Lately, I have been hearing more from contemporary writers about the novella form. In celebration of the recent re-release by Atlas Press of one of my favourites, I would like to say a few words about the French Surrealist Robert Desnos who managed to struggle with the capabilities of his lyric voice and his uncanny verse for long enough to turn out just over a hundred pages of poetic prose, resulting in the astonishing 1927 novella La liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!).
Desnos is notable for a rare gift that enabled him to go into trances and perform startling recitations and feats of “automatic writing” on the fly, replete with bizarre wordplay that concealed a deeper resonance. At this time, Desnos was rather a showcase darling for the Surrealist group led by André Breton, who had nothing but praise for him in his First Manifesto of Surrealism:
Ask Robert Desnos, he who, more than any of us, has perhaps got closest to the Surrealist truth, he who, in his still unpublished works and in the course of numerous experiments he has been a party to, has fully justified the hope I placed in Surrealism and leads me to believe that a great deal more will still come of it. Desnos speaks Surrealist at will. His extraordinary agility in orally following his thought is worth as much to us as any number of splendid speeches which are lost. Desnos having better things to do than record them. He reads himself like an open book, and does nothing to retain the pages, which fly away in the windy wake of his life.
By 1930 and the issue of Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Desnos, along with a number of others, had been excommunicated from the group and took part in a darker hybrid offshoot, contributing to the Surrealist Art Magazine Documents, which was edited by Georges Bataille. There was a number of possible reasons for the breach, including political and aesthetic differences, but I think that Mary Ann Caws hits upon the most obvious reason for the departure of Desnos from the group, in her book The Surrealist Voice of Robert Desnos (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977):
Desnos demonstrated an incredible fertility of imagination, dictating, writing or drawing feverishly, answering questions with a sustained lyric power at first impressive to Breton and the others but finally discouraging to them.
(Atlas Press 1993 original U.K. edition of Liberty or Love!)
In spite of Desnos’ gift for “automatic writing”, in his introduction to the novella, translator Terry Hale indicates that Liberty or Love!
has a greater thematic unity than might be expected of a purely automatic text and the action, or so it has been hinted, would in some sense seem to have been directed (the best evidence for this being the numerous self-referential passages).
Some critics has misinterpreted these passages as examples of Desnos’ self-involvement but his use of his own name is not unlike Samuel Beckett’s reference to a “Mr. Beckett” or various other characters that he suggests might have sprung from the mind of his character Malone, who also balks at the “stink of artifice” right in the middle of his narratives. In his poetry and in his novella, Desnos uses his name like a poetic trope or a stock phrase, deliberately confusing it with his dummy “Don Giovanni” named Corsair Sanglot in phrases that drip with ironic self-critique:
She is here.
I can see her in every detail of her splendid nature. I am going to touch her, stroke her.
Corsair Sanglot undertakes to, Corsair Sanglot begins to, Corsair Sanglot, Corsair Sanglot.
The woman I love, the woman, ah! I was going to write her name. I was going to write “I was going to write her name.”
Count, Robert Desnos, count the number of times you have used the words “marvellous,” “magnificent” …
Corsair Sanglot no longer walks around the shop of reproduction furniture.
The woman that I love!
For Desnos, “the woman that I love” is usually thought to refer to his passion for the singer Yvonne George (photographed above by Man Ray in 1924), who is transfigured into the alluring Louise Lame (lame = blade). However, unlike the ethereal idolesses or sacrificial victims of other poets and writers at that time, she is on relatively equal footing with Corsair Sanglot (sang = blood), and equally excited by a room of evidence (“remains of an adventure which could have been their own”) in which a crime has occurred:
Reproduction is proper to the species but love is proper to the individual. I prostrate myself before you, low kisses of the flesh. I too have plunged my head into the shadowy recess of thighs. Louise Lame clasped her handsome lover tightly. Her eyes sought out the effect this conjunction of her tongue had on his face. It is a mysterious rite, and perhaps the most beautiful. When Corsair Sanglot’s breath turned into a pant, Louise Lame became more resplendent than the male.
When speaking about these evocative French puns that are part of the characters names, translator Terry Hale points out that the resultant poetic pairings emphasize key themes or relationships:
Like the principle ‘character,’ these three leitmotifs – the sea, eroticism and revolution – separate and converge into unexpected patterns – perfect Surrealist combinations symbolising unconscious and conscious liberation initiated by love – that we must search for the elusive significance of the novel’s title.
In addition to these analogies to the bloodshed associated with war and revolution, Desnos also uses commercial iconography to great effect to lampoon religious tropes. The great Manichean battle will involve Christianity in the form of a contraceptive sponge (alluding to the sponge allegedly present at the Crucifixion) and also in the form of the divine Bébé Cadum (a grinning baby associated with a bar of soap), who is pitted against the original embodiment of might and machismo, the hard drinking chain smoking Bibendum Michelin (rough and tumble ancestor of the extremely non-theatening modern Michelin Man) whose name and credo essentially means Now let’s get wasted!
The narrative continually fragments, giving the sense of a film making an abrupt scene change. In Innovative Fiction Magazine, David Detrich discusses this cinematic quality in Desnos’ novella:
Robert Desnos writes with insight into eroticism, while foreshadowing events in the evolution of Surrealism into the 21st Century with the glow of a match as a theme that reminds us of the presence of the narrator, while his writing style is similar to the soft focus techniques used by Man Ray in the film L'Étoile de Mer (1928), influenced by the film techniques of the Italian Futurists, who feature silent black and white films of a woman’s feet in romantic situations.
Admittedly, Liberty or Love! should not be rated (E) for Everyone. The book includes tropes that are ordinarily found in the most banal erotica, or for that matter, in contemporary video games. However, the peculiarity of these scenes, whether it be an orderly lashing in the boarding school at Humming-Bird Garden or casual conversation and reminiscences at the Sperm Drinkers’ Club, and their resonance with the book’s recurring themes of “sea, eroticism and revolution”, give the novella a richness that lacks the inevitable monotony of similar prolonged scenes as set down by the Marquis de Sade or Georges Bataille.
(Mary Ann Caws makes easing into the world of Desnos’ poetry and novellas easy with Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos from Black Widow Press)
It is no small matter to communicate to English readers the precise nature of Desnos’ poetic style, with its bizarre constructions, with its agile rapidity, with its puns and repetitions. I am no means a fluent expert, but I will attempt to translate a short fragment to give some idea of this expressive quality in the original:
For calming these migraines, try a migration of albatrosses and pheasants. They would spend an hour over the nearby countryside, and then cool their wings in the fountain.
But the migration is not happening. The fountain flows with regularity.
Mary Ann Caws isolates a distinct linguistic quality in Desnos’ early work, including Liberty or Love!:
… certain points of focus are stressed in repetitions and modifications until they acquire an intensity and an emotive value far exceeding that of the less frequent images passing on the novel’s surface. It is to these linguistic and imaginative accretions, these deliberate constructions of literary energy, that we are here giving the name of “myth,” with the qualifying reminder that the myth in this sense is a voluntary creation of the poet of the elements of these constructions, which he builds and then destroys.
This is a reminder that if we so choose, we may indulge in novels and novellas that appear to have “lost the plot,” admiring instead their linguistic progressions and textures that form a dynamism that outstrips our reliance upon stale centuries-old literary tropes that are (let’s be honest) no more than antique hand-me-downs we hoard and talk up, when it might be in our best interest to let them go.
Liberty or Love! is at worst an interesting text that contains some of the preoccupations of Parisian Surrealists in the 1920s and is at best a startling apparition of what the future of the novel might yet be. So order it today and hide it from your family tomorrow …
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