MÉLUSINE XXXVI ISSUE

par Henri Béhar

March 4, 2016

This thirty-sixth issue of Mélusine contains two dossiers.

The first, Masculine/Feminine, organized by Elza Adamowicz, Henri Béhar, and Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, does not pose the question of genders in surrealism, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, but rather how each author or artist has translated the part of masculine or feminine that is in each of all.

To the sociocultural approach, which obviously had to be recalled, we have here attempted a more precisely stylistic approach of genres (rhetorical sense) by genders (sexual sense). "I would like to be able to change sex as one changes shirts." Simple quip on Breton's part? The fact remains that in interwar surrealism, masculine-feminine relationships as well as concepts of femininity and masculinity are characterized by ambiguity (retrenchment and search), oscillation (the play of exchanges), transgression (the beyond of the body), becoming (Cahun's self-indefinition), fusion, even confusion.

This synthesis of the various progressive slippages of desire does not claim to exhaust the subject, even less to establish a ranking.

It is up to the reader to nourish himself from each contribution in order to complete the puzzle composed by a cohort of artists opportunely gathered over twenty years to say, through their creations, and each in their own way, the world to which they aspired.

The second dossier, surrealism in Japan, constituted and presented by Martine Monteau and Atsuko Nagaï, gives an overview of the reciprocal influence exercised between surrealism as it was constituted in France, one must naturally agree, and Japan, and of the impact on the thought, writing or artistic practices of one and the other.

In the West, as in the East, it was a matter of poetically grasping circumstantial, immediate beauty that passes and goes. This responds to the aesthetics of Japanese poetry and art – apprehending the eternity of the instant, conjugating the subtle alliance of opposites. The surreal is this place of epiphanies. Where the marvelous emerges from reality, surprises, suspends the concept, surrealism is in familiar territory.

Collaborations by: Elza ADAMOWICZ, Henri BÉHAR, Léa BUISSON, Justine CHRISTEN, Cosana ERAM, Thomas GUILLEMIN, Misao HARADA, Satoru HASHIMOTO, David HOPKINS, Yoshiteru KUROSAWA, Hervé Pierre LAMBERT, Constantin MAKRIS, Neil MATHESON, Martine MONTEAU, Atsuko NAGAÏ, Martine NATAT-ANTLE, Andrea OBERHUBER, Virginie POUZET-DUZER, Marie REVERDY, Annie RICHARD, Camilla SKOVBJERG PALDAM, Hanako TAKAYAMA, Pierre TAMINIAUX, Masachika TANI, Darren THOMAS, Nobuhiko TSUCHIBUCHI, Fumi TSUKAHARA, Ikumi WATANABE.

Table

Elza ADAMOWICZ, Henri BEHAR, Virginie POUZET-DUZER Masculine/Feminine 9
Martine NATAT-ANTLE Surrealism, historiographer of gender and transgender? 19
Elza ADAMOWICZ The couple in Max Ernst: "hirondil hirondelle" 29
Léa BUISSON Admissible and inadmissible transgressions. Penalties of hell or new hebrides of Robert Desnos 39
Justine CHRISTEN Clothing at the service of a "masquerade with sex" 49
Cosana ERAM Isidore Isou: the insurrection of erotology? 59
David HOPKINS Surrealism and masculine deficiency: Blind Swimmer, by Max Ernst 71
Constantin MAKRIS The triumph of Oedipus will not take place... surrealism facing the ancestral conflict between oedipal reason and feminine mystery 81
Neil MATHESON Anatomical fragments: Magritte, trauma and the spoiler 97
Andrea OBERHUBER Toward the neutral: the weightlifter and the minotaur 113
Marie REVERDY Parental identity: sex, gender and citizenship in The Breasts of Tiresias 125
Annie RICHARD The surrealist bible of Gisèle Prassinos or the "sublime point" of masculine/feminine difference 137
Camilla SKOVBJERG PALDAM The revolution of sexuality: Reich's influence on Danish surrealism 149
Pierre TAMINIAUX René Magritte and Georgette: the portrait of union 161
Darren THOMAS The transformation of genders in An Andalusian Dog 173
Surrealism in Japan 185
Martine MONTEAU- Atsuko NAGAÏ From Acéphale to Zen: surrealism and Japan 187
Nobuhiko TSUCHIBUCHI Shûzô Takiguchi — his life and work 195
Yoshiteru KUROSAWA The life and poetry of Tiroux Yamanaka 207
Misao HARADA Haiku, Japonism: Japan seen by the surrealists 219
Masachika TANI In search of surreality through photography: three Japanese photographers in the surrealist lineage 235
Hanako TAKAYAMA The reception of surrealism in the regions – the example of Nagoya 253
Satoru HASHIMOTO Politics of meta-aesthetics: surrealism, Japan and colonialism 261
Hervé Pierre LAMBERT Surrealism and Western modernity of Japanese tradition according to Octavio Paz 275
Ikumi WATANABE Surrealism and Zen: the discovery of Zen references in André Breton 287
Fumi TSUKAHARA In search of the origin of the sun tower Taro Okamoto and surrealism of the 1930s 298
Anthology of Japanese surrealist poetry 313
Variety Thomas GUILLEMIN Cravan before Cravan…. 341

Issue delivery soon available online on the L'Age d'Homme editions website