From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature by Delia Ungureanu (review)

Part of Bloomsbury Academic’s “Literatures as World Literature” series, Delia Ungureanu’s From Paris to Tlön studies the surrealist aesthetic within the broad context of world literature. In contrast to local European avant-grade variations such as dadaism, vorticism, and futurism, Ungureanu demonstrates how surrealism gained a literary audience around the globe in just two decades, as manifested in poetry, visual arts, surrealist objects, fashion design, and even advertising. This posture breaks with many studies on the subject that treat surrealism as a uniquely European phenomenon, albeit with Latin American variations. Rather, Ungureanu’s study draws on the “network” theories established by social anthropologists including Elizabeth Bott, Jeremy Boissevain, and J. Clyde Mitchell to map surrealism’s “network of circulation” around the globe (3). Over the course of seven chapters, she traces the theoretical underpinnings of the movement, the international characteristics of its influence, the central position of the surrealist object as a form of intellectual exchange, and the broad reach of surrealist aesthetics and politics. Thus, Ungureanu highlights levels of networking, influence, and impact from the surrealist core in Paris to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote”; Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal work Lolita; Turkish Nobel Prize writer Orhan Pamuk’s novels The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence; and Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu’s works Nostalgia, Blinding, and Solenoid.

In treating surrealism as a global phenomenon, Ungureanu moves the discussion of surrealist aesthetics beyond what many consider a predominantly poetic and artistic movement. Ungureanu rightly suggests that by the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the surrealist mode can be seen in gothic, noir, and detective fiction, and in other manifestations of narrative. In doing this, she extends the conversation of surrealist criticism to incorporate writers not often associated with the movement, in addition to questioning the confines of orthodox surrealist groups and intimating that the writers discussed in the volume “never existed in isolation but participated in networks that have many points of intersection and that inform each other in the most unexpected ways” (15).

In the initial two chapters, Ungureanu addresses the French roots of surrealism in 1920s and 1930s Paris, from the theories of the father of surrealism, André Breton, to the continuously revisionary models of surrealism’s greatest practicioner, the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. The volume discusses the origins of the movement and their dependence on parlour games, café and bookstore meetings, the establishment of “little magazines” such as Littérature, Minotaure, Documents, and others, and the foundational surrealist premises of the first and second manifestoes, including automatic writing, surrealist objects, dreams and the subconscious, and mad love. These venues and aesthetic concerns were key in the networking of intellectual groups in Paris and beyond, which by the mid-1930s was evidenced in the publication of surrealist bulletins in multiple languages, Breton’s international travels to Prague, the Canary Islands, and Mexico, and the growing interest in surrealism in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia.

Subsequent chapters offer case studies that exemplify Ungureanu’s hypothesis of the networking of surrealist practices that led to a global market for surrealist creativity. In Chapter Three, she first addresses Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and their intertextual connections with a short analysis of Lautréamont’s handwriting written by Dr. Pierre Menard and published by Breton in May 1939 in a surrealist dossier. Borges knew of surrealist aesthetics through his readings in Buenos Aires of the Parisian magazine Minotaure, and articles published in Littérature, Mesures, and the Argentine review Sur, to which Borges was a regular contributor. Ungureanu addresses provocative questions reading the genesis of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” and whether Borges could have read Dr. Menard’s article on...