[In the essay below, Schwartz discusses how the relatively obscure surrealist works of Fondane and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte are newly relevant to contemporary French writing.]

Literary activity and literary history need not be divorced from one another. Why include two writers from an earlier epoch in an issue devoted to contemporary French writing, if the relationship between the contemporary and the historical were not significant? Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of writing in France is the way older texts are suddenly revived, taken seriously, and assigned fresh critical significance in the presence of a particular contemporary interest or mood. This sense of an active fertile past that informs the language of the present can be traced back to both an acute self-consciousness in France about predecessors, and to the fact that Paris remains a place of discovery, where, somehow, poetic works escape being put “under glass.”

How and why writers long forgotten reappear years later may seem to be a mysterious process. Often, it is a question of the concerted effort of one or more persons being convinced of the importance of a particular oeuvre, and working to revive it. But there are also larger forces at work in the process of bringing works in and out of style. In the cases of Benjamin Fondane and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte that larger force was surrealism, the artistic and literary movement grouped around André Breton from the mid-twenties onward. Fondane and Gilbert-Lecomte were both poets interested in the articulation of the irrational and the anti-logical. Each became caught up in a debate with surrealism, the reigning articulation of unreason in their day. Surrealism generated a tradition and a following. Writers like Fondane and Gilbert-Lecomte did too, but to a much smaller extent, and thus their writings remain little known, many of them republished or published for the first time only in the late seventies and early eighties. Thus, their work has experienced a delayed impact, a belated but extraordinary rebirth.

That surrealism has tended to suppress other writers and movements plying similar routes may not have been entirely by design, though of course it is well known that Breton often put writers on trial. Only in the recent past—after the demise of surrealism and the onset of a certain weariness with the grand themes to which surrealism had appended itself, e.g., Marxism and Freud's theory of the unconscious, did new possibilities present themselves and were other poetries critically examined. In some cases, this loosening up has allowed less prominent surrealists to resurface; the recent American interest in Rene Crevel, for example, might not have been possible twenty years ago.

Benjamin Fondane, born Benjamin Wechsler in 1898, the second child of a Jewish family of German descent, was a poet, philosopher, and literary critic. His books, among others, Ulysses (poetry, 1934); Rimbaud Le Voyou (1934); Faux Traite d'Esthetique (1938); and Baudelaire et l'Experience du Gouffre (1942), all passed out of print and by the mid-fifties were almost completely forgotten. Fondane's life, subject matter, and obscurity are all bound up with surrealism. In part attracted by the destructive spirit of Dadaism, Fondane moved from his native Rumania to Paris in 1923, where surrealism already occupied the center of the literary stage. Though sympathetic to its emphasis on the irrational, Fondane felt that poetry and art on the one hand, and power and the struggle for it on the other, could never be reconciled, as the surrealists tended to think, judging by their notion of revolution. But for Fondane the notion of revolution, attractive insofar as it implied a heightened or frenzied emotional state, remained little more than an expression of vulgar optimism. For him, art's function was to traffic in the absurd and the tragic alone, for only in the abandonment of hope was the nightmare of meaning to be escaped or overcome. In this, Fondane was profoundly influenced by the great Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whom he met for the first time in 1926, and continued to see regularly until Shestov's death in 1938. Fondane is often considered Shestov's disciple, and Encontres Avec Shestov remains one of Fondane's most moving books. Fondane died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944, denounced as a Jew by his concierge not long before the end of the German occupation of Paris.

The first text presented here—“Do Not Enter”—was one of the three “Ciné-poems” in Fondane's first book, Trois Scenarri, which appeared with a photograph by Man Ray in 1929. Republished in 1984 in Ecrits Pour Le Cinéma (a collection of all of Fondane's cinematic writings), the text reflects as much the lingering French concern with the connection between word and image as it does a desire to recognize and rediscover a forgotten but important writer. The “Ciné-poem,” written in the form of a film script, each numbered phrase representing a camera shot, is unrealizable as a film. It is instead the attempt to subvert the word to the illusion of the directly visible. Words for Fondane were governed by Reason, indeed were the last outpost of Reason. Thus, they concealed the brute reality of the visual, which obeyed neither words, thought, or Reason. So Fondane in his critical writings championed the silent film as a form higher than poetry, all this while remaining committed to poetry. The “Ciné-poem” is what emerged from this contradiction.

The case of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte equally demands attention as another instance of the forgotten as contemporary. Gilbert-Lecomte wrote a great deal of poetry in the twenties and the thirties and, with the better-known Rene Daumal, was one of the central figures in the “Grand Jeu,” a group of writers originally based in Reims, all interested in mysticism and negation. During Lecomte's lifetime only two volumes of his poetry were published: La Vie l'Amour le Vide et le Vent and Le Miroir Noir. Much of his poetry was never collected; by 1932 the Grand Jeu group had fallen apart. Gilbert-Lecomte, wracked by illness, destitution, and drug addiction, died in almost complete isolation in 1943. Partly due to lack of interest, partly due to difficulties with Gilbert-Lecomte's provincial and pious parents, who refused to allow their son's “immoral” writings to be published, Gilbert-Lecomte passed out of mind and print. But in the 1960s an impressive array of writers, including Sartre, Michaux, Breton, E. M. Cioran, and Phillip Sollers, formed the “Association of the Friends of the Work of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte” and petitioned the court to allow him to be published. Finally, in the late 1970s, Editions Gallimard released the complete works of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. Of the poems presented here, only “Holy Childhood” was published during the poet's lifetime; the others, found among Gilbert-Lecomte's letters, scraps of paper, and notes, appeared only after his death. This is the first time Gilbert-Lecomte has been published in English.

Lecomte's poetry is self-consciously visionary. For him, poetry's task was to uproot man from himself and the world, in favor of a revelation of another world and another man. Poetry must employ dream and myth to reach beyond ordinary experience. Thus the lines in David Rattray's translation of “Rebirth Prebirth”: “Between my tight temples are vast moonlit steppes” … and, quoting Novalis, “All that matters is the quest for our Transcendental Self.”

What Gilbert-Lecomte and Fondane's work share is a willingness to make daring metaphysical claims. Their second life, if one dares verse oneself in it, is powerful enough to reverse trends, rekindle original intentions and critical imagination. The contribution of these poets to French literature, combined with the revealing process in which their work had been forgotten and rediscovered, secures their place in any collection of contemporary French writing.