André Breton: Une Histoire d’eau (review)

This book makes a significant contribution to Bretonian studies through the use of the figure of the fountain from André Breton's best known work, Nadja. Gasarian demonstrates how the fountain functions as an enduring image with which to understand Breton's poetics because of the way in which a fountain circulates endlessly—not unlike the flow of surrealist automatism—and the ways in which it moves simultaneously up and down according to a natural tension, agitation, even "convulsion," to use Breton's own formula to describe his aesthetic vision from the end of Nadja: "La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas." This emblematic image figures materially and metaphorically the fundamental duality of form and content common to all poetry. It also contrasts and blends the real and the poetic, as surrealism itself tends to do. Gasarian, the author of previous books on the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Charles Baudelaire, stresses how the fountain in Nadja is underscored by the illustration that accompanies its description according to a doubling that recurs throughout his readings, where an apparently single element—like the fountain, or the woman evoked in Breton's poem "Tournesol"—serves a double function and thus maintains a vibrant quality that links the literary to the real, suspending any opposition between the two, like Breton's "sublime point," which reconciles "the old antinomies." This doubleness is reciprocal, Gasarian explains: "Loin d'être indifférent au réel, Breton voudrait que ses images surréelles s'y projettent, afin que les couleurs de la vie quotidienne en soient rehaussées" (123). Matter and mind, words and lived experience, objectivity and subjectivity may not be separated in Gasarian's careful reading of Breton.

Gasarian defends surrealism against the charge that it practiced a version of "art for art's sake" with a reminder of the lively, even shocking, quality of Bretonian "convulsive beauty" and its manner of creating after-shocks. This is exactly the way automatism works because of the way in which the sense of what emerges from the automatic flow often does not become clear until afterwards, as with Breton's discovery of the meaning of his own prophetic automatic poem "Tournesol" only eleven years after he wrote it. "Le sujet vient après son langage," argues Gasarian, "dont la beauté tient ainsi à sa force augurale" (205). He works doubleness throughout his readings of Breton's major writings from the 1920s and 1930s, (omitting, regrettably, Arcane 17 from 1944), combining a sensibility for Breton's poetics with Breton's practical presentation—his layout for Nadja, for example, that juxtaposes the image of the fountain with its description—and with Breton's biography, his place in surrealist history, and how he has been received by scholars, with a concentration on French scholars of surrealism. Gasarian shows through his study of the book Nadja how Nadja the person draws Breton outside of himself and, according to the double movement of the fountain, allows him to attain a deeper understanding of himself.

Surrealism tends towards the autobiographical, as Denis Hollier has argued and Gasarian confirms. Surrealist autobiographical writing, nonetheless, as Gasarian skillfully shows in this book, remains fundamentally poetic, as he demonstrates through elegantly formulated analyses of Breton's style, principally in Nadja but also in L'Amour fou, "Tournesol," "L'Union libre," and with useful contextual references to the Manifeste du surréalisme, "L'Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité," and "Le Message automatique." Gasarian shows how all of Breton's philosophy about surrealist living and writing, including his corroboration of automatism and his political commitments, may be read and understood through Breton's poetics of doubleness, of reconciliation and synthesis, of the necessary co-existence of poetry and life. In his reading, Gasarian follows Breton himself, who, almost touchingly in the Manifesto, claims that poetry can teach us everything we need to know—about desire, politics, life. Gasarian uses Breton's own poetry innovatively to clarify Breton.