[Hubert is a poet and scholar. In the following excerpt, she analyzes Breton's surrealist technique in Constellations, a volume consisting of twenty-two prose poems that parallel paintings by the artist Joan Miró.]

Breton's Surrealist technique, unchanged since Poisson soluble, is very much in evidence in Constellations. An animated spectacle unfolds, several events happen simultaneously, and this multifarious animation provides the only unity. "Le Lever du soleil" suggests a solitary child's crossing of the threshold leading into a world of fantasy, legend, and heraldry. This movement coincides with the denouement of another more adult, fateful play. After this awakening, a further exploration of this newly discovered land is suggested by a series of unfolding movements, such as the sudden opening of poppies, the upward projection of an invisible ladder, the cries of chimneysweeps, mysterious skybound smoke rings. Then follow hoverings between light and dark, between labyrinths and evanescently defined roads. The world has the content and meaning of dreams and must be deciphered accordingly. To these evocations Breton attributes both intimacy and bewilderment, fatality and playfulness. He relates simultaneously old legends as well as everyday incidents.

The texts "Femme à la blonde aisselle coiffant sa chevelure à la lueur des étoiles" and "Femmes sur la plage," far from attempting to rival the gouaches' multiplicity of erotic contours, suggest their gradual effacement. In a humorous dialogue between sand and a cork, the poet speaks of women's surrender, their liberation from conventions, their transgression of boundaries, their abandonment. Then, while the electrifying mystery persists, the gestures of the women embrace a lake, a castle and harvest fields. Undulating motions, creating a dreamlike fluidity, culminate in the final image of a nest woven of clematis leafage where secrecy renews its bond.

For the poet as well as for the painter, the world has become metamorphosed. In these texts objects and creatures maintain their identity in a veritable forest of symbols. The "Personnage blessé," undoubtedly an adult, gropes for rosy, sparkling, weightless elements and enigmatic fossils buried in caverns: the raw materials of future constellations. Surprise and illusion triumph over recognition. Humor adds a new dimension as night transforms a woman into a bird, but not with one stroke: "I'm halfwoman, but I've never been able to decide clearly whether the upper or the lower half suits me better" ("Femme dans la nuit"). Such metamorphoses both multiply and fuse images. A magnolia tree in "Femme et oiseau" embodies the sky and the earth, sound and sight, becomes a woman as well as a constellation while remaining a tree.

Magic festivities, games, disguises burst forth and overlap everywhere. Weightless creatures functioning as acrobats, dancers, stars, naiads graze the soil like shooting stars. Symphonic orchestrations, capable of endowing musical notations with the talent to perform by gestures the gay sounds they represent, enhance the show. Sparks and signs fly through the air, new life germinates on the milky way. The glitter moves ever more rapidly until the big dipper puts an end to the miracle. Forms and creatures subside, fuse and divide only to increase the animation. Reduced to their essential movements or outlines, all creatures are endowed with organic life. When joyful rites and other cults thus reach a climax, restlessness, pursuit, and destruction emerge to transform the nature of love. A relentless chase reduces woman, climbing the invisible ladder of the ideal, to a lacelike creature undistinguishable from the milky way. Fire and lightning dry the barren space until a black sun is spotted; bewitching erotic tunes persist. Later, in "Vers l'Arc en ciel," love at last assumes its full range, extending from a child's exiguous heart to roses in full bloom, from the violent eroticism of a tauromachy to ultimate fulfillment. Moreover, destruction of, and detachment from, earthly elements are expressed through a series of verbs indicating separation, escape and fusion. Solid matter is strongly denied in "Femmes au bord d'un lac à la surface irisée par le passage d'un cygne." From the swan and the flower approaching fascinating stagnation (as opposed to movement characteristic of the majority of texts) radiates an unreal, nebulous, dreamlike atmosphere. The open eye, "l'oeil cyclopéen," is included as if the spectacle, which has been conjured, must now be immobilized. The mysterious bond between love and death emerges, carrying with it the seeds of rebirth. Women incarnating the domain of "inconnaissance" extend an invitation to dream, love and intuition with clear Baudelairian undertones.

Throughout the episodes of love, the festivities of the dream, the child's world has not been eclipsed. Bonnets, kites and cages fly through the air as dawn disbands or interrupts the spectacle. The fairyking Oberon appears, to offer his protection to Huon and Esclarmonde. Legends, mysterious creatures and games abound, signs and symbols will have to be deciphered. These games gradually become less casual and carefree. There is more and more determination, in counting, spelling, skipping the rope. There may even be danger in catching little birds. In "Chiffres et constellations amoureux d'une femme" and "Le Bel oiseau déchiffrant l'inconnu au couple d'amoureux" the wish to solve the riddle of musical, astrological and literary signs fuses with love and desire; the manifold harmony expresses itself in one language. Letters and numbers, birds and flowers undergo mutual transmutations. The effort towards unity is symbolized by the stringing of pearls on a thread. The poet strives to concatenate one endless garland which includes the smallest globule and extends to the sky. And each tiny globule in this endless succession takes the place of other elements, for identity becomes less significant than participation in the chorus of stars. Universal attraction dominates the scene, so much so that the embrace of love and desire can give a child's weightless balloon or an atom the same dimensions as the sun. It is just after the lyre and the rosebush musically and visually fused their masculine and feminine contours in the final prose-poem, "Passage de l'oiseau divin," that Breton disbands "the world." Although gestures assume once more the complicity of marriage, although henchmen spread fear, although the insect devours the plant, and the bird the insect, we are as safe as in the world of fairytales, as safe as in a paradise of imagination and pure longing. The suite ends on a note of irony. It unravels like a drama. It disappears like a bird whose very transparence reveals the presence of fishshaped, flower-shaped and heart-shaped stars which never belonged to time-bound night.

Whether he takes the painter's representation as his immediate point of departure or derives his inspiration from other sources, Breton represents essentially the same poetic intent as Miró. Both bring day and night, desire and innocence, insect and comet into a single image. Breton, who wrote his prose-poems seventeen years after Miró had finished his twenty-two gouaches, has asserted the permanent traits of his own genius without betraying Miró's art. Strangely enough, the absence of spatial concepts characteristic of Breton's earlier poems, which are by no means lacking in painterly qualities, persists. Nonetheless, the barriers separating art from literature have perhaps never been as transparent as in Constellations.