Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (review)

Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris. Robin Walz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 206. $35.00.

In the last paragraph of his introduction to Pulp Surrealism, Robin Walz states, "In the division between history as knowledge and as interpretation, this book contributes primarily to the latter, although I trust readers will learn something of the former as well" (12). I would have to disagree. The primary contribution of his book is almost entirely knowledge-based. But it therefore has an appeal that few scholarly books do: it is a quick, compelling, and yes, even entertaining read. The anecdotes told here of early twentieth-century Paris, whether of the murder trial of Henri Landru, or the tales of the shopkeepers of the famous Passage de l'Opéra are fascinating and well documented. Much of the book consists of stories taken from mass print culture, and retold by Walz. (In this sense, perhaps a better--though certainly less catchy--title would have been Surrealist Pulp.) The wealth of intriguing source material here, as well as the narrative style, makes this book entertaining.

Walz's archival work supports an oft-made but seldom substantiated assertion about the connection between mass culture and Surrealism. Most anyone who knows anything about Surrealism knows that the Surrealists were influenced by mass culture and vice versa, but rarely do they know more than that. Pulp Surrealism uses mass print media--mainly tabloid-style newspapers marketed to laborers and the petit bourgeois--to follow the various trails that the Surrealists left behind in their poetry, novels, and artworks. At the very least, it makes perfectly clear why the Surrealists found the mass culture of their age fascinating. The book's first chapter, for instance, describes the section of Aragon's Paysan de Paris documenting the efforts of Baron Georges Haussmann to evict the shopkeepers of the Passage de l'Opera, then documents the errors of those who have mistaken Aragon's account for the "truth." The novel's intention is to force readers to leave their everyday lives, to transport them into the realm of the marvelous--and nothing more.

If the narrativity of Walz's book is one of its finest qualities, however, it is also its weakest. All four chapters move in much the same way. Each begins with a Surrealist's penchant for a particular aspect of mass culture, whether the Passages, the Fantômas stories, the Landru murder trial, or tales of suicide--and through each Walz painstakingly follows the Surrealists, who mark, as he says, "cultural guideposts." The final chapter, "Is Suicide a Solution: Surrealist Questions and Fait-Divers Responses" is a good example of the book's main fault, a problem I believe stems from a confusion regarding its proper audience. This chapter begins with the first issues of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste, featuring the inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?" accompanied by a series of fait-divers, short (usually 2-3 line) news stories often used as fillers in French tabloid papers of the time. Though Walz presents a convincing analysis of the Surrealists' interest in the question of suicide--that a moral and legal ban on suicide makes no sense in light of the atrocities of World War I and the realities of everyday urban existence--the majority of the chapter recounts the medical and psychiatric sources behind the contemporary discourse on suicide. As morbidly fascinating as these case studies are, their particular relevance to Surrealism is unclear. When he comments,

Under the guise of a medical and psychological work . . . Suicides et crimes étranges shed little explanatory light upon the causes of suicide. Instead it accorded a large amount of space to anecdotal accounts of suicides. . . . More than the mental or physical state of the victims, what was compelling in these accounts . . . was the bizarre details of their deaths,

it is tempting to levy the same critique...