djebar et surréalisme
TRANSCRIPT
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FROM MUSE TO MILITANT:FRANCOPHONE WOMEN NOVELISTS AND SURREALIST AESTHETICS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School
of The Ohio State University
By
Mary Anne Harsh, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University2008
Dissertation Committee: Approved by
Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras, Advisor Professor Karlis Racevskis ______________________________
Advisor Professor Sabra Webber French and Italian Graduate Program
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ABSTRACT
In 1924, André Breton launched the Surrealist movement in France with his
publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. He and his group of mostly male disciples,
prompted by the horrors of World War I, searched for fresh formulas for depicting the
bizarre and inhumane events of the era and for reviving the arts in Europe, notably by
experimenting with innovative practices which included probing the unconscious mind.
Women, if they had a role, were viewed as muses or performed only ancillary
responsibilities in the movement. Their participation was usually in the graphic arts
rather than in literature. However, in later generations, francophone women writers such
as Joyce Mansour and Suzanne Césaire began to develop Surrealist strategies for enacting
their own subjectivity and promoting their political agendas. Aside from casual mention,
no critic has formally investigated the surreal practices of this sizeable company of
francophone women authors. I examine the literary production of seven women from
three geographic regions in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice
to express human experience in the postcolonial and postmodern era.
From the Maghreb I analyze La Grotte éclatée by Yamina Mechakra and
L'amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée by Evelyne Accad.
These novelists represent mental and physical trauma and the fragmentation of
male/female relationships in times of combat. Célanire, cou-coupé by Maryse Condé and
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Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle by Simone Schwarz-Bart illustrate how
Antillean literature reflects the oral traditions, supernatural beliefs and the heterogeneous
cultural inheritance of its peoples. Both Jovette Marchessault’s visionary novel, La mère
des herbes, which draws upon her autotchonous heritage and lesbian orientation, and
Anne Hébert’s transgressive Les Enfants du sabbat , poignantly sabotage the paternalistic
domination of the English-speaking Canadian government and the Catholic Church
which relegated women to the role of reproductive automatons. I also examine feminist
collaborative writing in Quebec to understand how it kindled an intellectual revival and a
sophisticated field of literature and literary criticism.This dissertation charts the evolution of francophone women’s involvement with
Surrealism from its inception, when they played only the passive, objective role of Muse,
to the middle of the Twentieth Century when women writers became active militants for
equal rights while expanding the definition of surreal practice.
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Dedicated to
Fred and Marian Roberson
You always told me I could do “... anything I set my mind to.”
Michael A. Harsh, my very patient husband
Now you finally have your kids out of college.
My daughter, Molly Harsh, and my son, Leo J. III
The only regrets you’ll ever have are for the adventures you haven’t taken.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my advisor, Danielle Marx-Scouras, for her fervor and fire, her
zealous scholarship and her confidence and encouragement from the very beginning of
this journey. She has unselfishly shared her excitement, her impeccable judgment and
her animated personality with all of us fortunate enough to have worked with her.
I wish to thank Professor Judith Mayne, who welcomed me to The Ohio State
University ten years ago to begin my M.A. studies, in spite of my greying hair, and
Professor Karlis Racevskis, who continued to reassure all of us “late bloomers” that we
really did belong in academia. I am grateful to have come into contact with perspectives
outside my field in classes taught by Professor Racevskis and Professor Sabra Webber
and for their participation on my committee.
I appreciate Professor John Conteh-Morgan’s and Professor Christiane Laeufer’s
enthusiastic support in their classes and in the preparation of my minor fields of study.
Professor Diane Birckbichler’s wisdom and counsel have widened my experience
and encouraged me to integrate both sound practices and good humor into my teaching.
I wish to thank my Department Chair, Rich Hebein, at Bowling Green State
University and my colleagues for their encouragement while I completed my writing.
My first Surrealism class—Jocelyn Atkins, Cullen Colapietro, Teresa Eyler, Donna
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Figura, Naomi García, Hannah Neville and Ashley Rearick—have expanded my horizons
and helped me to fine-tune my conclusions.
Finally, I thank my colleague, Oniankpo Akindjo, for a thousand kindnesses.
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VITA
December 27, 1946 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Born – Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA
2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . M.A. French, The Ohio State University
1999 – 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Research & Teaching AssistantThe Ohio State University
2001 – 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Director French Individualized Instruction Center
The Ohio State University
2004 – 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of FrenchSaint Michael’s CollegeColchester, Vermont
2005 – 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Teaching AssistantThe Ohio State University
2007 – Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of FrenchBowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio
PUBLICATIONS
Research Publication
1. " The Grotesque and the Carnivalesque in Roch Carrier's La Guerre, Yes sir !: A
Twentieth-Century Narrative with Renaissance Echoes." Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Works in North America, eds. Mark Anderson and Rita Blayer. New York:Peter Lang Publishing, February 2005.
2. Book Review of Valérie Orlando's Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls. Research in African Literatures, (Autumn 2004).
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3. Book Review of Mildred Mortimer's Maghrebian Mosiac: A Literature inTransition. Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003).
4. Online Learning Packets to accompany Invitation au monde francophone to beused by instructors and students in levels 101.51-103.51 in the French Individualized
Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Jarvis, Gilbert A. and Thérèse M.Bonin and Diane Birckbichler. Invitation au monde francophone, 5th ed. Fort Worth:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000.)
Module 6, Chapter 7: "Le temps passe."Module 7, Chapter 8: "La Pluie et le beau temps"Module 8, Chapter 9: "Le monde du travail"Module 9, Chapter 10: "On fait des achats"Module 10, Chapter 11: "Être bien dans sa peau"Module 11, Chapter 12: "Des goûts et des couleurs"Module 12, Chapter 13: "Le passé et les souvenirs"Module 13, Chapter 14: "Le monde d'aujourd'hui et de demain"
Module 14, Chapter 15: "Les arts et la vie"5. Online Learning Packets to accompany Bravo! Communication, Grammaire,Culture et Littérature to be used by instructors and students in level 104.51 in the FrenchIndividualized Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Muyskens, Judith A.,Linda L. Harlow, Michèle Vialet, and Jean-François Brière. Bravo! Communication,Grammaire, Culture et Littérature, 4th. ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2001.)
Module 16a, Chapter 1: "Heureux de faire votre connaissance"Module 16b, Chapter 2: "Je t’invite"Module 17, Chapter 3: "Qui suis-je?"
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field : French
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Vita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Chapters:
1. The Fathers and (M)Others of Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1A Political and artistic revolution: Surrealistic practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Automatic writing and dream transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11Collective and collaborative experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Shocking the public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Genre boundaries, the marvelous: Visual and textual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Shell shock, insanity and altered consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Eroticism and the woman as Muse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Outside the Hexagon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2. Nightmares of War and Dreams of Peace: Traumatized Subjects in theMaghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Introduction to the Maghreb and Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Yamina Mechraka and La Grotte éclatée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43Assia Djebar and L’Amour, la fantasia .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45Evelyne Accad and L’Excisée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Surrealist Practices for Mechakra, Djebar and Accad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52The Capacity of the written word to “translate” trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Trauma writing and history in L’Amour, la fantasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69Civil and Family War in Lebanon: Evelyne Accad & L’Excisée . . . . . . 80Psychoses, textual fragmentation and genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
A Novel and much more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85French newpaper accounts, letters, theater: Djebar’s history . . . . . . . . . 91The severed hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99Accad’s genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103
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The French language subverted and elaborated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3. Resistance to DOM(ination): Maryse Condé’s and Simone Schwarz-Bart’smagical (Sur)realism and traditional culture in the Caribbean . . . . . . . 114
Geography, history and language in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114
The DOM’s resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism . . . . . . . . . 117 Négritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117Valorizing orality, writing literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Maryse Condé: Writer, teacher, critic, storyteller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128Condé and Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134Simone Schwarz-Bart: Ethnographer and novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136Schwarz-Bart and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Folk proverbs and oral tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141Proverbs and storytelling in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . 145Folk language and storytelling in Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Superstition, folk religion and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Condé’s linguistic treatment of the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160Simone Schwarz-Bart and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164The (DOM)inated French Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4. A Not-so-Tranquil Revolution in Quebec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
The French language in the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177A Negative image of Quebecois culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180Quebec’s “Grande Noirceur” and the Carnavalesque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185Coming out of the darkness: The Automatists and Refus Global . . . . . 187
The Women make a fuss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Nurturing the Quebec imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194Anne Hébert, Québécoise de souche, privilégiée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195Jovette Marchessault, blue collar, native and lesbian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198Hébert’s prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201Psychology and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208Jovette Marchessault’s benevolent sorceress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212La misère noire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Nature as redeemer, Grandmother as guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216Common ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Surrealists, idealists, feminist outlaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233Theory and practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
The Maghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235The French Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242The Province of Quebec .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
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Bibliography and works cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
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CHAPTER 1
THE FATHERS AND (M)OTHERS OF SURREALISM
In her 1999 study of the European Surrealist movement, entitled Surreal Lives:
The Surrealists 1917-1945 (1999) Ruth Brandon notes that the adjective "surreal," which
leaps so readily to mind as a definition of "the disjunctions, the bizarre concatenations,
the dreamlike illogic ..." of the past century, had not found common usage until the
French avant-garde literary and artistic movement headed by André Breton defined it.
Basing their research on a "super-reality" that they believed dwelled in the unconscious
mind and that had been largely unexploited by earlier writers and artists, Breton and his
followers chose the word that Brandon believes "perhaps more than any other, defines
our time" (485).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with political trouble brewing in
various corners of the world, bizarre events that defied description became everyday
occurrences providing writers with phenomena that required different techniques to
portray than they had previously employed on a regular basis. The emerging field of
psychoanalysis offered fresh approaches for describing and explaining human mental and
physical phenomena. Later, at mid-century, reports of revolutionary wars for
independence in the former French colonies and the ensuing struggles of minority races
and women for human rights in these locales were similarly rife with allusions to the
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"surreality" of life experience. In this study, we will examine the literary production of
seven women from three geographic regions—the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the
province of Quebec—comparing their concerns and techniques with those of the early
Surrealists, in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice to express
human experience in postcolonial and postmodern eras.
In 1924, Breton officially launched the Surrealist movement in France with the
publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. In the Manifeste, he speculated that the
subconscious mind might comprehend a plethora of creative sources and proclaimed that
he and his associates would search for links between what he called the "two adjoiningrealities," the previously untapped subconscious and the realm of conscious thinking:
Si les profondeurs de notre esprit recèlent d’étranges forces capablesd’augmenter celles de la surface ou de lutter victorieusement contre elles,il y a tout intérêt à les capter, à les capter d’abord, pour les soumettreensuite, s’il y a lieu, au contrôle de notre raison (20).
Impressed by Sigmund Freud's work, Breton speculated that psychoanalytic methods
might provide a model for pioneers outside the medical profession—for authors like
himself and for artists—to discover creative and previously unexplored resources within
themselves rather than relying solely upon external inspiration. Brandon terms this
search "the great artistic journey of the ... [twentieth] ... century" (157).
Norbert Bandier's Sociologie du Surréalisme reveals the social and professional
trajectories of the young Surrealists, who philosophically distained "real" work.
However, they managed to become well-enough connected in the Parisian publishing and
art worlds to garner a certain credibility among their peers—if not subsequently to be
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recognized as either famous or infamous by the general public.1 Throughout the most
productive years of the movement, the period between the two World Wars, personality
conflicts and ideological differences with Breton precipitated rapid turnovers in his
surrounding cast of comrades, although a handful of associates remained loyal to
surrealist principles until his death in 1966. Alain Joubert's Le Mouvement des
Surréalistes ou Le Fin Mot de l'histoire: Mort d'un groupe--Naissance d'un mythe (2001) ,
tolls the death of Surrealism as a dynamic movement and posits its conversion to the
status of a myth.
However, if we look beyond the chiefly French context of the surrealist current,we see that it did not so rapidly vanish in other corners of the world as it did in Europe
when its tenets were superceded by other avant-garde movements such as the nouveau
roman, Tel Quel and the feminist movement. The seeds of revolt against reigning
artistic ideologies and literary traditions are often sown at the same time that untenable
social and economic conditions provoke political upheaval. At times of turmoil in
society, literature and the arts transcend their aesthetic bounds, acquiring the role of
documenting struggle as it unfolds, and the artistic elite can be found at the forefront of
political revolution. Such was the situation, in the 1950s and 1960s, when a few subjects
who had been fortunate enough to gain access to a formal education in the French
1 Norbert Bandier, Sociologie du Surréalisme 1924-1929 (Paris: Dispute, 1999).
Bandier's sociological study of the founders of Surrealism is particularly interesting inthat it documents the primarily bourgeois and provincial origins of its members and
points out the various trajectories of the participants in terms of the social and financial
success that each gained. He maintains that André Breton was the only member of thegroup to stolidly eschew monetary pursuits. He placed himself in a position from which
he could readily criticize the moneymaking projects of the others, which contributed to
dissention in the group and often undermined its theoretical solidarity.
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colonies began to foment social and economic change and to document their resistance
against overseas dominance while employing practices heretofore unprecedented in
Francophone literature. They availed themselves of a few of the same practices that the
young French intellectuals who had created the Surrealist movement had utilized in
metropolitan France in the period between the two World Wars.
Until the 1970s, the majority of studies about Surrealism focused solely on the
male French writers and artists of the movement. The earliest feminist critique to appear
was Xavière Gauthier's Surréalisme et sexualité (1971), which has been compared to
Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe in terms of its analysis of the sexual attitudes of the group and its practice of excluding women from full membership. According to
Susan Rubin Suleiman in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde
(1990):
Whether they idealized the female body and their love of it, as they didin their poetry, or attacked it and dismembered it, as they did in their paintings, the male Surrealists, according to Gauthier's analysis, wereessentially using the woman to work out their rebellion against theFather (18-19).
Two years after Gauthier's study, further scholarly articles highlighting women's
contribution to the Surrealist art movement began to appear. The first was Gloria Feman
Orenstein's "Women of Surrealism" which appeared in Feminist Art Journal in 1973,
although it was not until twenty-four years later that she again took up the subject of "La
Femme Surréaliste" in the periodical Obliques. In 1985, Whitney Chadwick published
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement , which deals primarily with the women
artists associated with the first generation of Surrealists. A decade later, in 1998, she was
responsible for editing Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, the
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catalog of a traveling art exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which
underscored the partnership roles which a few women played in the inspiration and
production of the first and second generations of Surrealists.
In the meantime, Mary Ann Caws set her course for a career which has spanned
more than two decades when she published an article in Diacritics, entitled "Singing in
Another Key: Surrealism Through the Feminist Eye" in 1984. In a number of other texts
prepared both alone and in conjunction with other scholars, including Surrealism and
Women edited with Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (1991), The Surrealist Look:
An Erotics of Encounter (1997), she has devoted herself to recuperating the artistic and
literary work of a handful of the women who were unofficially connected to the
movement.
The works of the wives or lovers of the first Surrealists gained credence during
the later years of Surrealism. It is Caws's Écritures de femmes: Nouvelles Cartographies
(1996), co-edited with Mary Jean Green, Marianne Hirsch and Ronnie Scharfman, while
it does not speak of the Surrealist movement per se, that does undertake a more expansive
"double revision of the history of 'French' literature of the twentieth century" by
… re-thinking the traditional definition of periods, of genres, and of geniusin order to make them include women, on the one hand, and colonial subjectson the other ... in order to ... comprehend the radical displacement [of literaryhistory] from the [geographical] territory of France to the French language (6-7).
I share with Caws, et. al., an interest in focusing attention on women's literature written
in French and the promotion of its more notable examples to their rightful places in the
literary canon. Because a significant percentage of the widely acclaimed fiction of
French expression to appear in the past half century has been written by women who also
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hail from former French colonies, I believe that it is important that these novels be
"centered" alongside literature written by men, both French and Francophone, so that
neither the designation Francophone nor feminine will continue to carry a stigma. I also
wish to contribute to the venture of amending Francophone literary history through the
project of this dissertation by establishing a link between the surreal practices found in
the work of important Francophone women authors and those of their male precursors
while comparing the motives, methods, and products of the two groups. I will note the
similarities between two bodies of work that, at first glance, seem incompatible because
of the time periods in which they were produced, the geographic origins of their authors,and the gender politics of their creators.
From the Maghreb I have chosen to analyze La Grotte éclatée (1986) by Yamina
Mechakra and L'amour, la fantasia (1995) by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée
(1982) by Evelyne Accad. These authors describe the mental and physical trauma
suffered by victims of wartime violence as well as the fragmentation of male/female
relationships in times of combat. I will examine how the first generation of Surrealists
portrayed post-traumatic stress syndrome and insanity after World War I in France and
compare it with how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad dealt with mental illness in the
literature of the former French colonies during and after their wars for liberation.
Stepping beyond the pale of wartime trauma, we will scrutinize Accad's socio-
political theories which also concern themselves with the so-called "gender wars," so
common in regions of the world where fundamentalist hegemony denies equal rights to
women. She compares family and religious battles about the place of women in society
to actual armed conflict. Therefore, in the context of the economic and social changes
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that accompany the liberation of a nation, it is crucial to examine the resistance put in
motion by women against paternalistic prohibitions that continue to burden them after
their nations become free from French rule. Furthermore, it is significant that both
Djebar's and Accad's theories and fiction attempt to reconcile the victims of past wars as
well as the current generation to the "surreality" of peacetime violence.
From the Caribbean, I have chosen the novels Célanire, cou-coupé (2000) by
Maryse Condé and Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (1980) by Simone Schwarz-Bart.
These works vividly illustrate how Antillean literature draws deeply from the
heterogeneous cultural inheritance of its peoples and resources itself in their oral traditionand supernatural beliefs. Many of the critically acclaimed authors—past and present,
male and female, Francophone and Anglophone—who have roots in the French
Caribbean départments outre-mer, share an interest with the first generation of French
Surrealists in the central role of the occult and the marvelous in literature. I include these
two works by Condé and Schwarz-Bart from Guadeloupe in this study so as to illustrate
the bridge that oral tradition and religious belief build between the largely illiterate
inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and the literature created by intellectually elite and
politically savvy indigenous authors. The first Surrealists appreciated the folk artifacts
and folklore of so-called "primitive" peoples as representative of a more natural state of
human existence; so, too, do these contemporary female authors value the rapidly
disappearing cultural artifacts of their people for their capacity to encourage solidarity
and anchor regional identity.
As in other regions of the former French empire, women have also waged
personal and public battles through the literary medium in the province of Quebec on the
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North American continent. Just as the Surrealists attacked the French government for its
complicity in World War I and ridiculed the presence of the Catholic church in everyday
affairs, Anne Hébert and Jovette Marchessault poignantly strike out against the
authorities that denied French-speaking citizens of Quebec entry into the modern world
until the second half of the twentieth century. Their primary targets were the
conservative and paternalistic English-speaking Canadian government that treated
Francophones as second class citizens and the Catholic Church that relegated women to
the role of reproductive automatons. Hébert's protagonist, a sorceress who infiltrates a
novitiate in the novel Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), suggests that the crimes visited uponwomen and children by the Catholic Church would delight the Prince of Darkness rather
than the Almighty it professes to serve. As well, Marchessault's visionary literature,
including La mère des herbes (1980), draws upon her autotchonous heritage, creating a
supernatural utopian world of women who encourage one another to create a "Feminist
Renaissance." I will use the theories spelled out by several Quebecois feminists to
examine the works of Hébert and Marchessault and to look at the phenomenon of
feminist collaborative writing and its contribution to the field of literary theory in
Quebec. This movement has given rise to an impressive slate of women authors and
critics whose engagement in literary as well as political issues is unprecedented in any
other region of the French-speaking world.
Before outlining works which illustrate surrealist practice as drawn upon by these
Francophone women novelists—which will be detailed in their historical and social
contexts later in this study—it is essential to become familiar with the genesis of the
Surrealist movement so that we can understand how it continues to influence studies of
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the unconscious mind as a wellspring of inspiration in artistic creation and how it informs
my investigation of the works chosen for this study.
A POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC REVOLUTION: SURREALISTIC PRACTICES
It is important when documenting an artistic movement to situate it within its
social and historic context. The founders of a new movement generally denounce the
earlier dominant movement, develop their own strategies, advertise their innovative
approach as they denigrate the practices of their predecessors, and move toward an
apogee that provides a point of departure for the movement that will eventually supersedetheirs.
In Surreal Lives Brandon notes, "Surrealism began among poets whose aim it was
to create a revolution, both political and artistic" (3). Their movement set out to
revolutionize the world of literature by making a dramatic break from bourgeois ethics
and esthetics. Serge Gavronsky explains in Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,
Poétique (1986) that Breton had to define his own movement by denouncing "the grand
paternal traditions of poetry and culture in France" that had guided previous generations:
It is essentially about the tyranny of reason such as the disciples of Descarteshad imposed it and not only in the domain of philosophy, or even positivism, but also in writing, whether it is about realism or the romantics whoseverbal expression was dominated by the message (38).
Breton poignantly illustrates this rejection of preexisting esthetics in the Manifestes du
surréalisme (1924), "… l’attitude réaliste, inspirée du positivisme … m’a bien l’air
hostile à tout essor intellectuel et moral … faite de médiocrité … ses goûts les plus bas …
la clarté confinant à la sottise, la vie des chiens" (16).
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Having served his country on the field of battle and in the wards of French mental
hospitals during World War I, where he treated wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, he
vowed to fight a second crucial battle—this time on the literary front:
Le surréalisme, tel que je l’envisage, déclare assez notre non-conformismeabsolu pour qu’il ne puisse être question de le traduire, au procès du monderéel, comme témoin à décharge. Il ne saurait, au contraire, justifier quede l’état complet de distraction auquel nous espérons bien parvenir ici-bas (60).
Post-World War I literary historians point out that the first world war had as profound a
psychological effect upon non-combatants as it did on soldiers who carried arms. A
number of future Surrealists who saw combat in the War were as appalled by the so-
called "rational" political regime that had led France into it as they were disgusted by the
French people's tolerance of generalized inhumanity and savagery. When they undertook
their revolt, it encompassed not only the renunciation of government policies but also the
rejection of realist, symbolist, and Dada literary principles and practices—in short, a
comprehensive rebellion against the reigning political and artistic status quo. Searching
for a less compromising approach to life and creativity, they mounted “a campaign of
systematic refusal” to conform to society's mores that extended into all domains of life
including philosophy, ethics, mental and physical health, social interaction, politics, and
art. Hédi Abdel-Jouad summarizes some of these refusals in his Fugues de Barbarie: Les
Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998):
... l’arsenal de négations qui marquent son écriture: refus de l’orthodoxie,du statu quo, de la raison raisonnante, du discours langue de bois, …le refus de tout tabou pour une libération totale de l’éros, le refus del’interdit religieux … le refus de toute compartimentation de l’hommeque le rationalisme a écartelé entre Orient et Occident, raison etimagination, rêve et réalité … de l’une à l’autre s’ouvre, immense,
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le champ d’expérimentation, du rêve et de l’imagination ….2
Having enunciated these refusals, the Surrealists began to develop a set of positive
practices, including delving into the unconscious mind, which were to dictate the path
that esthetics would take into the future.
AUTOMATIC WRITING AND DREAM TRANSCRIPTION
It is through the practice of automatic writing that the Surrealists first attempted to
coax an individual’s desires from the subconscious into the realm of artistic experience
and the raw material of the dream world into the light of day. Automatic writing was tofunction as the poetic link between unconscious and conscious worlds. In their first
attempt at automatic writing, Breton and Philippe Soupault experimented with a variant
of the "speaking cure" that Breton had found effective in treating his shell-shocked and
insane patients during the war. Rather than free-associating aloud, as he had encouraged
his patients to do, he and Soupault decided to write down, as quickly as possible and with
no concern for the organization of their thoughts or the grammar of the results, whatever
came into their minds. The result was a process that Breton describes in Les Manifestes
du surréalisme in this way:
… je pris du papier et un crayon sur la table qui était derrière mon lit.C’etait comme si une veine se fût brisée en moi, un mot suivait l’autre,se mettait à sa place, s’adaptait à la situation, les scènes s’accumulaient,l’action se déroulait, les répliques surgissaient dans mon cerveau, je jouissait prodigieusement. Les pensées me venaient se rapidement etcontinuaient à couler si abondamment que je perdais une foule de détailsdélicats, parce que mon crayon ne pouvait pas aller assez vite, et
2 It will be seen later that Abdel-Jouad's study of Surrealism in the Maghreb is pertinent
to my investigation into the novelistic practices of Mediterranean women who wrote
about the trauma of war and their revolt against Islamic male hegemony.
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cependant je me hâtais, la main toujours en mouvement, je ne perdais pas une minute. Les phrases continuaient à pousser en moi, j’étais pleinde mon sujet (33).
When the two finally stopped writing, they were elated by the results and surprised that
what they had written was similar on many counts: each man's work revealing
extraordinary energy, an abundance of emotion, some unusual imagery, and a measure of
absurdity. (According to Breton, Soupault was somewhat obsessive about his attempts to
organize certain snatches of thought or to give them a title, while he had felt quite free
from formal literary constraint). The content of this first written experiment was entitled
Les champs magnétiques ( Magnetic Fields) and was published in 1920. In retrospect, itis considered to have been the first surrealist literary work.
During the early years of the movement, automatic writing was the first and the
most frequently used practice for probing the subconscious. Until other techniques came
into use, the name of the practice was often conflated with the name of the movement, as
it is here in the first Manifesto:
SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se proposed’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, lefonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de toutcontrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique oumorale (36).
It was not until the Surrealists began to experiment with the transcription of dreams that
they made a distinction between the two terms and recognized that automatic writing was
merely one of several practices that would define Surrealism. From these first attempts at
written free association, it is important to emphasize the importance of its evolution into
one of the main practices of the Surrealists as a group as it furnishes us with a
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background that explains the collective element of many of their beliefs and practices, a
subject which we will discuss more fully in Chapter Four.
Giving credit to Freud for his investigations into the labyrinths of sleep, Breton
asked himself why it was that the workings of the mind during sleep had been relegated
to a status inferior to the workings of reason while an individual was awake. He was
convinced that the free flow of an artist's inspiration was more likely to be sidetracked by
the interferences of everyday life than it would be when he was asleep. He pointed out
that while he was awake, man was "the plaything of his memory" which allowed him
only clumsily to recall the inspiration he perceived while sleeping (21). The experiencewould effectively “lose in translation” from one state to another. He also concluded that
the dream state possessed its own logic (or a lack thereof) and that waking broke the
thread of this organization.
Another of the Surrealists, Louis Aragon, in his Traité du style (1928), concurred
with Breton on the importance of the oneiric in artistic inspiration believing that
rationality does not get between reality and the dreamer to censor an experience when
one is asleep, although it does temper one's creative decisions when s/he is awake.
Wondering, "Can't the dream also be applied to the resolution of the fundamental
questions of life?" the Surrealists set out to systematically study it, believing in "the
future resolution of these two states, in appearance so contradictory, as are dream and
reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality ... " (24).
One major inconsistency arises when critics discuss the surrealist practice of
dream transcription. Breton based his theories on the spontaneous reception of
knowledge and inspiration from the nether side of consciousness. Surrealists set out to
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systematically study the phenomenon, using automatic writing to script the acquired
impulses and information. In an attempt to preserve the most ephemeral of contacts
between the sleeping and the waking worlds, they ended up resorting to a scientific
organization of information obtained through the mechanical process of transcription. In
doing so, a portion of the spontaneity of the experience was lost. In short, the Surrealists
faced a crisis of representation which was similar to that faced by the other esthetic
movements which had preceded theirs when they grappled with the corporeal aspects of
translating surreal experience into the written word.
COLLECTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE EXPERIMENTATION
Band. Cast of characters. Clan. Clique. Crew. Crowd. Flock. Gang. Throng.
Troop. Synonyms for the collective, which privilege group status over individual
achievement, abound in chronicles of the Surrealist movement. From the outset, Breton
and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing points out the propensity for working
together that infused the Surrealist movement. Although the two men recorded separate
experiences, they worked together at the end of the day to analyze collectively what they
had produced, publishing the resulting Champs magnétiques (1920) together.
A typical outing for members of the group consisted of strolling about the streets
of Paris in hopes of stumbling upon an extraordinary incident or of encountering
someone they hadn't expected to meet. Such an afternoon might be followed by an
evening spent together in a café discussing the role of "objective chance" or accident in
providing fodder for creativity. Together, the Surrealists might play "Exquisite Corpse."
This was a game in which four different artists could participate. The first person drew
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the head, folded the paper over, and passed it along to the next participant whose task it
was to draw the torso. The third person might draw the legs and the last person the feet.
The group then unfolded the paper to study and interpret their collaborative drawing.
Sometimes the group would borrow from the rituals of popular spiritualists of the era and
participate in séances hoping to receive motivation from the "other side." Breton did not
personally believe that it was possible to contact spirits from another sphere, but he
supported spiritualism as a possible means of seeking inspiration. The group also
experimented with "collective sleeping" and hypnotism as means of gathering
information about various sorts of sleep. Despite frequent quarreling, the members of this movement prized the outcome of combined effort and codified the doctrine of
collaborative production.
SHOCKING THE PUBLIC
Iconoclasm was the watchword of the Surrealist revolt. The movement is
notorious for having deliberately transgressed the social and moral norms of the period,
shocking the public and incurring sharp disapproval by its critics. Breton’s disturbing
goals are publicized in the second Surrealist Manifesto,
... comment veut-on que nous manifestions quelque tendresse, que mêmenous usions de tolérance à l’égard d’un appareil de conservation sociale,quel qu’il soit? ... Tout est à faire, tous les moyens doivent être bons àemployer pour ruiner les idées de famille, de patrie, de religion ... (77).
His calculated statement infuriated all sectors of French society since it attacked family
life, the nation, the government, and the Church in one fell swoop.
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In La Défense de l'infini (1927), Aragon describes his literary mutiny against the
canonical masters of French literature:
I'm not following the rules of the novel or the rhythm of the poem. I'm
writing and speaking as if Gustave Flaubert had never lived ... MarcelProust bores me to death and M. Giraudoux is a rabbit's fart ...When Ithink of Honoré [de Balzac] I can understand why people like Paul Valéryand André Breton pour scorn on their novels. But after all, I'm spitting inBalzac's face"(269).
An anecdote that illustrates the most blatant of the Surrealists' attacks against literary
tradition concerns the nation’s honored novelist, Anatole France, who had won the 1921
Nobel Prize for literature and was a longtime member of the French Academy and is
described in Bandier's Sociologie du surréalisme (1999) as "... Celui dont le style est
présenté comme modèle de finesse aux étudiants en lettres ..." (130-1). While he lay
dying, the group prepared a brutal pamphlet entitled Un Cadavre in which they unleashed
a tirade of criticism against his work. Joseph Delteuil stated, "Cette perfection formelle
manque de profondeur et de jus," and Aragon added, "Il écrivait bien mal." 3 Brandon’s
retelling of their bombastic attack on the previous generation of revered authors includes
the anecdote in which the Surrealists suggested that someone should empty out an old
box of France’s books, put him in it, and throw it into the Seine. In recounting the
incident, she concludes, "... though it caused a tremendous scandal, [it] did not bring
3 Bandier makes an argument that differs from most accounts concerning the Surrealists.
He uses Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to explain the trajectories of its
adherents during the first five years of the movement. He details the rise of many of themembers from provincial bourgeois backgrounds. For the most part, they were poets at a
time when novelists possessed the most symbolic and financial capital. He presents a
well-documented account of the collective strategies used by the group as its membersstrove to unseat the novelists who dominated the literary scene in Paris in the early 1920s
in order to usurp their places. He concludes that, at least in the beginning, their
"revolution" intended to be cultural rather than political.
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upon its authors the retribution that might have been expected ..." (230-1). What it did
accomplish, however, was to confirm that the Surrealists would stop at nothing to
vanquish both the survivors and the deceased of previous artistic movements.
GENRE BOUNDARIES, THE MARVELOUS: VISUAL AND THE TEXTUAL
Apollinaire, one of the most influential precursors of Surrealism, explained that
his poetry broke the rules of classical form in an attempt to reflect the unexpectedness of
life itself. Since the Surrealists had vowed to forego productive work, in the bourgeois
sense of the word, fantasy, childlike play, exploration, and experimentation occupiedtheir days. Declaring reason and rationalism irrelevant, the direction of their ventures
was often determined by accident, happenstance, or "objective chance" which was
reflected in poetic forms which defied conventions. They abandoned typical artistic
subjects in favor of everyday topics and found the beautiful in unexpected juxtapositions
of incongruous objects.
Another element of their practice that is very important to this study is the
Surrealists' belief in the marvelous and the supernatural which they saw depicted in
indigenous art and in native myths and folklore. During the founding years, the
Surrealists perceived the so-called "primitive" beliefs of African tribalism, folklore, and
indigenous folk artifacts as reflections of a former time when human art had not yet been
confined within the narrow limits that rational academism dictated. As an antidote to the
positivist view that every happening was explainable by reason and science, they
borrowed inspiration from the artistic practices of the so-called “unspoiled” cultures
which remained in the world. Later on in his career Breton became interested in the
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influence voodoo might have had on the "surreality" of Caribbean experience and the
literature and artwork that descended from it.
During the earlier Dada period and during the first years of the Surrealist
movement, writers and poets made up the majority of its members. To these were
associated, from time to time, Soupault, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray,
Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, who represented the graphic arts world. By 1928, so
many artists had joined the ranks that Breton published an essay entitled "Surrealism and
Painting." The Surrealists were also particularly intrigued by the rise of the cinema in
France because of its capacity to create bizarre images and to visually attack bourgeoissensibilities. However, since Surrealists had spoken out against the bourgeois practice of
actually working to earn a sustainable income, moving picture artists such as Dalí and
Luis Buñuel suffered from the dilemma of having to raise the funds they needed to
finance their cinematic projects from members of the same bourgeois society that the
Surrealists disdained. Since their range of interests was so wide and their aversion to
accepting support from wealthy supporters so strong, the mundane problem of financial
subsidies often threatened the ideological basis of "play" as they defined it.
Since the Surrealists were interested in such diverse projects, it is not surprising
that their writing practices would also reflect a wide range of styles. In his first
Manifesto Breton criticized the novelistic genre, particularly in the realist novels of his
predecessors', as incapable of expressing Surrealist innovation:
Chacun y va de sa petite “observation.” ... On ne m’épargne aucune deshésitations du personnage; sera-t-il blond, comment s’appellera-t-il, irons-nous le prendre en été? ... Et les descriptions! Rien n’est comparable aunéant de celles-ci; ce n’est que superpositions d’images de catalogue, l’auteur en prend de plus en plus à son aise, il saisit l’occasion de me glisser ses
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cartes postales... (16-17).
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he and nearly all of his followers, although
privileging poetry, also indulged in book-length storytelling pursuits at one time or
another. A prime example is that, over the past seventy-five years, literary critics have
classified Breton's own Nadja (1928) as a novel which illustrates all of the practices of
Surrealism—even though its structure does not fit the classic definition, and in spite of
the remonstrations that Breton has raised to the contrary. As with the definitions of
written genres, the Surrealists also rejected commonly-held laws governing the
appearance of works of art. They would spontaneously combine words and images intheir texts and paintings thereby creating hybrid images and new mixed genres: their
films, their paintings and collages—and their literature—all reveal the syncretism of the
visual and the textual.
SHELL SHOCK, INSANITY, AND ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS
As a youth, Breton had studied medicine. During World War I, he worked at the
Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where he first used techniques of psychoanalysis in
treating the mentally ill. According to Brandon in Surreal Lives, he, together with
Soupault,
... discussed these studies and their implications. For with that unerringinstinct for the significant ... Breton had realized that here, in Freud'swritings, lay the route-map for the great artistic journey of the comingcentury: the journey to the interior (156-7).
In 1916, he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Dizier where he worked
primarily with shell-shock patients who had returned from the battlefront. These patients
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presented a variety of neurotic physical symptoms such as blindness, deafness or
paralysis as well as violent bodily tremors and recurrent nightmares. After coming into
contact with these mental cases, Breton began to realize the importance of bringing fears
repressed in the subconscious to the surface in order to alleviate the pain of their trauma.
This is not to say that, later, he and his group did not harbor some objections against
Freudian analysis. Against it, they expressed, " ... une critique explicitement dirigée
contre la sublimation et la banalisation de la sexualité dans les recherches
psychoanalytiques" (Serge Gavronsky, Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,
Poétique, 1986, 59). Because of their clinical experience with this treatment on mentallydisturbed patients, they theorized that healthy artists might also be able to unlock the
creativity residing in the unconscious and try to funnel its inspiration into their works.
The character of the artwork sometimes produced by the insane population, who
were housed in the asylum alongside shell-shocked patients, also stimulated the interest
of the Surrealists. They became acquainted with the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, and this
relationship yielded a body of knowledge about paranoia that intrigued the Surrealists
painters, in particular Dalí, and pushed him to "move away from passivity towards the
active harnessing of this paranoiac power" (Surreal Lives 378-80). He was convinced
that graphic artists as well as authors could benefit from what he called his paranoiac-
critical method :
I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advanceof the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passivestates) to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completelythe world of reality ("The Rotten Donkey." This Quarter, trans. J. Bronowski. NP:1932, 378).
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By simulating the state of insanity, active observers might tap into the artistic reserves
that appeared to lodge in the minds of the insane.
The Surrealists promoted any and all methods of achieving an altered state of
consciousness. Not all of them used illicit drugs, but several in the group used opium and
cocaine, and many were heavy users of alcohol. Using the argument that prohibition in
the United States had not effectively curtailed the use of alcohol, Antonin Artaud, whose
deep depression improved only while he was taking legal anti-anxiety medication, argued
for the suppression of laws forbidding or limiting the use of narcotics in his newspaper
column "Sureté générale." A few starved themselves in order to experience thelightheadedness that hunger brings, and still others experimented with sleep deprivation
hoping that they could induce a mental ambiance somewhere between the dream state
and waking.
EROTICISM AND THE WOMAN AS MUSE
It is to Katharine Conley's Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in
Surrealism (1996), that I owe the most interesting explanation to date of the role of the
woman within Surrealism's first and second generations. She states that, for the first
generation, a woman's body reflected the male artist's self "usually buried in the
unconscious," and conflated the woman's corps which provided insight with the corpus of
the text in the process of the automatic writing exercise. In short, the Surrealists "used a
woman's body as a metaphor for the automatic text, which is itself also a tangible
'medium' between the poet's conscious and unconscious thoughts" (9). In André Breton:
Naissance de l'aventure surréaliste (1988), Marguerite Bonnet distills this explanation of
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the role of the woman's body as the object of desire that "... caused the subject to
experience, confusedly, a revelation concerning itself. The object/subject distinction
totters and becomes muddled; an interpenetration occurs" (133).
To balance this blatantly sexist appropriation of the woman's body, it is to her
credit that Conley redeems the concept by comparing it to the French feminist practice, in
the 1970s, of écriture féminine that “...similarly encouraged the practitioner to express
her innermost, uncensored thoughts, with a higher awareness of the body—an awareness
anticipated by the pre-1970 writing of women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and
Unica Zürn," whom she sees as belonging to the post World War II movement (24).Conley points out the practice of automatic writing as practiced by women members of
the second generation of Surrealism, as a point of encounter between the Surrealist
women and the feminist movement.
The surrealist practice of exploiting woman as a muse is more complicated than
simple sexual desire inspired by physical appearances. It is not surprising, given the
social climate of the times, that the Surrealists, too, would see women as second-class
citizens. Like the bourgeois men they deplored, they didn't consider their female
companions as true equals in their revolt against society's mores. Women, for the most
part, were not to be accepted as equal partners in the household any more than they
would be considered equal partners in business or in intellectual circles. They existed
only to facilitate the lives of men: they typed the proceedings of meetings and
experiments; they cared for their physical needs; and their family wealth often paid living
expenses so that the Surrealists themselves would not have to break their pact of idleness.
Women were also there to be adored and idealized. What is ironic is that this first
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generation of Surrealists did not comprehend, in spite of their desire to break with
bourgeois ideals, that they envisioned the role of women in exactly the same way as did
the rest of the French male population. Had they accepted women as their equals in an
era when this would have shocked bourgeois society, they might have appeared even
more revolutionary.
What separates the surrealist concept of women from that of classical mythology
is that their doctrine endowed women with erotic images to accompany their mystical and
supernatural symbolic powers. Woman became an icon, the incarnation of amour fou,
the closest man could approach to the mystical without being pulled into the whirlpool of insanity himself. Furthermore, an insane woman, rather than being marginalized as she
might have been in other circles, was seen to possess a special access to the unconscious.
The most famous example of this, Breton's frequenting of Nadja in his most celebrated
work, is admittedly an attempt on his part to gather information and inspiration from her
because of her special status as intermediary between the worlds of sanity and insanity.
Although Breton criticized the institutional treatment of the insane in Nadja, his callous
abandonment of his muse to the insane asylum can hardly be read as an act of kindness.
Surrealist art depicts an enormous amount of cruelty toward women. While
Conley asserts that the visual slicing and dicing of female bodies so often seen in
paintings by Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Hans Bellmer was both an acting out of the
men's worst nightmares and an exercise pursued primarily for its shock value, la femme
chez-d'oeuvre is a frightening rendition of woman (21). Fortunately, as Suleiman points
out in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1997), the second
generation Surrealist women who maintained relationships with these
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artists—Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, and Zürn—were able to establish
artistic dialogues with the works of their partners. She suggests,
… that such internal dialogue is to be found in not only in the work of
women directly involved with male Surrealists to whose work theywere specifically responding, but was a general strategy adopted, inindividual ways, by [other] women wishing to insert themselves as subjectsinto Surrealism (27).
Both Conley and Suleiman emphasize the ability of a select group of women poets and
artists to prevail despite the overt misogyny of the earlier years of the movement.
OUTSIDE THE HEXAGON Now that we have surveyed the social and cultural scene which gave rise to the
movement of Surrealism and followed its evolution through two generations in France, it
is time to turn our attention to the regional sites from which the works of our authors
originate in order to survey the development of a third generation of Surrealists who
were, in the second half of the twentieth century, more likely to welcome women artists
and authors into their midst. By retracing the paths of others who have employed
Surrealist practice, we will come to a better understanding of what it has meant and still
means to live in a surreal world.
In Fugues de Barbarie: Les Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998), Hédi
Abdel-Jouad examines the influence of the Surrealist literary movement and the Sufist
religious movement on a few of the earliest male authors from the Maghreb. He quotes
the Algerian poet Habib Tengour: "Le Maghrébin a été longtemps surréaliste sans le
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savoir"(5).4 In particular, Abdel-Jouad studies the literary pursuits of Tengour, Jean
Amrouche, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, Nabil Farès, Mouloud Feraoun, Tahar Ben
Jelloun, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Abdellatif Laâbi, Farid Lariby, and Youcef Sebti—all male
writers, well-recognized in the literary tradition of this region—whose careers began
either during the struggle for independence or in the immediate aftermath of liberation
from France. In the course of my study, this is the group that we will classify as the third
generation of Surrealists. Their first wave of literature deals with the wretchedness and
confusion of life and the psychological alienation of the Algerian, Tunisian, and
Moroccan peoples held powerless and voiceless under French occupation. A secondcycle of writing is rife with the disillusionment that resulted when citizens realized that
their new sovereign nations did not provide them with the freedom from oppression they
had expected (5).
Only a few pages of Adbel-Jouad's analysis are devoted to Nina Bouraoui's La
Voyeuse interdite, and further inclusion of women authors from the North Africa whose
works demonstrate surreal practice is limited to brief mentions of Assia Djebar, Leïla
Sebbar, and Joyce Mansour. To be fair to Abdel-Jouad, his argument traces the
"filiation" and affilation of the male writers with such male precursors as Arthur
Rimbaud and Gérard Nerval and the first generation of male French Surrealists.
However, his extensive investigation of the relationships of North African writers with
their French predecessors does not include a similar study of the most familiar women
4 Hédi Abdel-Jouad uses the historic term Barbarie to encompass the present nations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria and the word fugue in two ways: one to denote the artistic
content of poetry and literature as being akin to music; and the other, as a flight from the
physical present and conscious thought.
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writers whose works demonstrate a "filliation" with Surrealism and which followed the
men's work by a few years. Chapter Two of this dissertation will examine the surreal
practices of three of these female writers, Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar from
Algeria, and Evelyne Accad from Lebanon, in the context of the psychological and
physical effects of civil war and domestic conflict on their work.
Michael Richardson's Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean
(1996), details the support that the first generation of French Surrealists gave black
students from the Caribbean who later became leaders in both the Surrealist movements
in their homelands and in the ensuing Negritude movement. He describes "a uniqueseries of encounters" between 1931 and 1946 " [which] took place between Francophone
Caribbean writers and French Surrealists that constitute an important moment in the anti-
colonial struggle in the French-speaking world" (1). These elite black students
established or contributed to journals with political bents leaning toward Marxism and
anti-colonialism and with a literary content infused by revolutionary surrealist tendencies.
In 1931, Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyote, both École Normale Supérieure
students from Martinique, published the first and only issue of Légitime Défense, a
journal which questioned the foundations of European culture from the perspective of
blacks. Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, and Léon Damas
from Guyana who were also students at the École Normale during this period may have
read this fledgling periodical. In 1934, they collaborated to publish L'Étudiant Noir ,
which laid the foundations of the Négritude movement, although it was criticized for
approaching problems in the overseas departments from the perspective of the French and
for imitating French Surrealist and Marxist models of writing rather than creating
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revolutionary models reflecting the indigenous black identity of its authors. In 1937,
Damas published Pigments, a collection of poetry introduced by the French Surrealist
Robert Desnos, which was decidedly Surrealist in style and a prime example of black
pride in content. In 1939, at twenty-six years of age, Césaire published the epic poem
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal . In it, he documents his journey as a youngster raised
in Martinique under French rule and sensitized to his blackness in France, where he came
to realize that the important cultural foundations of African tradition and Martinician
identity had being erased by the French colonial policy of assimilation. He returns to his
homeland with a mission to improve its cultural and political landscape. Richardsonwrites that the Cahier "... helped to define a specifically black Caribbean sensibility, but
also announced a changed relation between black and white in the French colonies: no
longer would assimilation be taken for granted as the destiny of the colonized" (6).
Breton would later praise Cahier d’un retour au pays natal , in his preface to the
1947 edition under the title of “Un grand poète noir,” as "... rien moins que le plus grand
monument lyrique de ce temps” (81). During his visits to Martinique and Haïti, he
encouraged the adoption of Surrealism by people of color because, as he wrote in What is
Surrealism, edited and translated by Franklin Rosemont in 1978:
... in considering race and other barriers that must before all else becorrected by other means, I think that Surrealism aims and is alone inaiming systematically at the abolition of these barriers [of difference between people]. You know that in Surrealism the accent has always been on displacing the ego, always more or less despotic, by the id, heldin common by all ... Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first becauseit has always taken their side against all forms of imperialism and white banditry [ ...] and secondly because of the profound affinities that exist between Surrealism and so-called 'primitive' thought, both of which seek the abolition of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory emotion (258-61).
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In the context of recent social and literary theory, these comments are disturbing because
they seem to relegate the black race to a "primitive" access to the unconscious. However
it may be criticized, Surrealism opened up new opportunities for black people in the artsand in politics.
In Negritude Women (2002), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting breaks new ground by
insisting that a few black women also made significant contributions to the literary and
political pursuits of the Negritude movement although,
… the masculinist geneology constructed by the founding poets and shored
up by literary historians, critics, and Africanist philosophers continues toelide and minimize the presence and contributions of French-speaking black women to Negritude's evolution (14).
In 1931, Paulette Nardal co-founded La Revue du monde noir while her sister Jane
published poetry about Africa and the Antilles and wrote essays on black humanism and
pan-Africanism. Sharpley-Whiting claims that the efforts of these sisters were the basis
upon which Senghor later built his theories of race and global consciousness. The Nardal
sisters kept a literary salon in Paris, that according to Senghor, was a place "where
African Negroes, West Indians, and American Negroes used to get together" (Lillian
Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, Rev. ed., 1991). The author also maintains that
Suzanne Césaire has always been portrayed as walking in the shadow of her husband,
dwarfed by his lyricism and his political connections to Marxism and the Negritude
movement, while her Surrealist bent seems to have taken second place to her duties as
homemaker.
Just as women had first been considered as marginal to the Surrealist movement
and their participation required re-evalution in ensuing years, Sharpley-Whiting claims
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that several women of West Indian origin should also be considered as more central to
the Negritude movement. In Chapter Three of this dissertation I go a step further than
either Richardson or Sharpley-Whiting by discussing Maryse Condé and Simone
Schwarz-Bart's contributions to mainstream Caribbean literature—a literature infused, as
were Négritude and Surrealism, with the magic of voodoo, the (sur)reality of magical
realism, and the orality of the Creole tradition. I show not only how their contributions to
the literary canon can be traced back through a community of male participants in the
Surrealist and Magical Realist movements and the Césaires, (both Madame and
Monsieur) but also how Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s authorial practices have surpassed both movements.
Each Francophone region, however unlike the others it may be in geographic
location or natural environment, shares the common bond of its historic and existing ties
with France, just as the authors from each region share some version of the French
language as a medium of expression. As we have already seen, in spite of Surrealism's
revolutionary influence on literature and the arts in the Caribbean during the first half of
the twentieth century, Martinique and Guadeloupe remain in a "neo-colonial" relationship
with France as evidenced by continued economic dependence and their departmental
political status.
By contrast, Quebec—which France established as la Nouvelle France four
centuries ago and then lost to the English a century later—is three hundred years removed
from French domination. However, the province has been forced to deal with a set of
postcolonial issues resulting from its lengthy domination by Great Britain, the
overwhelming cultural paternalism of anglophone Canada, and the cultural and economic
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dominance of its superpower neighbor the United States. Terminating the dominance of
the Catholic church while continuing to promote the use of French in social and
economic situations has taken a route that is, surprisingly, quite similar to other
Francophone regions where persons of color have employed Surrealist practice in the arts
to counteract oppression.
In 1948, a group of Quebecois artists denouncing the values of the Catholic
church and the stifling conservatism of the Duplessis government signed a manifesto
entitled “Refus global” which reiterated in many ways the refusals enumerated in the
Surrealist Manifesto which had preceded it by twenty-four years. In Les femmes du Refus Global (1998) Patricia Smart explains this revolutionary act by the fifteen artists
surrounding Paul-Émile Borduas as the result of
… sept années de discussions et d’expérimentation, en lisant Marx et Freud, enécoutant la musique moderne de Stravinski et de Varèse, du jazz et des rythmesvaudou, et en créant au théâtre, en poésie et en danse des productions d’avant-garde qui ont scandalisé les critiques et le public bien-pensant. Si un mouvementa exercé une influence prédominante sur leurs idées et leur esthétique, c’est lesurréalisme, par son insistance sur l’interdépendance de l’art, de la libération del’inconscient et de la transformation sociale (9-10).
This group was known as the Automatists and was immediately distinguishable from the
Surrealists by the fact that they dedicated a larger portion of their attention to the
techniques of automatic writing and painting than did Breton's group. Another difference
that is particularly salient to our argument is the fact that seven active women artists
signed the Refus global along with eight of their male associates. The greater visibility
and equality of women as signitaries distinguished the Automatists from the Surrealists in
a very significant way.
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With its origin within this small team of artists, a vigorous spirit of intellectual
rebellion began to spread throughout the Canadian province of Quebec. Side by side
with men, women contested the power of the Church in their private lives, the domination
of the English language in business, and the influence of the United States on many
aspects of their culture and their natural environment. The Quiet Revolution evolved
from this movement, and poetry was once again put to the service of politics.
In Chapter Four of this dissertation I will analyze Anne Hébert's Les enfants du
sabbat and Jovette Marchessault's La Mère des herbes, whose preoccupations with the
occult and the surreal at specific moments in their careers link their work to the novels of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart and the movements of Magical Realism and
Surrealism in the southern hemisphere of the American continents. These feminists were
pioneers in depicting the psychological conflicts that women experienced in Quebec
because of their second-class status. For almost forty years Hébert wrote about her
homeland with an uncanny clarity from self-exile in Paris. Marchessault embarked upon
an artistic journey that began as singular and personal and evolved, over time, into theater
pieces in which multiple characters—and multiple creators—interacted. Her later works
are particularly marked by the collaborative aspect of writing that proved so fruitful for
Canadian women authors. I will use the theoretical works of Nicole Brossard, Patricia
Smart, Madeleine Gagnon, Lise Gauvin, and France Théoret to chart the trajectory of
women’s writing in Quebec from Hébert through Marchessault toward the collaborative
phenomenon which continues to distinguish a portion of Quebec’s feminist writing from
the francophone literature of other regions.
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Aside from casual mention, no critic has formally linked the surreal elements
found in the work of a sizable percentage of francophone women authors in the last half
of the twentieth century with those of their male precursors. It is my project to fill this
critical void by closely examining the surreal components present in the novels of
Mechakra and Djebar from the Maghreb, of Accad from the Mashrek, of Condé and
Schwarz-Bart from the Caribbean, and of Hébert and Marchessault from Quebec.
In all of the Francophone regions surveyed, one surrealist tenet holds constant,
which will be discussed in Chapter Five: the premise that the private and political spheres
are always/already inseparable in the works of Francophone women in the second half of the twentieth century. What combination of postcolonial and postmodern conditions in
these geographically and historically diverse zones has stimulated women to choose
authorial practices that resemble those promulgated by the first generation of male
Surrealists? Have the subjugation and revolt, the anguish of mental illness, the dreams
and nightmares of social disintegration, war and exile obliged women authors to venture
beyond conscious experience and realist writing in order to exorcize the humiliation and
horror of their reality? It is the project of this dissertation to document how feminist
Francophone authors, either consciously or unconsciously, have described the (sur)reality
of life in their particular regions while narrating the coming to subjectivity of their
protagonists who must reconcile the trajectories of their lives with both their tumultuous
pasts and their yet unexplored futures.
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CHAPTER 2
NIGHTMARES OF WAR AND DREAMS OF PEACE:
TRAUMATIZED SUBJECTS IN THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK
Comment imaginer, rêver, inventer quand la vie vous est uncauchemar de chaque instant rythmé par l'assassinat de tous vos
amis, la peur, les cris, les larmes, le sang? (Hayat, La Nuit, 7 )
INTRODUCTION TO THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK
This chapter will examine how Yamina Mechakra in La Grotte Éclatée (1979),
Assia Djebar in L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Evelyne Accad in L'Excisée (1982)
narrate traumatic events and how the creation of each of these tales represents a
transgressive political act intended to document the escape of North African and Middle
Eastern women from colonial and gender subjugation. These authors describe the
violence of war and its attendant traumatic effects, women’s post-independence and post-
nationalist efforts to extricate themselves from traditional gender roles, and the reshaping
of male/female relationships during their respective conflicts.
I am interested in studying the surrealist practices used by francophone women
writers in the last half of the twentieth century and charting their development from
techniques that originated in the French Surrealist movement led by André Breton in the
1920s. To make this connection, I will relate how the first Surrealist movement’s
exploration of madness and post-traumatic stress syndrome was adapted by a significant
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circle of male writers from the Maghreb during Algeria’s war for independence, and
ultimately how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad have depicted psychosis and trauma in their
fiction.
As was previously mentioned, the founder of the Surrealist movement studied
medicine as a young man. During World War I, he and Philippe Soupault worked at the
Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where they first used techniques of psychoanalysis in
treating the mentally ill. They discovered implications of Freud’s work for artists and
writers that went beyond its clinical use with soldiers returning from the front and other
victims of psychosis in the civilian population. They came to realize that healthy artistsmight also unlock the unconscious in order to take advantage of whatever aesthetic
inspiration might be hidden there.
It is the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s that provides the most significant link
between the first Surrealist generation’s interest in trauma victims and insanity and the
predilection for re-telling trauma that is evident in the novels of postcolonial authors of
the second half of the century. It is his study, in the 1940s and 1950s, of the divergent
reactions of European and North African patients to psychological testing that expands
our understanding of how an individual’s imagination is culturally bound by his/her
surroundings. It is also his documentation of the change in family relations that occurred
during the Algerian war for independence that forms a basis for the questions these
authors raise in their novels.
Fanon had been trained in France to explore the logic of the European imaginary
life, but his work with psychiatric patients in Blida, Algeria, taught him that he would
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also have to become familiar with the North African subconscious if he hoped to treat
patients coming from very different cultural backgrounds successfully:
The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life; the concrete
and objective worlds constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found theimaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feedsthe concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible onlyto the extent that the real world belongs to us.5
Regrettably, Fanon did not have long to learn more about Algerian customs and tradition
nor to adjust his methods of treatment for the mentally ill before his medical work was
disrupted by the outbreak of the Algerian war and he became more involved as a political
activist for the Front de Libération Nationale. Nevertheless, it is his theorization (asopposed to Freud) of the culture-boundedness of the imaginary that allows us to propose
a link between the two historic artistic currents which we are considering here: the first
generation of French Surrealists and future generations of men and women whose
aesthetic inspiration originates in the unconscious, is filtered by one’s belonging to a
particular society, and whose artistic practices can be studied in the light of a surrealist
approach to the unconscious. It is a valuable step—in the context of mental health, which
was Fanon’s primary concern—and in the sphere of artistic creativity, which is mine in
this work—to affirm his discovery that a subject's imagination is inextricably linked to
his/her society.
5 Frantz Fanon and C. Geronimi. "Le TAT chez les femmes musulmanes: sociologie de laperception de l'imagination" Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et
des pays de langue française. LIVe Session: Bordeaux, 1956, 367-8. Translated byDavid Macey in Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2001) 234-5. Only the
portion of the original document that is reprinted in translation in Macey’s biography of
Fanon appears to be available at this time.
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On first inspection, my use of the concepts of a radical male theorist to make vital
connections between a male-oriented movement such as Surrealism and a trio of women
authors—none of whom would challenge the designation “feminist”—may seem
surprising. After all, Fanon preceded the feminist movement by at least two decades, and
his essays which touch upon the role of women during revolution are among the least
known of his political works. “L’Algérie se dévoile” in Sociologie d’une révolution:
L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959) has been more frequently discussed and
contested in feminist cir