Le Surréalisme au grand air, 1: Écrire la nature par Émilie Frémond (review)

In this extensive and meticulous first volume, Émilie Frémond sets out to delineate the extent to which surrealist practices were informed by nature, proposing a ‘généalogie’ (p. 19) of its impact on the movement’s artistic and literary output. Frémond acknowledges from the outset that ‘la nature [. . .] fait mauvais ménage avec l’avant-garde’ (p. 40), and for this reason carefully and successfully avoids a simple cataloguing of all possible instances of references to nature in surrealist work. Art and literature are helpfully and appropriately treated as equals, and Frémond moves seamlessly between analyses of the two forms, as well as explicitly integrating an understanding of their socio-cultural context. Frémond’s literary writing style makes for an enjoyable read, despite the voluminous footnotes that somewhat overwhelm the page layout, sometimes occupying up to two thirds of the written page. Nature itself is dissected, sometimes literally, to identify the usefulness of the author’s comparison, which serves to consolidate and pin down the wealth of instances of engagement with the theme more broadly, particularly given Frémond’s assertion of the latency of the notion in the movement’s early years. Indeed, the author notes the surrealists’ own lack of recognition or consideration of their dependence on the subject, rendering her analysis of the values associated with these representations all the more pertinent. The author also highlights the sheer range of responses to nature, from Alfred Jarry and Émile Verhaeren to André Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire, drawing on the impossibility of reconciling these variations, and the desire to avoid the presumption of heterogeneity, to fuel her central problematic and analysis. The choice of proclaiming a structuralist approach risks feeling dated, but Frémond uses this theory sparingly in favour of a pragmatic method. The first part is dedicated to a lexicological analysis of the term ‘nature’ in its own right, in order to set up the comparative analysis around which the volume revolves. The second part addresses the limits of representation, through discussion of the worlds of dream, dépaysement, and the imagination. The work’s final and longest part lays out the landscapes of surrealism, going so far as to propose a Guide bleu of these landscapes, ranging from the marvellous, through the ‘panique’ (playing on the adjectival form’s dual capacity in French of referring both to panic and the Greek god Pan), to the political, before coming back to a discussion of the boundaries and limits of both representation and the author’s own study. Frémond closes the work by engaging in a consideration of contemporary art to demonstrate surrealism’s heritage in today’s culture, while again drawing on the strained relationship between art and nature. The symmetry of this move creates a pleasant consistency to the work without overplaying the role of the work’s central thesis. The book ends with a tantalizing promise of the forthcoming second volume, which promises to be of equal interest to scholars and amateurs of surrealism alike.