Surrealism and the Art of Crime (review)

In his Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1929) André Breton states that 'the simplest surrealist act' was to fire a pistol randomly into a crowd. The theme of criminality in Surrealism has traditionally been treated allegorically (violence as transgression); metaphorically (crime as a signifier for Surrealism's disruptive practices); or critically (Surrealism's assault on the female body). Jonathan Eburne argues that Breton's statement was more than the rhetorical gesture Georges Bataille reduced it to, indeed that questions raised by criminal activity were central to surrealist thought. The aesthetic, political and ethical roles of violence are uncovered as he traces the movement's intellectual history from the 1920s to the 1950s, showing how the surrealists both exposed state violence and engaged with the issue of the legitimacy of violent action within the revolutionary project of liberation, while avoiding the slippage into the glorification of murder (fascism) or individual rebellious action (anarchism). Eburne's first section, focusing on the epistemological and ethical questions raised by crime in the 1920s, explores the surrealists' fascination for both fictional crime stories and real murder cases, showing how the aesthetic treatment of murder by Aragon, Crevel or Péret was grounded on an ethical position. The second section focuses on the surrealists' participation in debates on revolutionary violence and social murder in the 1930s. It assesses the role of the Marquis de Sade's theories of revolt, violence and liberation in the surrealists' formulation of their revolutionary demands. It argues moreover that their defence of female criminal figures such as Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters or Violette Nozières was less a declaration of admiration for their anarchist actions than a means of exposing the increasing collusion between the repressive structures of French patriarchal power and totalitarianism, as well as a call to reflect on violence as a means of revolutionary intervention. The last section counters Sartre's 1947 dismissal of the surrealists as victims of the 1940 debacle. Against his charge of irresponsibility Eburne defends surrealist activities of the wartime and postwar period. Leonora Carrington's Down Below (1944), for instance, is analysed as a paranoiac response to the violence of World War 2. The notion of black humour is linked to the revival of the 'roman noir' and the detective 'série noire' as a form of vernacular surrealism which exported the surrealist discussion of violence into the North American political context (Chester Himes). The last two chapters examine the surrealists' postwar positions regarding violence as political strategy through their dialogues or disputes with French intellectuals such as Camus, Césaire or Sartre. The scope of this study, extending far beyond the surrealists' anecdotal fascination for Fantômas, Landru or the 'locked room mystery story' that its title might suggest, is an impressive re-assessment of Surrealism's intellectual history, refreshingly free of recent critical attempts to appropriate Surrealism, whether through Bataillean critiques which have shaped and often skewed much recent scholarship, or through reductive readings of the movement as an adjunct of popular culture.