolic figuration." The spoon is thus identified as a phallic object:
All the movement of my previous thought had had as its starting point the objective equality: slipper = spoon = penis = perfect mold of this penis. ↑
Here then is the writer doubled by an informed interpreter, versed in all the subtleties of analysis, absolute holder of meaning? This pretension has not failed to be denounced as naivety by readers recommending themselves of the analytical approach.
Exegesis and text analysis
In Les Vases communicants, "the poet […] has passed by his unconscious, to decipher from his material only the correlations best admitted by censorship[29]." Jean Bellemin-Noël subscribes to this diagnosis of psychoanalyst Jean Guillaumin and adds: Breton's "analytical autoscopy" could not be confused with the impossible interpretation of oneself, or rather "exegesis," to which he devotes himself, in his pretension to the absolute; what results from it is in truth only "a block of autography"[30]. Text analysis can then deploy itself, with its findings and jubilatory associations. Under heterosexual desire, the analysis of fantasies tracks and deciphers the more archaic unconscious material, that of the fusion of the subject with the Origin and the denial of castration,
the dominant anxiety before the block "phallic mother-homosexual narcissism-desperate pursuit of the paternal figure." ↑
Analytical criticism thus takes the author and his condemnations of homosexuality[31] in flagrante delicto of denial.
François Migeot has submitted to an analogous treatment the text of L'Amour fou, first demystifying the realistic pretension[32] hidden behind proclamations of authenticity:
Rather than to an amalgam of fragments representative of a supposed real, one has to do with a tissue that conjugates motifs […] to a textual elaboration that aims to produce the realistic illusion that things happened as they are reported, whereas it is it that stages them[33].
We will refer for the detail to this stimulating "rewriting" that shows, behind the heterosexual facade of interpretation, the presence of two archaic structures, fetishism and combined parent, two forms of denial of difference. The examination of the spoon-shoe is the first emblematic proof: its handle and its hollow part, the shoe-heel that serves as its support, reveal a double sexual symbolism. Text analysis also finds nourishment in the poetics of places: "The mother-Paris (Notre-Dame; the Île de la Cité, cradle of Paris) indeed has a phallus (blinking)[34]." The landscapes of the Canaries and of "Fort-Bloqué" offer complementary material.
In one sense, therefore, these readings are founded to emphasize the illusion of transparency linked to the project of self-analysis. One cannot really read in oneself without the help of a third party. The narrative dimension of the text, relayed by the motif of walking, would be for François Migeot the vector of this exploration, exposing the writer's misrecognition to the critic's interpretation. The ambivalence of images evoking the natural paradise of the Canaries[35], the anxiety it gives birth to can be understood as the trace of a repression, as the irrepressible need for a diverted expression. The mechanism of displacement is another sign of it. Thus, the fetishist structure of desire, forgotten in the page on the spoon-shoe, is implicitly suggested further on, when Breton expresses his admiration for Leonardo da Vinci's Childhood Memory. One could not nevertheless carve out too easy successes to the detriment of the poet, forgetting the specific nature of the psychic material here offered: literary text and not discourse of analysand, mixed text, at the very least.
Literary creation and waking dream
The literary text can indeed be envisaged as one of the compromise formations that the subject realizes with his unconscious[36]. Doubtless the truths brought to light hardly surpass the preconscious level, but one can also lend to the writer the intuition of this limit and the aptitude to represent it. In this sense, the evocations of witnesses, of third persons, the recurring motif of the theater are so many invitations to complete the letter of the discourse by another interpretation.
Also one will not quite follow Jean Bellemin-Noël criticizing the recourse to witness Paul Éluard, in a passage from Les Vases communicants. Even if the detail of the envisaged procedure does not fall under good Freudian orthodoxy[37], the search by others for a truth about oneself remains in spirit a major corrective of the pretension to self-analysis. Here, the presence of the third refers to the figure of Giacometti, also attracted by an object from the flea market, "a half-mask of metal' ↑:
This more or less conscious desire […] only entails a finding for two, doubtless for more, insofar as it is oriented on common typical preoccupations. I would be tempted to say that the two individuals who walk one near the other constitute a single machine of influence set in motion. ↑
These "common typical preoccupations' are quite different from the relationship between analyst and analysand: they could on the other hand, like the "finding for two," apply to the relationship between reader and his text. The final letter, written after the couple's separation, also places the poet's speech under the supposed gaze of a third party. This at the price of an internal contradiction. For Écusette de Noireuil, the child born of this union, seems at first to figure a last resurgence of this feminine absolute imaginarily constructed from the fantasy of the phallic mother – "my very little child […] who are at once like coral and pearl'; her name recalls the magical object and the "scandalously beautiful woman" ↑ of whom she is the daughter[38]; but Breton imagines her in a distant future of fifteen years – "in the beautiful spring of 1952." This time is therefore at once that of perpetuated lyrical communication (by the final wish) and of the distance from which the other's gaze benefits, time of fantasmatic participation and reflexivity[39]. The collage structure accentuates this distance: the reunion in the aftermath of sometimes pre-published chapters or written in different contexts[40] preserves a coefficient of heterogeneity that works in the same sense of critical distance.
The other of the Subject is finally symbolized by the mental theater on which the book opens. A writing haunted by the Absolute, by love "ideal place of junction, of fusion" ↑ would expose itself to a sterile hallucinatory projection if it did not secrete as if by itself this safeguard, the interior theater. Mallarmé, in the Notes toward the "Book," Aragon, in La Défense de l'infini have played with the same motif, not without analogy: both moreover share with Breton the particularity of having written little for the theater properly speaking[41]. Here, the figurants staged in the first sentence "carry the keys of situations," but, as we have seen, the use of these keys is first evaded, remitted in some way to others. More prudent and less naive than one seems to suppose, the writer's attitude toward self-analysis is therefore at the very least double, shared between a dream of accomplishment and a factual retreat behind this residue of writing, no longer metaphysical but poetic, as was said above.
It is this writing reflecting itself that it is now appropriate to examine.
Crystal, cloud, and sempervivum
The textual metaphor, ultimate and problematic degree of allegory, will be questioned here. The crystal, recurring motif, seems to condense an aesthetic ideal: transparency, image of absolute knowledge. The "house of glass' (Nadja[42]) or of "rock salt" is an avatar of it:
The house I inhabit, my life, what I write: I dream that this appears from afar like these cubes of rock salt. ↑
Breton, by this image borrowed from the mineral world, distances himself strongly from the swamp metaphor invented by Lautréamont to designate his text, at the beginning of Les Chants de Maldoror, from this swamp which is still the emblem of the poetic text for Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris[43]. But the crystal metaphor is perhaps less transparent than the crystal itself. The vegetable register moreover competes with it, like a step toward the forgotten swamp.
Surrealism and crystal
In a poetics of unveiling[44], the veil or cloud is first:
Desire, sole spring of the world, desire, sole rigor that man has to know, where can I be better to adore it than inside the cloud? […]
Here I am in the cloud, here I am in the intensely opaque room where I have always dreamed of penetrating. I wander in the superb bathroom of steam. […]
I desire you. I desire only you. […] But I will end up finding you and the entire world will light up again because we love each other, because a chain of illuminations passes through us.(755-756)
Illumination of love that dissipates the mists of desire in quest of realization. Illumination of poetry. Coincidence.
Doubtless in this crystal, product of crystallization, one can also hear the memory of Stendhalian analyses, for the pure mineral is still sign of perfection:
No higher artistic teaching seems to me able to be received than from the crystal. The work of art, moreover at the same title as such fragment of human life considered in its most serious signification, seems to me devoid of value if it does not present the hardness, rigidity, regularity, luster on all its exterior, interior faces, of the crystal ↑
"Hardness," "rigidity," "regularity," "luster" are its attributes: the canons of classical art are not far, as if, inverting the periods described by Hegel in his Aesthetics, one passed from the romantic veil to classical transparency. Unless it is rather a matter of the "dissolution of the romantic form of art[45]" envisaged by the latter at the end of his diachronic panorama?
Speeds of light
The ambiguity of the image surges when one questions the realization – immediate or discursive – of transparency. The commentary that follows the citation, page 681, tends to impose the first version, refusing to "found formal beauty on a work of voluntary perfectioning" to specify immediately:
I do not cease, on the contrary, to be carried to the apology of creation, of spontaneous action and this in the very measure where the crystal, by definition non-improvable, is its most perfect expression.
It is therefore a matter of conjuring the image of classical transparency, fruit of a work. The crystal would be the product of poetic illumination, Revelation of the absolute, by automatism, triumph of the romantic conception of the symbol over allegory. Yet the text seems to hesitate:
It is as if all of a sudden the profound night of human existence were pierced, as if natural necessity, consenting to make but one with logical necessity, all things were delivered to total transparency, linked by a chain of glass of which not a link was missing. The beginning of a contact, among all dazzling, of man with the world of things… ↑
Fulgency of the work that illuminates: "all of a sudden" the world and assures "a contact among all dazzling"; but the transparency of the crystal also appears as the outcome of a process symbolized by the "chain of glass[46]." This process is that of the superior science capable, according to the model of Hegelian dialectics, of articulating the causal series of "natural necessity" and "logical necessity."
Crystal and convulsive beauty
Suddenness is moreover not the only attribute of beauty. The "convulsive" beauty announced at the end of Nadja reappears here under a more detailed form (680, 687):
Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magical-circumstantial or it will not be. ↑
The pairs of adjectives mark ambivalence: "erotic" is indeed situated on the side of dreamed transparency[47]. It therefore forms with "veiled' an antithetical couple. "Magical-circumstantial' perhaps says the opposition of the important and the anecdotal. Movement and immobility, in the pair "exploding-fixed," indicate in advance the duality of the crystal, solid mineral and fruit of a crystallization, therefore of the progressive fixing of a mobile matter. The term moreover takes on a strong Hegelian dimension: a Letter to A. Rolland de Renéville, dated February 1932, – letter of homage to Char's poetry – confirms it:
I estimate that crystallization, in the Hegelian sense of "moment where the mobile and restless activity of magnetism attains to a complete rest," that Char obtains ceaselessly from his thought ready at each line of Artine, of L'Action de la justice est éteinte, an extreme transparency and hardness that are proper to him and guard him more than any other from the surrealist cliché…[48]
The crystal would therefore be the safeguard against the divagations of meaning linked to a certain practice of automatism; yet writing surrounds it with negative connotations. The Introduction to the discourse on the paucity of reality compared the poet to "Theseus enclosed forever in his crystal labyrinth[49]." The labyrinth, symbol of the unconscious is perhaps become accessible to knowledge, but one remains prisoner there. Taking up again in the final letter the initial theme of the transparent house, Breton also evokes his "famous uninhabitable [I emphasize] house of rock salt" ↑. The image also calls against its contrary.
Corals and plants
Gracq has analyzed the ambiguity of Bretonian prose, shared between the "rational yoke of syntax" and the resistance of the word, "rebellious to any definitive subjection[50]." Images reveal the same duality. The calcified fauna of coral opposes the crystal:
If the very place where the "figure" – in the Hegelian sense of material mechanism of individuality – beyond magnetism attains its reality is par excellence the crystal, the place where it ideally loses this all-powerful reality is in my eyes the corals, for little that I reintegrate them as is proper to life, in the dazzling shimmering of the sea. ↑
The "hedges of blue tits of aragonite" (variant of the crystal) must then associate with the "bridge of treasures of the 'great barrier' Australian" to represent the "process of formation and destruction of life" ↑. And Breton to imagine a third condition to define convulsive beauty: "the poignant sentiment of the revealed thing" ↑. Necessity and insufficiency of the textual metaphor to describe the aesthetic fact.
The vegetable is also called in reinforcement. Upstream of illumination: the "sensitive" is this "herb of enigma" that preludes to the "absolute gift of one being to another" ↑. It evokes chaos or at least the surprise of sensation, not yet illuminated by the reciprocity of love. Downstream finally appears the sempervivum.
It is one of the curiosities of the flora of the Canaries, whose landscapes of nature "marching toward man[51]," make emerge, behind the paradisiacal facade, a world of drives mixing jouissance and anxiety. After the euphorbia, "superb milky hydra" that bleeds "milk" and "sperm" when one wounds it with stone blows, the sempervivum retains attention:
Otherwise embarrassing is to tear oneself away from the contemplation of this autochthonous species, I believe, of sempervivum which enjoys the frightening property of continuing to develop under any conditions and this as well from a fragment of leaf as from a leaf: crumpled, pricked, torn, burned, pressed between the pages of a book forever closed, this glaucous scale of which one does not know if it is proper in the end to press it against one's heart or to insult it, is doing well. ↑
Strangely fascinated, the narrator spreads himself in details that suggest a double level of reading – we will return to this in a moment. Let us first see the confirmation of allegory:
It [the sempervivum species] is beautiful and confounding like human subjectivity […]. No less beautiful, no less inextirpable than this desperate will of today, which can be qualified as surrealist as well in the domain of particular sciences as in the domain of poetry and arts, to operate at each instant the synthesis of the rational and the real, without fear of making enter into the word "real' all that it can contain of irrational until further notice. (741-743)
Avatar of surrealist writing, the sempervivum would therefore be a counterpoint of the crystal. But it designates at the same time what escapes the surrealist enterprise, what renders its will "desperate." One can therefore also see in it an image of reading. This "frightening" plant and which "is doing well," is indeed capable of proliferating "from a fragment of leaf" and even between "the pages of a closed book." It awakens ambivalent sentiments, comparable perhaps to those of the writer for the hermeneut, a being to "press against one's heart" or to "insult." Unless "to parry any velleity of invasion of the earth" one makes it "boil[52]," reducing its language in quest of novelty to this "cooked language" mocked by Desnos!
From writer to interpreter, the sempervivum recalls the fascinating and worrying engenderment of meaning that nothing could fix definitively. Textual metaphor, it could apply, as much to the original text, to the critic"s text, thus alerted to the flaws and unsaid of his own subjectivity, even if he claimed to pass with the text a "contract of impersonality[53]."
Haunted by the absolute of knowledge and passion, Breton's writing could not therefore fail to inscribe an original episode in the allegorical serial opened from the origins of literature. Nothing surprising, in truth, for a movement that, under a virulent atheism, developed perhaps one of the last great forms of lay religiosity. Between mythology and oneirism, poetic automatisms and concerted reflection, the text of L'Amour fou seeks for itself and for all the path of a Truth to which the crystal gives all its brilliance. Hegel is its syncretic agent. One does not know then if the poetic "appearing" is, according to Heidegger's word about the Phenomenology of Spirit, "the parousia of the absolute[54]," or if writing refers this truth, by the dialectical surpassing that it calls for, to an undetermined future. Whatever the case, the poetic "residue" carries more discreetly theatrical or vegetable metaphors[55] that finish, in the half-consciousness of writing, by opening to other voices than that of the author the interpretive field. At the most secret of the image, the "sempervivum" perhaps says the intimate and anguishing link between the survival of the work and the end of this dream of hegemony.
1 — Reference edition used: Œuvres complètes, II, Paris, Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade," 1992. The text of this article is the slightly reworked version of a communication presented on June 3, 2003 within the framework of the seminar "Allegory and Symbol' organized by the ADONI research group of the University of Poitiers. ↩
2 — The book published in 1928 ends on a bouquet of allegories of which the principal flower is none other than Nadja herself, emblem of "convulsive beauty." ↩
3 — In Arcane 17 (1944-1947), whose title refers to the tarot cards, allegory exploits poetically the reservoir of alchemical symbols. On the relationship between Breton's writing and esotericism, read Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1950. ↩
4 — The narrative is inspired by the encounter, on May 19, 1934, of the music-hall dancer Jacqueline Lamba – "the Ondine." From this passionate and stormy liaison is born in December 1935 a daughter, whom Breton names in the book "Écusette de Noireuil': the letter of the last chapter is addressed to the young girl she will be fifteen years later. ↩
5 — Julien Gracq, "Spectre du Poisson soluble," André Breton – Essais et témoignages, collected by Marc Eigeldinger, La Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 1950, re-ed. in Julien Gracq, Œuvres complètes, I, Paris, Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de La Pléiade," p. 909. ↩
6 — The project of refounding a modern mythology is largely shared within the surrealist group. One thinks in particular of Aragon's "Préface à une mythologie moderne," by which opens Le Paysan de Paris ↑. ↩
7 — Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, Commerce, 1925, Paris, Gallimard, 1927, Œuvres complètes, II, p. 265 and 275. ↩
8 — See on this subject Stéphane Toulouse, "La lecture allégorique d'Homère chez Porphyre : principes et méthode d'une pratique philosophique," in La Lecture littéraire, n° 4, "L'allégorie," Klincksieck, February 2000, p. 25-50; and Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1958. ↩
9 — P. Lacoue-Labarthe/J.-L. Nancy, L'absolu littéraire, Paris, Seuil, 1978 ↩
10 — Schelling, "Schème, allégorie, symbole," 1802, Textes esthétiques, Klincksieck, presentation Xavier Tilliette, p. 48. ↩
11 — Schlegel, Discours sur la mythologie, in Entretien sur la poésie, L'Athenaeum, 1800, reprinted in L'absolu littéraire, p. 311-315. ↩
12 — J. W. von Goethe, Ecrits sur l'art, Paris, Flammarion, coll. "Garnier-Flammarion," 1996, p. 310. ↩
13 — "The representation according to which the universal signifies the particular, or according to which the particular is intuited by means of the universal, is schematism. The representation according to which the particular signifies the universal, or according to which the universal is intuited by means of the particular, is allegorical. The synthesis of the two, where neither the universal signifies the particular, nor the particular the universal, but where the two make but one absolutely, is the symbolic [...]. Mythology ends as soon as allegory begins." ("Schème, allégorie, symbole," op. cit.) ↩
14 — Julien Gracq identifies two "sorts of treatment of writing" in Breton: "on the one hand automatic writing properly speaking (that of Poisson soluble, of L'Immaculée Conception), on the other hand the concerted expositions that represent the Manifestos, Point du jour, Les Vases communicants' (André Breton, in Julien Gracq, OC, II, p. 495). L'Amour fou is perhaps the text that makes best appear the association and interaction of the two writings. ↩
15 — P. 685, 707, 717, 737, 750, 768. ↩
16 — Before Nadja, Breton already describes himself "like a man struck by lightning at the feet of the Sphinx," not dissociating love and enigma until the end of the narrative, when the real woman [Suzanne Muzard] will have in some way taken in his thought the relay of Nadja, allegorical figure: "I say that you turn me away forever from the enigma" (Breton, Nadja, OC, I, p. 714 and 752). ↩
17 — Marguerite Bonnet recalls that the alchemist Nicolas Flamel "would have had the small portal [of the tower] covered with emblematic and hieroglyphic figures in 1389" Notice, p. 1916. Nicolas Flamel and the alchemists had already been the object of an eulogistic presentation in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, OC, I, p. 818-819. ↩
18 — See notably the commentaries of Marguerite Bonnet, in the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes. ↩
19 — The text of Les Vases communicants ↑ constitutes in this regard an important stage. ↩
20 — Book by Friedrich Engels. See on this subject the commentary of M. Bonnet, p. 1712. ↩
21 — OC, I, p. 781. ↩
22 — Notice, p. 1722. ↩
23 — Guy Ducrey has also shown what "the Ondine" Jacqueline Lamba owes to Raymond Roussel's Faustine (Locus solus) and before him to "the myth […] of the Dancer, as it had been elaborated, after Baudelaire, by the ending 19th century" ("Les danseuses d'André Breton," in Cahiers de l'Herne, "André Breton," Paris, L'Herne, 1998, p. 203-213. ↩
24 — By this expression, often taken up again in Les Vases communicants, Breton designates the French translation of Freud's work die Traumdeutung ↑. ↩
25 — Jean Starobinski, "Freud, Breton, Myers," text published in André Breton – Essais et témoignages, collected by Marc Eigeldinger, op. cit., reprinted in Jean Starobinski, La relation critique, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, re-ed. 2001, p. 398. ↩
26 — Citation amplified (p. 709) by another passage from the same book on "the two instincts' of life and death that confront each other in human behaviors. The Ego and the Id (translation S. Jankélévitch, 1927) is known today under the title The Ego and the Id (translation J. Laplanche, 1981). ↩
27 — "My self-analysis remains in abeyance. I have now understood the reason. It is because I can only analyze myself by using objectively acquired knowledge as for a stranger. A true self-analysis is really impossible otherwise there would no longer be illness. As my cases pose me certain other problems, I see myself obliged to stop my own analysis." (Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess of November 14, 1897, cited in Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, Fayard, 1997, p. 80) ↩
28 — See Jean Starobinski, cited article. ↩
29 — Jean Guillaumin, Le Rêve et le Moi, Paris, PUF, coll. "Le Fil rouge," 1979, p. 204. ↩
30 — Jean Bellemin-Noël, "Des vases trop communiquant," in Biographies du désir, Paris, PUF, 1988, p. 128-138. ↩
31 — Read on this subject the hostile positions to homosexuality taken by Breton, Péret, and Unik on the occasion of the "Recherches sur la sexualité," in Archives du surréalisme, 4, January 1928 – August 1932, presented and annotated by José Pierre, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 39-40. ↩
32 — The narrator seeks to persuade by all means of the authenticity of his narrative, using notably the photographic documents that illustrate it as so many proofs of the irruption of the marvelous in ordinary life. ↩
33 — François Migeot, "L'amour fou dans le sillage de la narration," Mélusine, XI, L'Âge d'Homme, 1990, p. 236. ↩
34 — Op. cit., p. 241. ↩
35 — "How not to surprise oneself wanting to love thus, within reconciled nature? Yet there are the prohibitions, the alarm bells, they are all ready to go into action, the snow bells of datura in case we should think of putting this insurmountable barrier between others and us." ↑ Let us recall that datura is a toxic plant of warm regions… ↩
36 — As Freud showed for example in the famous article "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," ↑, reprinted in Essais de psychanalyse appliquée, Paris, Gallimard, "Idées," 1975, p. 69-81. ↩
37 — "Nothing of all this is worth anything, these propositions are contrary to what makes the originality and fecundity of Freudianism […]. The psychoanalyst is not, – Fliess was not for Freud during his self-analysis – a witness of the subject's life," op. cit., p. 168. ↩
38 — Dreaming on Cinderella's glass slipper and on its relationship with the spoon-shoe, Breton evokes the "fur of vair, when it was constituted only of squirrel backs' ↑. Finding a little further on "the face that I had madly feared never to see again," the narrator notes: "her smile at this second leaves me today the memory of a squirrel holding a green hazelnut" (p. 714-715). ↩
39 — On the contrary Arcane 17 will close the gap here maintained by resorting to the myth of the woman child: "in her and only in her seems to me to reside in a state of absolute transparency the other prism of vision of which one obstinately refuses to take account…" (OC, III, p. 68) ↩
40 — See on this subject Marguerite Bonnet, Notice, p. 1692-1693. ↩
41 — See on this subject our work, Le lecteur et le livre fantôme, Essai sur La Défense de l'infini de Louis Aragon, Paris, Kimé, 2000, p. 316-319. ↩
42 — "For me, I will continue to inhabit my house of glass, where one can see at any hour who comes to visit me" (Nadja, OC, I, p. 651). ↩
43 — The narrator attacks Kant vigorously, emblem of an overly abstract rationalism and launches: "Mosquito, go! You take swamps for solid ground. You will therefore never get bogged down! You do not know the infinite force of the unreal." (Le Paysan de Paris, Gallimard, 1926, re-ed. "folio," 1972, p. 76). ↩
44 — According to Gracq's word recalled here in introduction. ↩
45 — Hegel, Aesthetics, Librairie Générale Française, 1997, trans. Charles Bénard, revised and completed by Benoît Timmermans and Paolo Zaccaria, re-ed., Classiques de Poche, I, p. 728. ↩
46 — Convergence after divergences: Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris calls myth "path of consciousness' and "the stupefying image," "way of knowledge." One can, for more precision, read our study "Présence de l'allégorie" in the volume Une tornade d'énigmes Le Paysan de Paris d'Aragon, Acts of the Study Day held in Reims on March 19, 2003, Paris, L'Improviste, 2003, p. 171-189. ↩
47 — "L'Air de l'eau" already evoked in 1934 the desire to "place my lips on your glass thighs'( OC, II, p. 402). See on this subject, Jeanne-Marie Baude, "Transparence et opacité dans la poésie d'André Breton," Mélusine, n° 2, L'Âge d'Homme, 1981, p. 117-129. ↩
48 — Letter to A. Rolland de Renéville, February 1932, reprinted in Point du jour, 1934, OC, II, p. 329. ↩
49 — Op. cit., p. 265. ↩
50 — Julien Gracq, André Breton, op. cit., p. 480-481. ↩
51 — Julien Gracq, "Spectre du Poisson soluble," op. cit., p. 911. ↩
52 — "I was forgetting that, to parry any velleity of invasion of the earth by the sempervivum, men have found nothing better – in truth nothing else – than to make it boil." (p. 743) ↩
53 — Jean Bellemin-Noël, "Des Vases trop communiquant," op. cit., p. 133. ↩
54 — Heidegger, "Hegel and his concept of experience," in Holzwege, 1949, trans. Wolfgang Brokmeier, Paris, Gallimard, 1962, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, re-ed. "Tel," p. 174. ↩
55 — This apparition is another sign of convergence between the two figureheads of surrealism, which persists years after the rupture. Aragon compares in 1928 the storm of his style to uncontrollable species: "The ferns! here it's at your place. Everywhere, when these worrying verdures surge, which reveal by their fullness an unfaithful subsoil and dormant waters, your kingdom extends, where the reader gets lost" (Traité du style, Paris, Gallimard, 1928, re-ed. "L'Imaginaire," p. 173) In this reader who "gets lost," one must first hear the writer attempting to recapture what he has, with "his gaffe of words' (Le Paysan de Paris, Folio, p. 186), made rise from the depths of his psyche. ↩