Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (review)

Book Reviews addresses itself to the mind, as in this surprising portrait of several lexicon-eater writers, whom a never relenting passion for life haunted. Gérard Bucher SUNY, Buffalo Elza Adamowicz. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Pp. xiv + 248. £40. Here Elza Adamowicz offers an interestingly analyzed study of the various techniques of cutting, assembling, and pasting the parts that go to make up the kinds of collage, visual and verbal, constructed in surrealism, and (since one-third of the book is devoted to Max Ernst) in dada before it. She is particularly good at the discussion of the subversive undermining of "established narratives" and of organic wholes by the "processes of substitution and displacement," the theoretical background for it, and the individual examples adduced to support her statements. As surrealist creations, the new body of texts, both of words and images, gives room to an erotics of fragments whose typical structure is that of the famous cadavre exquis, extensively commented on in other publications—but of which we enthusiasts never tire. Her remarks on statues and the techniques of masking and mosaic making up a counter-order of impossibility (and here she cites Jean Ricardou) as opposed to "the static, contained aesthetic of classicism" will be valuable for those scholars wanting to continue the analysis of this kind of process and production typical of surrealist investigation. I found particularly appealing—knowing, of course, that often what one is convinced by most successfully is that of which one is already at least partially convinced—her argument about the way in which certain analogies, whether Freudian, Hegelian, or alchemical, act to impose a coherence on texts that had willed themselves incoherent and incongruous. Breton's totalizing spirit acted often to contradict the very theory and practice of collage. And yet, this contradiction, along with others so apparent in surrealism, has contributed to keeping the arguments about surrealism alive. Without these, how dull a movement it might be by now, so long after its inception. Here's to contradiction. Mary Ann Caws Graduate School, City University of New York Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon, and Thomas C. Spear, eds. Céline and the Politics of Difference . Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1995. Pp. xii + 264. As Scullion states in her introduction, the contributors examine "the racial and ethnic differences foregrounded in [Celine's] pamphlets, but also those involving discourses on rationality, gender, and class" (12). Many of the essays discuss the writer's novels, but the prewar and wartime pamphlets are a constant reference, especially Bagatelles pour un massacre and L'Ecole des cadavres. Celine's style and racism are seen as deriving from the same impulse. Alice Kaplan documents the influence that publications distributed by notorious anti-Semites Darquier de Pellepoix, Henry Costón, and others exerted on Bagatelles. Philip Solomon discusses Celine's attack on Renoir's La grande illusion, a film Céline considered exemplary of "the Popular Front's pro-Jewish ideology" (56). In related articles, Philippe Aimeras argues that Bagatelles' racial stereotypes are present in literary works from L'Eglise to Rigodon, and Thomas Spear discusses Celine's characterization of his internal reader as a victim of Jewish rationalism, the antidote for which is the writer's own virile style. Several essays focus on identity, gender, and class. Isabelle Blondiaux questions Celine's Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 89 L'Esprit Créateur self-portrayal as paranoid or hysteric, while Jennifer Forrest analyzes Bardamu's trip to the U.S. in search of the ideal, passive woman who would not threaten his gender fantasies and underlying misogyny. Scullion's "Choreographing Sexual Difference" asserts that the diatribes and ballets of Bagatelles, along with Celine's obsessive focus on the beautiful yet contorted moves of the ballerina, reveal the author's inability to deal with otherness except through rejection, scopophilia, or mastery. Furthermore, Celine's resurrection of ballet imagery after the war accentuates "things beautiful" while diverting attention from "authorial accountability" (142). In another vein, Pascal Ifri concentrates on Mort à crédit and its picture of France's lower middle classes, disadvantaged by industrialization. Other...