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Eluard's Rupture with Surrealism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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Eluard's rupture with Breton, in 1938, is attributed to a change in political ideology, from surrealism to Stalinism. Doubt is thrown on this simple explanation by the deliberate silence of Eluard, Breton, and their biographers, who have not recorded the event, though no such reluctance followed the earlier defections of Aragon, Desnos, or Prévert, who were accused, and who answered, in violent and well-known diatribes. It was not until 1951 that Eluard acknowledged the importance of the break, in publishing a testament of his surrealist days, and reproducing poems that he had tried until then to keep secret. A close examination of his poetry and of a few external events reveals several important facts. As we shall see, the vital elements in the rupture include Eluard's fatigue both with Breton's pacifism and with the thematic and technical artifices of dream interpretation. An analysis of his protest is obscured by his other psychic worries, from the war in Spain to his isolation from events during the first years of the German occupation. Eluard's personal crises came to an end with the death of his wife, Nusch, on 28 November 1946, and in a sense, until then, he found full peace of mind after 1937 only during the period of Poésie ininterrompue, published on 3 January 1946, and of his revised Choix de poèmes, of 15 July.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961
References
Note 1 in page 436 Vol. i contains Nadeau's historical interpretations, vol. ii selects from the principal historical documents; I have gone to the originals in the case of Minotaure and Eluard's theoretical texts in Donner à voir, Paris, 1939.
Note 2 in page 436 Roy's choice of poems, in Paul Eluard: Poésies, follows his biography of Eluard, most useful for the postwar period.
Note 3 in page 436 Poètes d'aujourd'hui (Paris : Seghers, 1944).
Note 4 in page 437 There are three editions, Choix de poèmes, 1914–1941 (published 30 June 1943), Choix de poèmes, nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (published IS July 1946), and Idem (recorded in Autumn 1951, published Nov. 19S9). The original selection was twice merely brought up to date, but in 1946 Eluard added Novembre 1936, La Victoire de Guernica, and Les vainqueurs d'hier périront, unpleasant to the German censors.
Note 5 in page 437 Une Leçon de morale (Paris, 1949), pp. 9 ff.
Note 6 in page 438 This volume, primarily a selection of prose texts, seems to point to the rupture in setting at the end a series of poems devoted to artists, each labeled either “Cours naturel 1937,” or, in italics, “1938,” that is as yet unpublished.
Note 7 in page 439 The edition is peculiar in several respects. The imprint on page [123] reads “Le tirage de ce volume a été achevé le dix mars mil neuf cent trente-huit sur les presses du maître imprimeur Henri Jourde à Paris / Printed in France,” in contrast to the same printer's traditional “Achevé d'imprimer…” in Chanson complète; further, the paper is very mediocre and the inking very uneven, and a few letters are from different fonts, indicating haste or carelessness; finally, though Eluard was closely associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française, no notice of the volume appeared until 1 June, and no review until 1 August, and neither identifies the contents. I believe that Eluard withheld Cours naturel for a time : the Bibliothèque Nationale received its copy on 23 April, forty-four days after printing, but only nine days after the fighting near Barcelona that inspired Les Vainqueurs.
Note 8 in page 444 A la poursuite des saisons is throughout very mysterious in its cryptic allusions to “le feu le nain de mars—jeu de lèvres—le feu d'avril—mêmes ombres—un printemps que tu as oublié,” lending themselves to various conjectures and apparently pertinent to a grave psychic problem.