André Breton: Une histoire d'eau (review)

Contemplating the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens, one night in 1926, Breton recalls Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), unwittingly echoed by Nadja, who sees in the fountain her thoughts mingled with Breton's, converging and separating. This image of the fountain, Gérard Gasarian argues, is at the core of Breton's poetics. He links it first to a nexus of themes active throughout Breton's writings: the fluctuation between the material and the immaterial, between idealism and materialism, impulses and sublimated thought, words and thought. On the metapoetic level the image of the fountain is interpreted as an allegory of thought, the paradigm of 'le point suprême', the notion of surrealist poetry as a 'pro-jet' or as the oscillation between what Jean Paulhan defines as 'terror' and 'rhetoric'. The matrix thus established, Gasparian maps out a poetics of 'hydraulic circulation' among the texts of the 1920s and 1930s. He traces, for example, the development and transformation of the theme of 'la voyageuse', first encountered in the 1923 poem 'Tournesol', reactualized in the figure of Nadja, and finally materialized in 1934 as the young woman Breton met during another nocturnal Paris walk, 'la nuit du tournesol', which reenacts the trajectory recounted in the early poem. The method also allows Gasarian to follow the chain of associations in Breton's texts from 'Occident' to 'Orient' and 'aurore', in turn associated with the theme of 'l'attente' and the erotic. Gasarian argues that Breton's 'point sublime' is a 'point d'eau', the site of a constantly renewed tension (like the water of the fountain suspended between high and low, movement and immobility) rather than an accomplished union of opposites, where differences and tensions would be abolished. From this perspective surrealist metaphor, like Nadja's gaze drawn by the rising and falling water, is envisaged in terms of circulation and fluidity, a constant play between the figurative and literal meaning of words, an erotic encounter of images, thus foregrounding, paradoxically, differences rather than resemblances, and opening on to aporia rather than analogy. Gasarian revisits an earlier generation of critics, Henri Meschonnic, Jean Paulhan or Jean-Pierre Richard, whose 'critique totalisatrice' appears to be one of the founding models for the present analysis. This is a dense text, both sensuous appreciation and intellectual apprehension, but one which privileges sympathetic criticism over critical distance. Rather than providing a key to understanding central surrealist concepts, it is a study for the initiate, the reader already familiar with Breton's complex poetic and philosophical discourse. Above all it is a performative text, a celebration of Breton's aesthetics, enacting, in its non-linear developments, echoes and word-play, in its favouring of the fragment over sustained discourse, its perceptive interweaving of images and its sudden illuminating observations, Breton's own aesthetics of communicating vessels.