Phantoms of the opera: Notes Towards a Theory of Surrealist Confession--TheCase of Breton

Alina Clej

MLN, Vol. 104, No. 4, French Issue. (Sep., 1989), pp. 819-844.

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Phantoms of the opera: Notes Towards a Theory of Surrealist

Confession- The Case of Breton

3 Alina Clej

Surrealist enigmas are not meant to be unravelled. At least this is the message that Breton foists upon the reader of Nadja, through his quarrelsome remarks directed against interpreters and inter- pretation. This attitude, which is part and parcel of the surrealist project defined by Breton-an ambitious operation designed to reclaim the energies of the unconscious in their unmodified state, which is to say, beyond all interpretation-has left its imprint not only on surrealist writings, but to a large extent on surrealist readers as well. This may explain why ~ a d j a has retained its ambiguous charm long after Michel Beaujour raised his challenging question in the wake of Breton's death, "Qu'est-ce que Nadja?"'

What indeed is Nadja, if it is not a roman a clef, not a detective story, hardly a romance, certainly not a psychological novel, not a novel in fact, but perhaps a veridical narrative, too artfully written,

N.R.F., April 1967, 780-99. All references given by page only will be to the revised edition of Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Translations are either my own or else borrowed (with occasional modifications) from Nadja, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), which follows the 1928 edition. The following ab- breviations will be used to refer to other works by Breton: C T = Clair de terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); E = Entretiens. 1913-1952 (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). 1 = "Intro-duction au discours sur le peu de realite," in Point dulour (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Eng. tr. adapted from Franklin Rosemont, ed., Andre Breton. What Is Surrealwm? (Pluto Press, 1978). MS = Manifestes du surrealisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Finally, OC = the Pleiade edition of Breton's Oeuvres completes (1988), t. I , containing notes and commentary by the editor, Marguerite Bonnet.

820 ALINA CLEJ

however, to maintain its allegedly documentary or scientific value, too fantastic and contrived to be a genuine a~tobiography?~ Nadja is no doubt difficult to place, but not so much because, as one critic put it, it represents a "unique challenge to all genre^,"^ but rather because it functions as an unusual kind of work, more like a text- object than a mere text, resembling, one might say, a surrealist object, of the kind described by Breton himself in his Introduction n u discours su,r Le pez~ de rkalitk, published in 1925, a couple of years before Nadja was written. The imaginary object evoked by Breton in Introduction is "a rather curious book," whose back "is formed by a wooden gnome" with a long white beard "clipped in the Assyrian manner," and whose pages are made of "thick black wool." Such dream-objects, Breton says, could be easily "manufactured" and "put into circulation" in real life, for the sake of their "distinctly puz- zling and disturbing" effect (I, 26). Nadja is, I believe, such a dream-object-the textual realization of Breton's rather extrava- gant "marketing" project.

There are certain interpretative advantages to this hypothesis, which my analysis will, I hope, confirm. First of all, if Nadja were to be considered as a dream-object ("objet de rCve"), or perhaps as an object that operates "symbolically," which is to say, using Dali's de f in i t i~n ,~an "object which fulfill[s] the necessity of being open to action by our own hands and moved about by our own wishes," then Breton's text would reveal, if not its own precise meaning, then at least its symbolic function. Identifying Nadja with the dream-object mentioned above, the "curious book" which could certainly be "open to action by our own hands and moved about by our own wishes," would explain the teasing obscurity of Breton's narratjve as the result of a "necessity" or "wish" which may con- cern the writer no less than his reader. I would like to suggest, in other words, that Breton's text functions as a sort of dream-ma- chine. in which both reader and author are intended to lose their

For generic considerations of Nadja, see Michel Beaujour (op. cit.); Anna Bala- kian, Andre' Breton-Magnus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 104; Mary Ann Caws, Andre Breton (Twayne Publishers, 1971), 62; Renee Riese-Hubert's critical bibliography in Oeuvres et crztzques, 11, 1 (1977); and Jacque- line Chenieux-Gendron, Le SurrCalisme et le roman (Lausanne: Editions L'Age d'homme, 1983), 151-77.

Franklin Rosemont, Andre Breton and the First Princzples of Surrealism (Pluto Press, 1978), 61.

"Objets surrealistes," Eng. tr. in Herschel B. Chipp ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 425.

trail, or as some ingenious mechanism of disorientation and for- getting, in which footprints and traces are continuously muddled (les pas perdus). All this goes to say that one can perhaps answer the question "Qu'est-ce que Nadja?" in some definite, straightforward way, not by ignoring the surrealist quality of the work, but on the contrary, by isolating and emphasizing its function as a surrealist dream-object. From such a perspective, and with all the cautionary moves required by the interpretation of such phantasmatic objects, I will venture to define the wish that governs the textual produc- tion of Nadja as a desire to forget, or rather, as a desire to recollect through forgetting.

A second interpretative advantage to such a hypothesis will be of a methodological order. Breton's attachment to his thick, wooly, "curious book," whose pages, as he says, he has "no difficulty in turning," suggests, in spite of the author's disavowals, a strong in- terest in reading or interpretation-an interest that is of a very peculiar kind, no doubt, since it is the thick obscurity of the pages which makes for their easy and obviously pleasant manipulation. If one correlates this oblique image of negative exegesis with the die- getic signals provided by the narrative in Nadja, which point, as most critics have agreed, to some form of autobiographic dis- course, Nadja's genre, or rather its generic practice, may not be so indefinte after all. There is, I think, with some adjustments, the possibility of reading Nadja as a confession, or rather as a surrealist confession, in which the process of self-clarification (an ordinary trait of confessional discourse) is replaced by one of deliberate misprision, a work or working-out in which the mystification is de- signed as much for the locutor as for the addressee. It is under this generic guise that I propose to examine the symbolic mechanism produced by Nadja, not only because the confessional mode ap- pears as the most plausible negative structure for Breton's narra- tive, but also because it seems indispensable to its functioning as a dream-object. * * * The term "surrealist confession" may surprise and rightly so, since nothing seems more unconventional than the surrealist methods of self-examination. In the Western tradition, inspired by Chris- tianity, literary confession has been generally understood as a quest for individual truth aimed at achieving a certain measure of existential harmony, that is, peace with oneself, with God, or the Other. Confession so understood is an ontological project based on

822 ALINA CLEJ

self-exegesis, whereby the discourse of truth can be said to assume a performative function. It is from this perspective that the term "surrealist confession" seems difficult to maintain. First of all, it is quite obvious that surrealists, in general, lack the religious or eth- ical framework associated with confessional practices: they do not believe in guilt, or in a transcendental Law to guide their spiritual exercises. What makes applying confession even more difficult vis-a-vis the Surrealists is that they no longer believe in the old Cartesian fable of a steadfast undivided subject grounding repre- sentation: there is no central self to conduct and suffer the anal- ysis. For them, as for Rimbaud, "I is an other," Je est u n autre. And yet, in spite of this ontological self-difference, I think that they still play the old "truth gamef15 in which, as Foucault puts it, the self becomes "the operating ground for a process more or less obscure which has to be d e ~ i ~ h e r e d . " ~ What has changed is the nature and position of the hermeneutic field. The ground of interpretation, which was traditionally conceived of as both central and accessible to the subject, is displaced, only to be situated below or beyond the subject's reach. In fact, the ontological formula "I is an other" could easily be rephrased in epistemological terms: what is to be interpreted lies outside the subject, who now becomes a subjec- tively constituted objet trouve', as it were a kind of sujet trouve'. This reading of the subject as alienated object is justifiable, inasmuch as what is often given for the interpretation of the self in a surrealist text is a stray object, which turns out to function as a "partial ob- ject," or else as some imaginary projection of the ego.

The surrealist notion of self-investigation that is based, as I said, on the decentering of the subject and on the displacement of the hermeneutic field is, of course, not so original or singular as it pretends to be. The interest, taken by both writers and psychia- trists of the 19th century and early 20th century, in the dissocia- tion of personality and in parapsychological phenomena, is well known. Never before the 20th century, however, was alienation explored and practiced in such a consistent way. And not merely by poets. The notion that "I is an other" was not just a fanciful idea

It is perhaps not without significance that Breton was always fascinated by "truth games," even in his later years, when, according to a witness, he used to have his New York friends submit themselves to a rather painful game of confessional reminiscence, as a social pastime.

"Truth and Subjectivity," Howison Lectures (ms.), Part I, Berkeley, October 1980, 12.

tapped by the Surrealists for unconventional poetic purposes, but the basic assumption of the new science of psychology developed by such pioneers in the field as Freud and Lacan. In fact, Lacan used Rimbaud's formula Je est un autre to illustrate the decentering impact brought about by the Freudian discovery of the uncon- scious, adding that "poets who don't know what they are saying manage however to say it before everybody else doesn7 Placing the hermeneutic field outside the subject meant, for both Surrealists and psychoanalysts, investigating unconscious rather than con- scious phenomena, and privileging those states in which uncon- scious phenomena become more readily visible-that is, various forms of mental disturbance and alienation, of which paranoia (meaning literally, the state of being "outside oneself" and "men- tally estranged") was a favorite example.

The relation between surrealism and psychoanalysis, in all its historical and theoretical entanglements, is unfortunately too com- plicated to be treated adequately here. I will resort, now and then, to psychoanalytic terms, only insofar as they clarify the reading of the texts. My main point, however, will not be to prove the uni- versal validity of psychoanalysis, but rather to show its more re- stricted historical and heuristic value, seeing that its appearance, arguably, was produced in part by the phenomena that it de- scribes. In this respect, I realize, it is hard to escape the herme- neutic circle. All that I can do is bring to my support a rather dis- credited and weak prop, which is to say, History or the Real, with regard to which I feel I am on safer ground in giving somebody else's definition. I will accordingly turn to Jameson, who in an early essay on "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psy- choanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," defines the Real as the "diachronic evolution of History itself, the realm of time and death."8 Given Jameson's understanding of "ideological representation" (based on Althusser's concept of ideology) as "that indispensable mapping fantasy or narrative by which the indi- vidual invents a 'lived' relationship with collective systems," I will attempt to place the subject under discussion, the sujet trouve', in its relation to the two orders of the Symbolic (or the synchronic tissue of social relations mediated by language), and the Real, as defined

'Le Se'minazre, I1 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 16. in Shoshana Felman ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hop-

kins University Press, 1982), 394.

824 ALINA CLEJ

above. Following, to some extent, Jameson's notion of the "political unconsciou~,"~I would like to suggest that in the very process of self-examination, confessional acts, and especially literary ones, may constitute patterns of imaginary accommodation to various changes and pressures that develop in collective systems; and that, in certain historical circumstances, accommodation can assume the form of a resistance. The process of self-fashioning may then be construed as a reverse "mapping" of history onto the self, through a complex type of mediation or "overdetermination," in the sense that Althusser gives to this term. Specifying the mechanisms that subtend this process will be one of the objects of the present anal- ysis.

Breton's Nadja exemplifies, to my mind, such an imaginary transaction with the Real, within what appears to be a purely "exis- tential" or poetic frame of self-examination-which is not to say that philosophical and aesthetic values do not play a part in the general constitution of the work. In this particular case, I would like to show how a private discourse (i.e., a confessional narrative) can respond to the real and symbolic disturbances that occur within a given historical context (defined in Breton's case by the First World War). This response is measurable in the relation be- tween the external conflicts reproduced in the imaginary texture of the work and the simultaneous reactivation of libidinal tensions in the subject's personal history. Seeing that Nadja is presented by Breton himself as a case-history, and explicitly takes the form of a clinical model of analysis, I would prefer to use Foucault's notion of "technologies of the self" instead of the conventional under- standing of confession as a genre.1° There are several advantages to this choice. For one thing, it diversifies the confessional model so as to include the possibility of using another to examine oneself -the way in which Breton employs Nadja as a medium for self- discovery. Secondly, it enlarges the scope of the confession, al- lowing for purposes other than redemption or forgiveness. Third and most important of all, the word "technology" facilitates the transition from a real economy to an imaginary one. And, in this particular case, what both the experience and the confessional techniques of Breton's surrealist narrative reproduce is the sym-

See especially pp. 77-79 of the Preface to The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Methuen, 1981).

lo Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton eds., Technologies of the Self (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.

bolic functioning of the war machine, or what Breton calls the "death apparatus" ("l'appareil de mort"), with all its attendant symptoms of desire, anxiety, and phobia.

* * * Breton's Nadja is, as I have already mentioned and has often been noted with justified anger by feminist readers," a text more about Breton than about Nadja. And yet, on closer inspection, it is not really about Breton either, since the most striking feature of this confessional narrative is the absence of its subject, a matter which the author makes no effort to conceal. The text opens with the question "Who am I?", a question which, given the proper rhetor- ical emphasis, traditionally grounds and motivates all confessional narratives, and describes their "plot"-the movement from an ini- tial state of unknowing or me'connaissance, with its corresponding feeling of emptiness, to a state of clarification, in which truth ("la parole pleine") fills the subject.

I believe, however, that Breton's query at the beginning of Nadja does not have a propaedeutic value, nor does it betray an existen- tial doubt which has, in the meantime, been solved by the very discourse in which it appears, but is and remains endowed with the illocutionary force of a literal question of identity. "Who am I?" implies, accordingly, "I don't know who I am," "I am not sure I am the one supposed to be me," "I have forgotten who I am." In other words, it is precisely the proper name or the signature of the au- thor, which in autobiographic texts is supposed to certify the exis- tence of a referent behind the "speaking I," which is in question in Breton's case. The fact that the author's question addresses his identity in a direct way is not only indicated by the context in which the question appears, to which I shall presently return, but is also suggested by some of Breton's previous works.

I shall mention for the moment the poem "PSTT" whose title stands as a modified acronym for the Post Telegraph Telephone Ser- vice, a poem in which Breton seems to be scanning through a tele- phone directory in search of his name (CT, 49-50). That is, he is faithfully recording all the Breton's listed in the book, with their respective addresses and occupations: hotel-keepers, wine mer-chants, retailers, public servants, dairy farmers, and so on. I will

l1 For a positive evaluation of Nadja's character, see for example, Gloria Feman Orenstein, in DadaISurrealism, 8 (1978), 91-106; and Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), 34-35.

826 ALINA CLE]

retain only two names: that of "Breton (E.)," a specialist in funeral monuments, who resides on the avenue of the Paris Cemetery, and "Breton & Co.," a charcoal wholesale business, because of their allusive links with the topographic details present in Nadja. At the end of the nominal list in which "Andre Breton" himself does not figure, Breton signs his name, putting "Andre" in parentheses. Critics have noticed Breton's odd search for his name in connec- tion with the particular revamping of traditional psychology un- dertaken by surrealist writers, but without taking the poet's quest at its face value,'* that which Breton himself gives us to read. The dissemination of the proper name in the telephone directory has thus been interpreted as a positive sign, which serves to reinforce, through the very contingency of the name's appearance, the uniqueness of its referent, that is, of Andre Breton the poet who signs the list.

In what follows I would like to give credit to Breton's specific instruction, which is to read the name in parentheses, the name which does not appear on the list, but which could be claimed as proper. I would like, in other words, to propose a reading of Nadja which ascribes a literal value to Breton's rhetorical question of identity, and explores the "I" as an absent other, or as a name which has been forgotten. Of course, one should not take Breton's amnesia too seriously, at least not that of the historical person be- hind the author's implied self, since the real Breton had a good grip on his name, and could remember, only too well perhaps, what he pretends to have forgotten. The interesting thing is to see how, and if possible why, Breton represents his quest in terms of a loss of memory.

Coming back to the name, "Andre," inscribed in parentheses at the end of "PSTT," whose title is a contradiction of sorts, an au- dible cue to silence and a signal for attention, one feels tempted to compare the bracketed subject at the bottom of the list with some- thing resembling a box in which the subject is lying, an image which reappears in Nadja, and which could be identified as a coffin. Breton himself points to this meaning, when he gives a sin- ister turn to the French saying "tell me whom you haunt, and I will tell you who you are" (9). So the question "Who am I?" would perhaps "amount," he says, "to knowing whom I 'haunt.' " By "haunt" (hunter, that is, "frequent," or "hang around with") he does

l 2 Chenieux-Gendron, op. cit., 55.

not have the mundane term in mind, although I think the sense of "consorting with" may also be relevant here, but the more ethereal action which pertains to ghosts or other disembodied creatures who are known to visit the living with some vindictive purpose in mind.13

What is the meaning of this ghastly impersonation and its vain haunting? Why should Breton represent himself as somebody al- ready dead, or as somebody who must have died in order to be? His very posture at the beginning of the narrative is quite startling in this respect. Inside a glass house, where all objects are sus- pended by some kind of magic force, Breton is lying on a crystal bed, amid transparent sheets, hoping that the answer to his ques- tion of identity will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond (18-19). There is something coy and fanciful about this image, in which Breton seems to present himself under the traits of Sleeping Beauty, waiting for a redeeming kiss to bring her back to life. There is also a kind of obtuse stubbornness about somebody waiting in a prostrate position for truth to descend on him, like blissful manna or an avenging sword. And it is not difficult to see that what Breton is lying on, with such a somber resolution, looks more like a coffin than a couch, in which he himself or somebody else lies buried. Let us first consider the solutions to this enigma which Breton himself proposes, and then dismisses for some reason or other.

The religious or metaphysical interpretation of the ghost figure is brushed aside from the very beginning, since Breton is eager to warn the reader not to associate the phantom with some idea of ontological loss, or with Christian notions of fall and punishment, conceits whose "lack of moral basis" Breton takes to be "beyond dispute" (10). So even as he values the figure of the ghost, as the concrete image of "a torment that may be eternal," Breton refuses to give it a religious meaning which would then, by implication, identify it with the shadow of Cain-the one who killed his brother and was doomed to be "a fugitive and a vagabond" on earth-the arch-ghost that can never be appeased or even de- stroyed.

l 3 For previous discussions of the ghost image in Nadja, see Nicolas Wagner, in Travawr de linguistique et de littirature, XIV, 2 (1976), 221-28; Laurence M. Porter, in L'Esprit criateur, XXII, 2 (1982), 25-34; Mario Richter, in Zeitschrft fur franzosiche Sprache und Literatur, XCVI (1986), 225-37; Alan Waite, in The Romanic Review, LXXVII, 4 (1986), 376-90.

828 ALINA CLEJ

One need not, of course, associate the figure of the ghost with any notion of guilt that would give Breton's text an expiatory turn, although, be it said in passing, Nadja abounds in taunting sugges- tions of crime and death. There are less dramatic, more urbane ways of dealing with ghosts as forgotten things, and Breton him- self says that he is in search of something lost. One could think of a mnemonic technique mentioned by Foucault in connection with the Stoic tradition of self-examination, in which "it is not a ques- tion of discovering a truth hidden in the subject," but "of recalling a truth forgotten by the subject" ("Truth and Subjectivity," I, 12). This method by which the subject recollects the things that have escaped his control in order better to "administer" his private do- main, would unfortunately fail in Breton's case, seeing that he is not really in charge of himself, or, as he puts it, he is constantly reminded of the error of assuming that he "stand[s] at the helm alone" (20). The things that he literally collects or picks up during his ghostlike wanderings through Paris are odd objects, objets trouvis, or lost women, like Nadja.

By phrasing his quest in terms of forgetting and recognition, "condemned," as he says, "to attempt to know what [he] should well be able to recognize, and to learn but a feeble part of what he has forgottenfl(lO), Breton inevitably calls to mind an analytic field of investigation, whereby both concepts play an important role in the interpretation of the ego and its imaginary functions, or in the more restricted domain of neurotic phenomena. Breton's training as a psychiatrist, and his knowledge and previous use of Freudian methods, could have naturally led him to some form of self-anal- ysis, but strangely enough Breton appeals to the clinical model of neuropsychiatry. The strangest thing of all, however, is that, given his fanciful description of the ghost syndrome, he should claim any scientific validity for his project. But this is precisely what he does in a very forceful way and as late as 1962, in his Foreword (subtitled "Belated Telegram") to the re-edition of Nadja. Ac- cording to Breton, his work obeys "anti-literary" imperatives-the negation is important-being modeled, as he says, after the pat- tern of "medical observation, that of neuropsychiatry in particular, which tends to keep track of all the details that an examination or questioning could yield, without concerning itself with any stylistic flourish" (6). In other words, Nadja should be considered as a strict, non-metaphorical record of experience, a "lived document" (document "pis sur le vzf ' ) , as Breton puts it (6).

A number of baffling considerations come to mind. The first regards the disposition of the characters in the examination con- ducted by Breton. How are the roles distributed? And who or what is the object of the analysis: Breton himself, who suffers from a haunting obsession; Nadja, who is more or less mentally disturbed; or some third party that is hinted at but not named in the fore- word? The second concerns the rigorous documentation claimed by the author. It is quite obvious that, in spite of Breton's detached clinical tone and his meticulous reporting of details, dates and places, an account which, taken as a whole, seems to approximate a patient's case-history, nothing is more obscure and perplexing than the facts accumulated by the narrator. This troubling effect, through which what is immediately visible and in clear focus turns out to be opaque, seems, in fact, expected by Breton himself. In the same foreword, the author remarks that "the deliberate bare- ness of his account has contributed no doubt to the renewal of its audience by removing its vanishing point beyond ordinary limits" (7). The object of Breton's self-exploration seems to be situated on this vanishing point, which his peculiar method of investigation does nothing but prolong beyond the reader's horizon of under- standing.

What exactly is the nature of the hermeneutic project embraced by Breton who, on the one hand, sees the necessity of "deciphering life as if it were a cryptogram" (133), and on the other declares his lack of intelligence and penetration? "I understand, moreover, quite poorly, I follow too vaguely" (40) .It is as though he suffered from some kind of myopia, in spite of all his apparent good will and "scrupulous honesty" in recording what he thinks are relevant facts. His vigorous rejection of psychoanalysis in this respect seems quite odd. The fortuitous encounters and random episodes which he meticulously relates are, Breton insists, not be interpreted as revealing in any analytic sense. The analytic method (and with it, of course, the psychopathology of everyday life) is declared use- less, if not pernicious, seeing that it can actually "further inhibi- tions, by its very interpretation of inhibitions" (26), a statement which blatantly contradicts the ultimate raison d'2tre of psychoanal- ysis.

Given Breton's strong opinions on the subject, which are cer- tainly surprising for someone who has actually used the analytic method, as Breton prides himself to have done as a medical stu- dent during the war (E, 29), the hermeneutic problem has to be

830 ALINA CLEJ

solved in a different way, paradoxically by giving up interpretation altogether. There existed at the time a different kind of method for releasing inhibitions, forgotten or repressed memories, in the older, somewhat theLrgic practices of 19th century psychology, a tradition represented in France by people like Janet and Charcot, in a line which goes back to Mesmer. It is to this vein of psycholog- ical research, to which he was introduced as a medical student, that Breton seemed to be irresistibly drawn. All the experiments based on the dissociation of personality, like artificial somnambulism, hypnosis, hypnagogic hallucinations, automatic writing (pense'e parlie)-a form of endophasia-sooner or later found a place in his work, as privileged methods of retrieving the precious sublim- inal content of the mind. And it is most certainly this kind of re- search that he had in mind when he gave neuropsychiatry as a model for his narrative.

Going back to Breton lying on his crystal bed in sight of whom- ever wants to see him, an attitude which recalls the ritual exposure of the sinful body in early Christian practice, it is obvious now that Breton waits not to be analyzed but rather to fall asleep, so that he could dream the secret message which he cannot recall by any sys- tematic method of self-examination. This state of hypnosis is actu- ally performed through his somnambulistic wandering through Paris and his apparently random accumulation of memories, facts, and objects, following the unpredictable course of "objective chance." By this he means "sudden connections" or "petrifying co- incidences," "fortuitous encounters" or "arrangements of objects," in which meaning appears like "a flash of lightning" too swift to apprehend (20). This kind of fitful revelation, which takes place outside the subject, with the "surprise" effect and "violent inci- dence" of an electric shock, is not meant to reveal anything in par- ticular. It functions more like an indexical sign with no precise referent, a "signal" which one receives "without being able to say exactly what [it is]" (20).14

I will collect some of these "signals" (or indexical operators) that Breton finds on his way for what may be their common denomi- nator. The initial point of departure of Breton's account is 1' ''Hate1 des Grands Hommes place du Pantheon," where the au- thor was living towards the end of the war, and which inevitably

l4 Cf. Pierre Albouy, "Signe et signal dans Nadja," in Europe (juillet-aolit, 1969), 234-39.

suggests a mausoleum where famous people and heroes are en- tombed. Breton himself is mistaken for a lost friend, somebody who has disappeared during the war. A woman dressed in mourning visits him, asking for a particular issue of his surrealist journal (Litte'rature), which had not yet appeared, to take back to somebody in Nantes, where Breton was stationed sometime after his conscription. In connection with Desnos's "sleep period" (e'poque des sommeils), Breton mentions Marcel Duchamp, the elu- sive artist whom he greatly admires, author of the "Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries." At another point, the writer encounters a young girl in the street who spontaneously recites to him Rim- baud's poem, "The Sleeper in the Vale," in which the peacefully recumbent figure is a killed soldier. One could also list a collection of frightening objects, like the gloomy monument of Etienne Dolet, or the skull of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's statue, or dis- quieting images suggesting severed limbs, like the stacks of sec- tioned logs under the sign of a lumber store ("Bois-Charbons"), the kind of store which retained Breton's attention in the tele- phone directory, and then the disturbing appearance of a glove or of a detached hand. These random pieces could well be part of a playful jigsaw puzzle, or some "Exquisite Corpse" (a surrealist game invented by Breton), if they weren't charged with a definite emotional energy, bound up in a strange combination of attraction and fear. They could therefore be considered as a special kind of partial object, being both fetishistic and phobic in nature.

The erotic pleasure which Breton seems to derive from these fortuitous encounters and arrangements of objects is generated by their ambivalence, the almost playful possibility of reversing their meaning. At one point Breton mentions an ancient woodcut repre- senting a tiger, but which, seen from another angle, could assume an entirely different shape, namely that of an angel, suggesting the tiger's symbolic opposite (67).The effect of the "shifting picture" is similar to that of the "faits-glissades" or "faits-prkcipices," whose elusive presence and incommunicability becomes a source of "in- comparable pleasure" (22). The fitful, electrifying revelations which bring the author in touch with his subliminal self ( and which suggest the production of surrealist images) have an un- doubtedly erotic character. As Barthes remin'ds us in The Pleasure of the Text, "it is intermittence which is erotic . . . it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the stapng of an appearance-as-disap- pearance." Breton's hermeneutic project thus turns into an erotic

832 ALINA CLEJ

play. What is truly disturbing about this procedure is that the ulti- mate object of this confessional game seems to be more dead than alive, a dismembered body (un corps morceli) which cannot be pieced back together'. In other words, the surrealist game of the Exquisite Corpse should be taken in a literal sense, that is, as a game in which the ultimate figure, the figure that never emerges, is death itself.

It is for the sake of this portentous meaning that he needs to bring on stage the half-crazy, half-inspired woman, the innocent prostitute, Nadja, a name she had chosen for herself "because in Russian it is the beginning of the word hope, and because it is only the beginning" (75). Nadja's "appearance on the sceneu-Breton makes it very clear that this is a theatrical production-is an-nounced in a nearly gothic climax: "Finally the tower of the Manoir d'Ango" (to which the author had retired in order to write the novel) "explodes [saute; the French verb suggests a war-time operation], sending a snowfall of feathers from its doves, which dissolves as soon as it touches the ground of the formerly paved courtyard, now covered with real blood!" (69).There is something rather ambiguous and unsettling about this annunciation, in which the doves end up in a pool of blood, not to mention the intrusion of the "real blood," in what is very much an imaginary landscape -an ambiguity which colors, in fact, the author's relation to Nadja (NadaIJa).

Breton's attraction for this unusual woman, whom he meets in the street during one of his hypnotic wanderings through Paris, is not only partial, that is, focused on certain aspects of her person, but also mixed with a strange feeling of aversion. Breton is, for instance, clearly fascinated by her "fern-colored eyes," in which he expects to find, like in some kind of rear-view mirror, the answer to his initial question, the forgotten content which would corre- spond to the lack or absence experienced by the subject. In this sense, Nadja functions as a seer, a gracious medium. What Nadja reveals, however, in her spontaneous, poetic way, are glimpses of a violent scene in which the color red (suggesting fire or blood) seems to play an important part. The image of the glove, which had previously seduced Breton's imagination, is replaced by the ominous figure of the "burning hand" that persistently appears in Nadja's visions, and that she identifies with the poet. "It is you," she tells him (1 17).

There is, moreover, a suggestion that the fire coming from the

severed wrist may be related to a larger conflagration, which Nadja conjures up at the height of her sibylline delirium on Place Dauphine, where a host of dead people rise before her eyes, in the middle of the public square. On the same occasion, Breton is ac- cused of some obscure guilt or wrongdoing which needs to be punished. "Why do you have to go to jail?" she asks, trying to descry one of Breton's previous impersonations. "What did you do?" (97). The vision of an underground corridor connecting the square to the Palais de Justice, and the allusion to Marie-Antoin- ette's circle may define the scene as a place of execution, the site on which History blindly enacts its judgement. The vicinity of the Conciergerie, which functioned as a prison and "antechamber" to the guillotine during the French Revolution, serves to reinforce the impending sense of historical doom. The shadows evoked by Nadja's spiritual powers appear to have an overwhelming effect on the narrator, who has to use all his might to put an end to her apocalyptic vision, a vision that he had, in fact, encouraged from the very beginning. The ambiguity of Breton's motives may pos- sibly explain why, in spite of a growing sense of anxiety, Nadja's ethereal presence continues to attract him. Perhaps this is because she is a "wandering soul," a kindred spirit, somebody that Breton had met before. In an incident related in L'esprit nouveau, she ap- peared as another young woman with stupendous eyes, and with something incredibly lost in her demeanor (OC, 258). Everything seems to point to the lost woman ("fille perdue"), as an answer to Breton's quest. And in this sense, the prostitute (the lost and found object) is the objet trouve' par excellence, functioning as a "trace" for the subject's undefinable lack-a meaning of which Nadja herself is fully aware (137).

Breton comes closest to regaining what he so desperately misses in a somewhat awkward love scene, in which he kisses Nadja for the first time. The odd thing about this episode is that Breton kisses Nadja's teeth rather than her lips, and that he does that with a kind of deep "respect"-the word that Breton himself uses. The erotic element is thus displaced by a devotional attitude, which would more aptly describe the kissing of an icon, or a holy relic. That the meaning of the scene is in fact religious is made quite clear by Nadja's remark: "Communion takes place in silence," and by the comparison that she draws between her teeth and the host (109). Beyond its slightly gothic irreverence, this moment is, I be-lieve, extremely interesting because of its sequel. In the following

834 ALINA CLE]

paragraph, Breton receives a letter containing a reproduction of an important detail in Ucello's The Profanation of the Host, repre-senting a scene in which the characters, including a tearful young boy, are visibly distressed by a mysterious profanation (the burning of the host).

The scene of the kiss explains, I think, the failure of Breton's involvement with Nadja. If the true Word or the holy host, figured in that scene by Nadja's teeth, does not pass her lips, this is because the teeth act as kind of barrier. The desired meaning fails to mate- rialize-which leads to the strange paradox that the obstacle to the message is the message itself. This may explain why it is precisely the moment of contact which interrupts communication, sug- gesting a tension that exceeds the limits of speech. The fact that, as Nadja puts it, "communion takes place in silence," only gives a greater power to the silent Word embodied in the host, which the communicant takes in. It could be that it is this very force (the performative value of the silent communion, or, for that matter, of any confessional speech-act) that makes Breton uneasy. One could also assume that despite its ostensible meaning, the act described by Breton is not sacred, in his eyes, after all, but rather sacrile- gious, as the subsequent scene suggests: "the profanation of the host" may amount to a profanation of the Word, or at least of the word that the author expects. Whichever the case, it appears quite clear that Breton and Nadja are "non-communicating vessels," which implies that the longed-for restitution of meaning is either impossible or, for whatever reason, prohibited.

But is it the disappearance, or rather the appearance, the sym- bolic manifestation of some lost object, or some forgotten truth, that the narrator apprehends? Wouldn't the appearance itself be a death-trap, in which he would end up "black and cold, like a man struck by lightning, lying at the feet of the Sphinx" (130), as Nadja sees him in one of her visions? Breton seems, in fact, unlike Oe- dipus, to be very careful in maintaining the flash of revelation at a moderate intensity, and in controlling what he calls the faits-pre'ci-pices so as to avoid any dramatic fall into a scene of truth. For reasons of self-preservation, which may also constitute another erotic way of enjoying intermittence, the possibility of revelation is continually repeated but never played out.

* * * To understand what is being kept out or repressed, which I think is as important for historical and ideological reasons as it is for

strictly biographical ones, one should look for what literally re- turns in the speaker's discourse, following, in this sense, Breton's own use of "literal" figuration. Whether the repetition was or was not intended for the "amateurs of easy solutions," as he calls the inquisitive readers, for whom Breton once in a while drops some obscure or insignificant clue, would be hard to decide. What is clear is that things do return, in a very stark and rather offensive way in Breton's narrative. One is the disfigured body of a young girl, falling out of a closet, in a kind of sensational play entitled Les De'traque'es ("the madcaps") which, for some reason, Breton consid- ered as "the only dramatic work . . . worth remembering" (46). In the context of a private school for girls, laced with homoerotic overtones, there is a young corpse turning up every so often to the horror and bewilderment of the gardener, and no doubt of the audience of the "Thestre des Deux Masques," for whom the play was performed.

The other instance in which repetition, as a return of the dead body, is played out, so to speak, occurs in a somewhat absurd anec- dote towards the end of the novel. A certain Monsieur Delouit, suffering from a kind of partial amnesia, asks, as he checks in at a hotel, to be reminded every time of the number of his room. Soon after going up he returns, disfigured almost beyond recognition, and asks again for the number of his room, explaining that he had fallen out of the window (184). This is the story that Breton re- counts to his newly found love, who replaces Nadja, at the end of the book. This female figure, who remains unnamed and whom Breton addresses in the second person, is the one who reminds him that he wanted his book to be "ajar like a door," a door through which she alone could come and go. This message, placed under the propitiatory signs of erotic fulfillment and regained hope ("The Dawns"), is, to my mind, a message of renunciation. This ideal woman who turns the poet away from enigmas forever, as Breton tells us, is none other than oblivion, or the trope of for- getting. It is not surprising that the end of the book should evoke the Royalty of Silence (19O).The identity question with which the book begins remains suspended, only to be answered by another query, like that of a night sentinel: "Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?" The only thing that the book ultimately reveals is Breton's desire to forget.

To forget what? Breton never quite forgets to forget, as the epi- logue to his narrative serves to remind us. From then on, Breton

836 ALINA CLEJ

tells us, the morning paper will suffice to give him word about himself. Differently put, this means that to find out who one is, one should look in the news, an idea which, after all, is not as pointless or absurd as it sounds. And this is what Breton finds out in the current newspaper. A telegraph operator stationed on the "Sand Island" had received a message coming from a navigating pilot, which read "There is something wrong," without providing any further information. Due to unfavorable atmospheric condi- tions and considerable interference, the operator could not under- stand anything else, nor could he reenter into communication with the endangered pilot. I would like, in what follows, and as a con- clusion to this analysis, to attempt to interpret the nature of the interference or noise which jams communication in Breton's work, by reexamining the paradox which I have already mentioned in connection with the kiss scene, and which makes the message itself an obstacle to the message.

Despite Breton's resistance to psychoanalysis, it seems quite clear that the author of Nadja suffers or simulates a case of chronic mel- ancholia. Its particular form could be explained, I believe, by Abraham and Torok's notion of the phantom which, in an exten- sion of Freud's theory, takes into account the linguistic peculiar- ities of the melancholic condition. In their article on "Mourning and Melancholia," the authors begin by opposing incorporation to introjection, the latter being a way of alleviating the loss through verbal or symbolic substitution.15 In the case of melancholia, the obstacle to introjection, and hence to the work of mourning, is to be found in the mouth itself, that is, in the organ that cannot artic- ulate the loss, but only swallow it, as it were. According to Abraham and Torok, this phenomenon points to "the sudden loss of an object which is indispensable from a narcissistic point of view, at the same time as the loss itself is of a nature that prohibits communication" (264).Their notion of the "crypt" or "endocryptic identification" covers more or less the same phenomenon.16 The "crypt" figure points to a "memory . . . buried without legal burial place," a "segment of painfully lived Reality, whose unutterable na- ture dodges all work of mourning" (4).What looks like a crypt is in fact a gaping wound, a construct that disguises and denies both the

l5 ~ ' ~ c o r c eet le noyau, (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), 260f. l 6 "A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: 'The Lost Object-Me,' " in Sub-stance, No. 43,

3-18.

"idyll and its loss." Abraham and Torok's notion of the "crypt" seems to provide a perfect subtitle to the opening scene of Nadja, in which Breton presents himself lying on a crystal bed, whose massive transparency evokes the rock-like density of a tomb. (18-19;cf. 1, 17).

In Abraham and Torok's view, the original scene or the unnam- able loss can only be figured in a displaced, symbolic or rather allusive way, as an imaginary staging, in which the "wish word [is] made into a thing and acted out," becoming what the authors call an "allosemic" representation, or a "fetish word" (Ibid., 9 ) . We have seen how Breton plays out the moment of revelation without re- vealing anything in particular, or rather, revealing things which seem totally unrelated to his personal condition. The inability to verbalize the loss, that is, to take it into the symbolic order, is man- ifested, to use Abraham and Torok's phrase, as "a new figure of style, the figure of the active destruction of figuration. . . . the anti-metaphor" (L'Ecorce, 268). In this sense, incorporation "implies the phantasmatic destruction of the very act by which metaphor is made possible," and, hence, the destruction of the symbolic act of articulation that constitutes the very essence of language. Breton's use of "literal" figuration performs this very function. In the dream following the episode of the dead body in the closet, Breton swallows a rather repulsive insect, whose torn limbs can hardly be extracted from his throat, an operation which Breton witnesses with unspeakable disgust, the disgust being, as I see it, caused by the extraction and not by the insect (57-59).I think that this dream illustrates very well the phantasm of incorporation, the devouring and disarticulation of language, which can only be restored with great difficulty. Breton's imaginary objects, the objets trouvks, func-tion in this respect as figures of erasure, images of blankness. They symbolize the scotomization of perception and memory, as well as the cancelling of signification.

There is a personal biographic explanation to Breton's case of melancholia, which is, in a sense, easy to figure out and not very interesting in itself. I would like to discuss it, however, because it may help us understand how disturbances which occur in the real and symbolic orders find their way into the unconscious by co-opting or parasitizing elements of a very private nature. The key to this private content is the mysterious window, indicated by Nadja during her climactic vision on Place Dauphine, a window which looked "barred" or abandoned, but from where, as she said,

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"everything can come" (tout peut uenir), not to say return (reuenir). "It is from there that everything begins" (97). And indeed, both from a chronological and an analytic point of view, Nadja is right, or rather Breton is right, since he is the one who sets up the signifi- cant elements of his case. What is barred or censored (the French word condamne'e suggests a taboo) is the return of the repressed. But as Breton's writing proves, if the repressed content does not appear, the return certainly does.

This fateful window, or the one through which Mr. Delouit falls out, is but another version of the window from which Breton sym- bolically jumps at the end of a short piece entitled "The Disdainful Confession" published in 1923, and which later opened Breton's volume Les Pasperdus. This text, which at first glance seems to have very little bearing on Breton himself except for his petulant resis- tance to bourgeois values and culture,17 reads, in part, like a ne- crologue, or one of those intimate evocations written for a dear friend who has disappeared. The friend in question was Jacques Vache, a very imaginative and eccentric type whom Breton had met in Nantes during the war,18 and who later exercised a strong, if posthumous, influence on Breton's formulation of surrealism. In his Manzfestes du surre'alisme, Breton names Vache as the origin of his surrealist credo: "Vache is the surrealist in me" (MS, 38), a genealogy which may have been reinforced by Breton's desire to displace Tristan Tzara, or the Dada origins of the surrealist move- ment. At the time of their encounter (early 1916), Breton was em- ployed in the military hospital where Vache was recovering from a wound received on the front. Given Vache's passion for disguises, and the swiftness with which he used to change uniforms, it was, Breton says, hard to know in which section he was actually serving.lg This man, for whom Breton had an unbounded admira- tion and an intense attachment, to the point of wishing to die with

l 7 Cf. Colette Gaudin, "Tours et detours nkgatifis dans 'La Confession Dedaig- neuse' de Breton," The Romanic Reuzew, LXXI, 4 (1980), 394-412.

l8 For Breton's evocations of Jacques Vache, and his relation to this figure, see bibliography and commentary in Marguerite Bonnet, Andri Breton (Paris: Jose Corti, 1975), 86-98, 275-77, and Michel Carassou, Jacques Vachi et legroupe de Nantes (Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1986).

l 9 Cf. OC, I, 200, 227. Breton's last letter to Vache (to which he never received an answer) contained a newspaper clipping, representing a masked character called "Double face," with the mention, "It was you, Jacques!" (OC, I, 1227). This image may be significantly related, I believe, to the play represented at the "Thegtre des deux Masques," and to Breton's subsequent dream of incorporation.

him, as he admits in a letter to a friend,20 took his life shortly be- fore the end of the war, leaving Breton with a long-lasting "emo- tional trauma" (OC, I, 198). In the epilogue to "The Disdainful Confession," which retraces the brief and humorous existence of Jacques Vache, Breton pays homage to the "beautiful shadow" of his lost friend "dancing on the window-sill," by leaping after it into the void, a ritual gesture which he promises to repeat every day of his life.

If, as Abraham and Torok see it, the crypt stands for a gaping wound, then the window through which Breton performs his sym- bolic leap may in fact represent, at an imaginary level, that open crack in the topogography of the unconscious. The imaginary function of the window could also explain its double aspect in Breton's works: the fact that it is abandoned, that is, barred or walled in, but also open, so that its abandonment or forgetting is never complete. On the other hand, when Breton continues to re- peat his symbolic jump in his later writings, he is not only main- taining a kind of contact with the lost love-object, but also pun- ishing himself, as melancholics are known to do. This endless, painful quest for the desired object, which in Nadja takes the form of an anxious circumambulation, Breton describes as an "eternal torment" (10.)

The hyperbolic character of Breton's guilt suggests that there may have been other reasons, as well, which contributed to the author's need for punishment, beside the strictly private ones. As I mentioned before, the barred window on Place Dauphine over- looked a square, on which Nadja saw not just one dead body, but an entire host that evoked a historical scene of massacre or execu- tion, through its elusive association with Marie-Antoinette's time. On that occasion in the narrative, Breton was accused of some ob- scure crime for which he had to go to jail. There is in Breton's experience something that approximates the situation evoked be- fore, in which innocent people fall under the violent winds of his- tory. As an assistant doctor at the psychiatric center of the Second Army, in Saint-Dizier, Breton came to face this kind of innocence in his direct relations with his patients. In his medical (and also moral) capacity he was confronted with two types of cases, in which

20 Letter of May 22, 1918 to Theociore Fraenkel: "Never make fun of Jacques Vacht!. I don't want to say it, hut nonetheless, he is everything I love-using his own words more or less to tell you how close I feel to him: 'What if we died to- gether, instead of parting,' to tell you how close I feel to him" (OC, I , 1231).

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the question of innocence was of crucial importance: soldiers who had been sent back from the front for serious mental disorders, of which acute delirium was the most common form; and so-called delinquents, miscreant or fugitive soldiers placed under arrest by the court-martial, pending a medical report. It is in these circum- stances, which Breton describes in one of his interviews (E, 19-31), that he began experimenting with different methods of psycholog- ical investigation, such as analytic techniques of free association and dream interpretation-an experience which later provided, in his own words, the materials for his first surrealist experiments.

Breton's interest in madness and his poetic use of "paranoiac knowledge" is well-known, and too involved to discuss here. It is worth noting, however, that his sympathy for madmen was always strong and his defense of them passionate, as his lengthy plea against mental institutions and the incarceration of the mad in Nadja makes abundantly clear. That Breton's defense was, actu- ally, less genuine than he makes it sound is suggested by the fact that he did nothing to prevent Nadja's return to a mental institu- tion (135)-by which I want to say that Breton may have been interested in madmen for his own sake, or rather that madmen defended Breton as much as he defended them. In his first Mani-festo of Surrealism, for instance, the author declared that he could spend his whole life provoking the confessions of the mad. "They are people of a scrupulous honesty, and whose innocence is only equal to mine" (MS, 15). Why would Breton need to exculpate himself, taking the madman as a witness, and of what?

Going back to the historical circumstances provided by the con- text of the First World War that we mentioned before, it is clear that madness functioned as a measure of innocence, separating the truly disturbed soldiers, those who were not on the field killing people and could not be condemned for not doing so, from the simulators or otherwise unqualified deserters-a delicate dividing line that Breton had to draw more than once during his medical duties. And if he needed the "real" madmen on his side, from what was he defending himself? Against being a deserter, that is, trying to escape a war in which others got killed, a war to which his friend VachC fell more or less victim?21 Or was it against the

21 This is at least how Breton 5eem< to Iiave construed Vaclie's death, by inter- preting his ingestion of an overdose of opium, not as an accident, as some of VachC's friends saw it, but as a spectacular suicide. Cf. Jacques Vachd et le poupe de Nantes, 20, and OC, I , 1230-31.

specter of death itself, for which madness could offer a semblance of protection? Whichever the case, it seems quite clear from the textual evidence (Nadja, in particular), that Breton suffers from a complex sense of imaginary guilt, in which an external determina- tion (of a real and symbolic nature) is closely entwined with a pri- vate one. It seems fair to assume that Breton's symbolic jump (or compulsion to repeat) serves, in fact, a double purpose: as a pun- ishment for something illicitly loved, but also for something vicar- iously destroyed. Breton's much-commented poetic search for an ideal woman figure, an innocent female child, betrays his complex sense of imaginary guilt, and his need for atonement.

It is at this point of conflation between a historical and a private sense of guilt that Breton's well-known rebelliousness and flam- boyant rejection of bourgeois culture should be placed. In this sense, I definitely agree with a critic like J. L. Houdebine when he states that Breton's "dynamics of refutation," his rhetorical opposi- tions and negations, are in fact "purely verbal denegations . . .of a neurotic kind," and that he used both Marx and Freud to fashion a highly idealistic or imaginary political i n ~ t r u m e n t . ~ ~ In spite of the revolutionary aura that Breton attached to the "future reconcilia- tion" of dream and reality (MS, 24), I am inclined to see behind his programmatic credo a regressive tendency, a form of imaginary accommodation, which allowed Breton to transform reality (as well as the texts of Marx and Freud) according to his own desires and anxieties, in a manner which was theorized and sanctioned by the surrealist doctrine. I believe, in other words, that Breton's methods of ideological resistance should be understood in a psy- choanalytic sense, as a set of "defensive mechanisms directed against former danger," and recurring as "resistances against re- ~overy,"*~a mechanism on which Breton's elaboration of surrealist techniques of the self is actually based.

The defensive nature of this technology of the self could be re- lated to Breton's special form of "war neurosis," in which the ego has to fight off a double danger: the "external violence" of the

22 "Breton et la double ascendance du signe," in La Nouvelle Critique, 212 (Feb- ruary 1970), 49.

23 Sigmund Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," in The Standard Edi- tzon of the Complete Psychologzcal W o r k of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 23:238.

842 ALINA CLEJ

war, and the "menacing demands" of his libido.24 From this per- spective, the repressed (encrypted) content offered both a motive and a model for resistance. It is precisely Vache and the person of the madman that Breton embraced as exemplary figures of resis- tance. Vache was the man who "defied everything," Breton says. "Against the horror of those times, to which the only opposition consisted in reticences and murmurs, he appeared as the only being perfectly unscathed, the only one who was able to elaborate a crystal armor protecting against any form of contagion . . ." (E, 25-26). And one could see how in this image what was a real de- fense becomes a "crystal armor," and then turns into a neurotic shield: "the crystal crypt" on which Breton is lying in his imaginary glass-house.25

Breton found the same imaginary defense in the madman. One of them, whom Breton had met among his patients, had made an indelible impression on his anxious mind. This was a "cultivated young man" who had attracted his superiors' attention by his ex- cessive temerity. He would stand up on the rampart and direct the fire-bombs that dashed around him. Discharged from service, he later explained to his doctors that his behavior was perfectly justi- fied. In fact the war was nothing else but a "simulacrum," the "fake bombs could not harm, and the apparent wounds were but the effect of make-up" (E, 30). Breton later identified himself with the mad soldier, in a piece significantly entitled Sujet (Subject), which he composed before the end of the war.26 In this tragically bur- lesque narrative, Breton represents himself as a man diverting

24 In his "Psychoanalysis and War Neuroses" (1919), Freud considered the possi- bility of a "unifying hypothesis" that would ultimately allow for the interpretation of repression "as a reaction to a trauma," or, mutatis mutandis, to a complex trau- matic experience of the kind described in this paper. Unfortunately, Freud never developed this concept, seeing that, as he says, "the war came to an end . . . and interest in the war neuroses gave place to other concerns" (in Philip Rieff, ed., Character and Culture [New York: Collier Books, 19631, 215-19). I have tried to show that "these puzzling disorders" do not cease with the end of the war, and that, in fact, other social forces may take over and engage their symptoms.

25 In I , 17, Breton imagines himself donning somebody else's outfit, which seems to suit him perfectly; and thus "masked" in the likeness of its dead owner (possibly Vache), he tries to recapture "a strange image" of the other (himself as other) in a looking-glass.

26 In Marc Eigeldinger, ed., AndrC Breton, Editions de la Baconniere, Neuchitel, 1970. 18-19.

shells on a battlefield, where the murderous frenzy turns into a wild carnival. The airborne bombs create a delightful breeze, the soldiers waltz to gypsy music, and once in a while a dancer made dizzy by the movement falls to the ground with his hand clutched to the purple rose of his heart. At the end of this piece, Breton tells the reader that it is precisely this sublime experience of the war as an artful staging which made him escape its power, in case any- body had doubts about the effects that "the death machine" might have had on him.

This piece suggests that Breton is actually using resistance in an active way, that is, by staging within himself the dreaded scene, by mastering it through a process of imaginary transformation. What is more, in his surrealist experiments with a madness that is both simulated and controlled, Breton is, I believe, reproducing in fact the delirium of the war, its deadly mechanism. As he puts it in his Introduction au discours sur le peu de rialiti, "in writing [the poet] smuggles in at the fall of darkness all the instruments that he needs to wage his war against himself." Which is to say, "he wants to place all the chances on the other side, so that the defeat should come from himself alone" (I, 23). This war game that Breton is playing with himself at the level of writing, is similar to, and in a sense compounded by, the hermeneutic game of the "the Exquisite Corpse" that I mentioned before. They both perform a staging of "an appearance-as-disappearance," in which the controlled, ma- nipulated danger becomes a source of pleasure.

In Breton's case, however, what is resisted is not just the Real but also the Imaginary, that is, the whole domain of literature for which Breton pretended, following Vache's example, to have nothing but contempt. Through the double negation of history and literature, Breton makes sure that his neurotic resistance can be fantasized as real. As an instance of Rimbaud's "systematic de- regulation of all the sensesn-but a deregulation practiced under control, unleashing the energies of the unconscious in order to contain them-Breton's techniques of the self become a way of reproducing and fending off both the real and the imaginary danger, in a movement that may be said to approximate a violent dance figure. It is in this sense that I would read his notion of "convulsive beauty" introduced as the very last'word of Nadja, and which is explained in L'Amour fou, as "a veiled-erotics, a fixed-ex- plosion, circumstantial-magic." Breton has not only incorporated

844 ALINA CLE]

the libidinal object but, with it, a fragment of historical reality, which this essay has endeavored to restore.27

The Universzty of Michigan, Ann Arbor

27 This article is an excerpt from a book in progress, entitled Fables of Transgres- sion: Lzterary Deviance and Modernist Confessions. Versions of this paper were read at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank both audiences for their remarks and suggestions on these occasions.