Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (review)

When, just a few days before his arrest and deportation, Robert Desnos tried to imagine what, if anything, of his work would survive the test of time, he offered the following tersely drawn prediction: "J'appartiendrai au chapitre de la curiosité limitée" (Œuvres 1265). Coming from a writer known for his unwavering optimism in the face of adversity, such a bleak prognosis suggests an underlying fear that his numerous contributions to the culturally diverse landscape of the interwar and wartime periods might be forgotten in postwar France. Fortunately, this has not occurred. Sustained critical interest in Desnos's work and, specifically, the recent publication of Katherine Conley's study testifies to the poet's enduring significance, not only for specialists of Surrealism, but for people interested in learning more about the various cultural contexts within and against which Desnos wrote in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Unlike earlier studies of Desnos's life and works, including Marie-Claire Dumas's ground-breaking Robert Desnos ou l'exploration des limites (Klincksieck, 1980), Conley's study deliberately combines discussion of Desnos's life with his writing. The result is a tapestry in which biographical and creative threads are tightly interwoven. The rich array of oral and written testimony Conley brings to bear on her study—some of which she garnered in interviews with people who knew Desnos or who were intimately familiar with some aspect of his life—constitutes one of the work's most impressive dimensions. To cite but one example, in a meeting with novelist and scholar Pierre Lartigue, Conley was able to find out that Eirisch, a prisoner at Compiègne when Desnos was there, had bartered some of his cigarettes—obtained from the Nazi guards in exchange for some of his portraits—with Desnos who, in turn, gave Eirisch some verse, including the last poem he would ever write. Like a detective whose passionate pursuit of hidden meanings frequently takes her beyond the poet's writing to shed light on some of the meanings contained therein, Conley's use of oral evidence to trace the poem's fortuitous circulation in the prison camp adds a poignant note to our understanding of Desnos's last work.

In her introduction, Conley proposes "to think about surrealism through the figure of Desnos, the most prolific practitioner and star performer of automatism" (1). By contrasting what she calls "Desnosian surrealism" with the more abstract "Bretonian surrealism," Conley asserts that Desnos "was unique in persisting in the ideological understanding of surrealism as nonelitist and as a way of life accessible to all" (5). Desnos's break with Breton in 1929 allows the poet, in Conley's words, to "popularize" surrealism, to "carry it into Nazi deportation camps" (1), and to reinvest everyday life with a sense of the marvelous inspired by the poet's lifelong engagement with the city of Paris. While Conley alludes in her introduction to significant parallels regarding the notion of the everyday in Desnos's work and the critical work of Lefebvre, Blanchot, de Certeau, and Augé, she makes it clear that her study is not concerned with discussion of broad theoretical issues, but with tracing the evolving role of everyday life in the poet's writing.

Each of the five chapters that comprise the study begins with a concise biographical vignette of Conley's own making that poetically encapsulates Desnos's situation at a specific moment in his life. These include: Desnos at surrealism's inception from 1922 until 1926; his move away from Breton and toward Bataille, as well as away from Yvonne George and toward Youki from 1926 to 1931; the heightened political role he played in radio from 1931 to 1939; his complex engagement as a writer of both clandestine ("illegal") and censored ("legal") texts from the phony war in 1939 until the time of his arrest in February 1944; and, finally, the circumstances surrounding his arrest and detention in Compiègne, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Flöha...