Surrealism and the Art of Crime by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)

The thesis and methodology of Jonathan P. Eburne's Surrealism and the Art of Crime are made clear from the outset. Eburne's aim is to chart how Surrealism, from its beginnings in the early 1920s to its dispersion in the 1950s, was shaped to a significant degree by its reaction to crime. His methodology is chronological, with each chapter pertaining to discrete moments in the movement's history.

The introduction's clarity of purpose is quickly clouded, however, by the first chapter, which deals with 1922, when the proto-Surrealist group was still the particularly fractious Paris branch of Dada. In this chapter, although the Surrealist reaction under examination is vaguely to crime, it is more precisely to artistic "crime," or to the way crime novels "kill" certainty by their multiplication of red herrings and dead-ends, and to the "epistemological murder" (27) of naturalism by photography, which, in their opinion, had co-opted naturalism's claims to realism. The chapter ends with a description of the Surrealists' distribution of nonsensical, decontextualized papillons in Paris, where they carried out an "assassination of unitary logic and its ideological confines," (46) the last in a series of "crimes" that appear rather anemic in comparison to the heartier assertions Eburne makes in his introduction.

After this shaky start, Eburne returns in earnest to his thesis in chapter two, which recounts the "période des sommeils" of 1922-23 and the main Surrealist concern of the day--the transcription of Robert Desnos's and René Crevel's waking dreams. In their accounts of these "dream days," (61) the Surrealists stressed the lyrical and poetic aspects of Desnos's dream ramblings, while barely mentioning Crevel's, which were laced with imagery of horribly violent crime. To explain this strange omission, Eburne notes that while the unconscious impulses these dream sessions released were indeed, in Desnos's verbalization, the treasure-trove of great beauty, fantastical images and wonders the Surrealists had hoped for, the unconscious that Crevel revealed was clearly the hiding place for gruesome violence and bloodthirsty desires, all of which were repressed by the ego, and for good reason. According to Eburne, the Surrealists had an unconscious preference for Desnos's happier expression of the unconscious, and subjected Crevel's to a second censorship, after that of the ego, much as they chose to ignore the foul crimes enumerated in Lautréamont's Maldoror, favoring instead a celebration of his "thirst for the infinite." (65). Despite Crevel's and Aragon's objections that the Surrealists were thus prettifying the truth of unconscious life and ignoring a royal road to the unconscious, Eburne shows that the Surrealists demonstrated a revulsion for crime--an attitude that marked their movement in the years when fascism was looming on the horizon.

Chapter three relates the Surrealists' reaction to the anarchist Germaine Berton's assassination of an ultra-right journalist. When the group hailed Berton as a true Surrealist, not just in word but in deed, it united once and for all with the far Left, a union whose excesses included Louis Aragon's acceptance of terrorism as a justifiable means of warfare. As Eburne points out, this acceptance, together with Breton's assertion that firing blindly into a crowd was a simple Surrealist act, would repeatedly return to haunt the Surrealists, and would lead indirectly to Aragon's expulsion from the group in 1932.

In chapter four, Eburne charts the ever-deepening anticolonialist alliance between the Surrealists and French Marxists between 1925 and 1928 in reaction to the Rif wars, native uprisings in colonial Morocco that were brutally repressed by French forces. Eburne's focus in this chapter does not, however, pertain to the book's central thesis, since the Rif uprisings, and even the French repression of this unrest, cannot truly be considered crimes per se, however germane they were to the development of Surrealism. Nonetheless, the chapter helpfully demonstrates that while chafing under the strictures of a doctrinaire Marxism, the Surrealists incorporated...