THE ART OF SURREALIST CRIME

Recension par Georges Sebbag

November 23, 2014

Jonathan Eburne, Surrealism and the art of crime, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 2008. Masao Suzuki, Faits divers surréalistes, coll. Surréaliste, Jean-Michel Place, 2013. Histoires littéraires, janvier-mars 2013, vol. XIV, n° 53.

In Surrealism and the art of crime, Jonathan P. Eburne's very structured and innovative book, surrealist thought and activities are scrutinized through the lens of crime or the news item, a concrete notion from which the author gradually extracts the concept. This allows him, with such a guiding thread, to slip between individual crime and collective violence, media hype and theoretical reflection. Jonathan Eburne can thus elaborate new interrogations on evil, terror and revolution. Expressing himself in an elegant and concise style, he resolves, for pedagogical reasons, to expose, sequence after sequence, the chronology of crime explored by the surrealists. Above all, he shows himself to be formidably effective in selecting texts and documents that surrealist historiography had neglected. Taking the reader as witness, he details the manifestations of crime, dissects the ambient elements, exploits a series of clues or signals, unfolds arguments without ever forcing the point. In short, he conducts an investigation, most often unprecedented, on the art of surrealist crime.

Of course, Eburne thoroughly examines the cases of Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters or Violette Nozières, all these women whose criminal gesture the surrealists exalted. He also does not fail to question Breton declaring that if he were mad and locked up in an asylum he would assassinate the doctor who fell into his hands (Nadja) or defining the simplest surrealist act as shooting randomly into the crowd (Second Manifesto). But even more subtly, he submits to the reader much more unexpected pieces of evidence:

We know that the author of the Surrealist Manifesto relies on Dostoevsky's description of a room to fire red-hot shots at the novelist's craft. However, contrary to Breton's assertion, this description from Crime and Punishment is not arbitrary, it corresponds to a moment of reconnaissance by Raskolnikov, a potential assassin. Thus, even if it is invoked by default, this room wallpapered with yellow paper, virtual scene of a crime, seems lodged within the very surrealist apparatus. In May 1922, in Littérature, nouvelle série, n° 2, appears "Au Clair de la Lune," a text dedicated to Raymond Roussel and signed by a certain Philippe Weil. There is described with the meticulousness of a bailiff the scene of a crime: a room where a male corpse lies and where clothes, curtains and various pieces of furniture are constellated with droplets of blood. Behind Philippe Weil actually hides Philippe Soupault. This redundant description of blood stains will take on its full meaning once placed in the novel À la dérive, but then the corpse will be female. Note that this same issue of Littérature ends with a letter, with an illegible signature, received by the editorial staff: "We have the pleasure of informing you that we are sending you by this mail the dozen French children who died of hunger that you are requesting in exchange for the Russian specimens that you have kindly sent us. / Always devoted to your orders, please accept, etc." Beyond this missive that balances between the sinister and black humor, let us recall that Soupault at the same time was writing Invitation au suicide, a work whose trace has still not been found. We may wonder if André Breton, to whom the novel À la dérive is dedicated, did not want to sanction, through the room of Crime and Punishment, another crime room, the one where Soupault dwelled on the drops of blood and modified at will the sex of the corpse.

Down Below (En bas), Leonora Carrington's dramatic and moving account of her flight to Spain and her internment in a clinic, is the occasion for Eburne, after a review of the approach to paranoid delirium by Dalí, Lacan and Crevel, to situate the unfortunate Carrington in this wake. On the one hand, he establishes a parallel between the clinic plan drawn by the surrealist and that of Dr. Flechsig's clinic inserted by the famous President Schreber in Memoirs of a Neuropath. On the other hand, he insists on the cosmic, social and political scope of a delirium integrating the persecution of Jews in the midst of the Second World War.

La Reine des pommes by Chester Himes published in 1958 in the Série noire, the collection of the former surrealist Marcel Duhamel, allows an interrogation on the ramifications of black humor but also on a new way for the African-American writer to reshuffle the cards of crime and social violence in his own writing of the noir novel. These few glimpses of Jonathan Eburne's work give an idea of how much his investigation of the criminal field as well as collective violence represents a real advance in the critical and epistemological knowledge of surrealism. It is impossible not to associate this book with Masao Suzuki's dossier Faits divers surréalistes, which was about to appear in 2007 and which finally saw the light of day only in 2013. There we find gathered, in the spirit of the Surréaliste collection at Jean-Michel Place, all the texts published in surrealist journals precisely on this theme. Under the title "L'Opium / Des jeunes gens s'étaient essayés à fumer le terrible suc," the death of Jacques Vaché and Paul Bonnet in a hotel in Nantes on January 6, 1919 opens the ball of news items. Benjamin Péret, in Littérature of July-August 1920, outbids the recent news item of a little girl raped then cut into fifty-five pieces and thus specifies his point of view: "A crime only interests us insofar as it is an experience (a dissociation of chemical compounds)." For Eburne, this article by Péret lays the foundations of surrealist crime art.

We can give an idea of the documentary extent of the news items by citing the three major sections of Masao Suzuki's anthology: "Who killed Philippe Daudet? 'It's me,' says Germaine Berton / Violette, victim of incest and parricide / Denise Labbé, diabolically bewitched." How to explain that the news item is consubstantial with surrealism? Masao Suzuki sees two reasons. On the one hand, the news item, as a journalistic statement, falls on the one who receives it as a message, even as an automatic message. On the other hand, this unverifiable message finds in the surrealist group, which is a convulsive plurality, an affective terrain particularly propitious.

In this surrealist history of crime and news items, I have had the opportunity on many occasions to emphasize three points: 1. "There is a man cut in two by the window," the first automatic message heard by Breton is of a schizophrenic nature. 2. This message succeeds the tale L'Homme coupé en morceaux projected by Breton shortly before, in November 1918. 3. This tale, this message, as well as a few years later, the exquisite corpse game, are nothing other than the projection of the woman or man cut into pieces, a news item that has its letters of nobility with Jean Lorrain ("Autour d'un cadavre / Propos d'opium," Le Journal, January 29, 1901), Alphonse Allais ("La vérité sur l'homme coupé en morceaux dévoilée par l'assassin lui-même," Le Journal, January 30, 1901) and Alfred Jarry ("Opinion de l'homme coupé en morceaux," L'Œil, June 21, 1903). This press review would not be complete without the resounding article "Pour l'homme coupé en morceaux" published by Joseph Delteil in Paris-Journal of January 9, 1925: "Every time that opinion, irritated, troubled by incidents of international order, social rumors, political quarrels, slides, pitches, needs a veronal tablet, quickly we appeal to the man cut into pieces."

It seemed necessary to me to bring together two works which, although written independently of each other, complement each other admirably. To Jonathan Eburne's masterful study which radiates around the conceptual focus of crime respond the pieces of this same dossier gathered and analyzed by Masao Suzuki with the greatest finesse. A new understanding of surrealism emerges when those who strip it bare experience its very sensitivity.

In "André Breton et le grand fait divers" (Histoires littéraires, January-March 2013, vol. XIV, n° 53), whose title alludes to Stéphane Mallarmé's Divagations, Henri Béhar poses this pertinent question in a note: why did the surrealists call their Violette Nozières and not Nozière?