[In the following excerpt, Gershman argues that Péret stands out among the early surrealists in his attempts to fuse the Surrealist principal of “automatic writing” with elements of the Gothic novel.]

Only Péret, of the early surrealists, […] attempted a synthesis of the technique of automatism, carefully controlled so as to give the desired end result, with the content of the Gothic novel: a combination of deliberate sensory and logical confusion with a matching subject. All this in an impeccable syntax.¹

—Die, deaf horn!
—Die, eel soap!
—Die, head paper!
—Die, flighty elephant!

Such were the cries which echoed inside the tin tube where two virgins and their shadow were sleeping. With arms raised to heaven, they begged the arsonists to spare the roots of the beech tree which had given birth to them. The younger of the virgins, whose brow was a wine cellar reserved for the purest alcohols, those which the philosopher extracts from fur coats after they have shielded a woman's shoulders from indiscreet glances of a winter's night similar to a picture book Christmas when booted Russians hunt wolves in vegetable gardens bristling, for decorative effect, with frozen brushes and mannequins who nonetheless. …²

This is the wonderland of a child's picture book where reigns the wicked witch, a land where animal horns may turn deaf, eels wash (or [savon d'anguille] is it simply soap made of eels?), skulls are the source of paper (or [papier de crâne] is the paper for the skull?), and elephants are fickle. Not really very wicked or dangerous when compared with either of the world wars between which this falls, or when held up to the mischievous works of a Sade or a Lautréamont. On the surface this is far more a pampered child's version of what is dreadful in the world about him. For adults, on the other hand, Péret's tales are neither terrifying nor amusing. His chambers of false horrors are indeed so anodyne that there arises the suspicion he wanted it that way, that he was deliberately engaged in writing new fables for old children, as Desnos and Prévert were to do years later in their Chantefables and Paroles.³

Une fourmi de dix-huit mètres
          Avec un chapeau sur la tête,
Ça n'existe pas, ça n'existe pas.
          Une fourmi traînant un char
Plein de pingouins et de canards,
          Ça n'existe pas, ça n'existe pas.
                    Une fourmi parlant français,
                              Parlant Latin et javanais,
Ça n'existe pas, ça n'existe pas.
          Eh! pourquoi pas?

“La Fourmi”

                    Ce sont les mères des hiboux
          Qui désiraient chercher les poux
De leurs enfants, leurs petits choux,
          En les tenant sur les genoux.
          Leurs yeux d'or valent des bijoux,
                    Leur bec est dur comme cailloux,
          Ils sont doux comme des joujoux,
          Mais aux hiboux point de genoux!
                    Votre histoire se passait où?
          Chez les Zoulous? Les Andalous?
                    Ou dans la Cabane Bambou?
                    A Moscou ou à Tombouctou?
                    En Anjou ou dans le Poitou?
Au Pérou ou chez le Mandchous?
                                                  Hou! Hou!
          Pas du tout, c'était chez les fous.

“Les Hiboux”

                              Ils sont à table
                    Ils ne mangent pas
          Ils ne sont pas dans leur assiette
Et leur assiette se tient toute droite
          Verticalement derrière leur tête.

“La Cène”

L'amiral Larima
Larima quoi
la rime à rien
l'amiral Larima
L'amiral Rien.

“L'Amiral”

Péret early struck this tone:

Un clou, deux clous, trois clous et voici notre maison bâtie. Devant elle se dresse une épée de sucre qui sous l'influence des rayons du soleil tend à devenir un monde nouveau, une planète de feuille sèche dont le désir de rotation autour d'un couple de hérons se manifeste par un léger hululement qui est le signal du départ pour les quarante-huit coureurs envoyés dans la course de Paris à l'étoile polaire en passant par tous les nouveaux cinémas des capitales européennes. Les voici partis, tandis que, dans la course que nous voyons de temps en temps dans les forêts de sel, les coureurs disparaissent un à un comme des gouttes de rosée. Cette fois-ci ils se multiplient à mesure que croît la distance qui les sépare de leur point de départ sans que pour cela diminue celle qui les sépare de leur but.

For those tired of logic, of reason, of lockstep consensus, Péret offers an enchanted land where houses are built in a twinkle, and one goes from candy swords to prodigious bicycle races. Much may happen in this aloof dream world, but it is all harmless, for it doesn't really “engage” us as would, say, tangible reality. Things become people, women are always at the ready, nothing is burdensome, and should you be injured you can always change into something else.

Le vent se lève comme une femme après une nuit d'amour. Il ajuste son binocle et regarde le monde avec ses yeux d'enfant. Le monde, ce matin, est semblable à une pomme verte qui ne sera jamais mûre, le monde est acide et gai. On dirait une pelle neuve avec son manche blanc. Partout il y a des pelles et des ustensiles de ménage, à croire que le monde a attendu ce jourlà, aujourd'hui, pour s'installer, pour avoir son jardin et son chien qui aboie dans sa niche parce qu'il a vu un million de cloportes sortir du corps d'un lézard tué par le froid. Ce chien, il faut que j'en parle et que je le décrive afin que nul ne puisse le confondre avec un fraisier. C'est un bel animal énorme et bruyant comme une pouponnière. Il saute, bondit à travers la collection de timbres-poste de son maître. Il va du paratonnerre au fond du puits plus rapidement qu'une pierre et se retrouve de l'autre côté du mur toujours semblable à lui-même et à sa porte cochère.⁴

In this dream world, which could serve as a model for a film to delight the young and disturb the rest of us, the heart reigns supreme. The standard tools of comprehension are of little avail. Nonetheless, the human animal is sufficiently resilient to assimilate even the strangest of human artifacts, however odd they may appear at first sight. In a sense this is the glory of surrealism and its major contribution to literature. Having obliged us to recognize the irrational in the world, it challenges the smug and obliges the sedate to redraw the boundaries of reality. From the time of symbolism to the present a certain type of art has become more and more of a private affair, the author writing less for a public, even the restricted one of fellow authors, than for himself. Art, at this point, becomes a form of self-knowledge requiring new techniques and a new logic, in much the same way that life then is identified with spontaneity and action, rather than with the idea of progress. Is this very different from Tristan Tzara?⁵ For both Tzara and the old-line surrealists art-for-a-public was to be replaced by art-for-truth (subjective truth, bien entendu!), with each artist dipping his own siphon into the unconscious well and marveling at the bubbles which rose to the surface, individual bubbles reflecting a collective consensus. Where Tzara saw psychoanalysis as a “dangerous illness, [for it] puts the antireal penchants of man to sleep” and shores up a declining middle class, Breton perceived the possibility of turning psychoanalytic techniques away from integrating the “patient” into society and toward a new revolutionary self-awareness.⁶ In Péret, as in Tzara before him, the content is sufficiently amorphous so that the reader is encouraged to restructure the poem (or story) according to the dictates of his ever-solicited caprices. The end result, as Breton foresaw, was “an unprecedented freedom of expression,”⁷ one that, according to one critic, “does not aim to bridge the distance between the real and the surreal; it places us unequivocally in the realm of the latter.”⁸

In Péret's universe, as occasionally in Mallarmé's, disembodied words have a reality all their own. Had not Breton insisted that “man was given language so that he might use it surrealistically”?⁹ Péret would not have it any other way. The one pitfall is to explain, to reduce the complex unknown to a simple known, this in spite of the fact that “Thought is ONE and indivisible.”¹⁰ Although no mystic, Péret has a mystic's unconcern for categories: all is one and one is all. …

Notes

1. Among the more recent adherents of this approach are André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Joyce Mansour.

2. This is the beginning of the final section of Péret's La Brebis galante, dated “Automne 1924,” but first published by Le Terrain Vague in 1959.

3. “La Fourmi” and “Les Hiboux” were first published in Trente chantefables pour les enfants sages (Gründ, 1944), and reprinted in the Desnos anthology Domaine public (Gallimard, 1953), p. 375. The Prévert selections, “La Cène” and “L'Amiral,” are from his Paroles (Gallimard, [1946] 1949), pp. 192, 268. The final passage is from Péret's La Brebis galante, p. 49.

4. La Brebis galante, p. 41.

5. As early as 1916, Tzara had insisted that “Dada est notre intensité.” In “Manifeste de Monsieur Antipyrine,” Sept manifestes Dada (Pauvert, 1963), p. 15. The movement, as he explains, was born “d'un besoin d'indépendance” (“Manifeste Dada 1918,” ibid., p. 22). In a Dada work, “chaque page doit exploser” (ibid., p. 26), which is not without recalling similar statements by Breton, esp. in Nadja and L'Amour fou. Tzara continues by affirming that “L'expérience est aussi un résultat du hasard …” and “L'art est une chose privée, l'artiste le fait pour lui” (ibid., pp. 28–30). Thanks to M. Sanouillet, we now have conclusive evidence of Breton's enthusiasm on reading “Le Manifeste Dada 1918”: “Je me suis réellement enthousiasmé pour votre manifeste,” he writes on Jan. 22, 1919. If Vaché, “ce que j'aimais le plus au monde,” is dead, Tzara, as if by miracle, has come to replace him: “il [Vaché] aurait reconnu votre esprit pour frère du sien …” (Dada à Paris, p. 440). Freud is no stranger to automatism, but what of the author of “La pensée se fait dans la bouche”? (Tzara, “Dada manifeste sur l'amour faible et l'amour amer” [Dec. 12, 1920], Sept manifestes Dada, p. 58).

6. Tzara, in a statement that prefigures Communist opposition to Freud, noted that “La psychanalyse est une maladie dangereuse, endort les penchants anti-réels de l'homme et systématise la bourgeoisie”—this just prior to a section devoted to “La Spontanéité dadaiste,” in “Manifeste Dada 1918,” Sept manifestes Dada, p. 28.

7. Breton, Entretiens, p. 68. Breton is here referring to Péret.

8. J. H. Matthews, Introduction to Péret's Score, an anthology with translations on facing pages (Minard, 1965), p. 7.

9. In the first Manifesto, which is the one most likely to express views that would have had a determining influence on Péret. (Breton, Manifestes, p. 48). The practice of surrealist speech would lead to a type of activity not significantly different from that suggested by Tzara's “La pensée se fait dans la bouche” (Sept manifestes Dada, p. 58). Breton regularly returned to this idea, e.g., “Il ne faut donc pas s'étonner de voir le surréalisme se situer tout d'abord presque uniquement (italics mine) sur le plan du langage …” (Second manifeste, 1929, in Manifestes, p. 183); and still later, in the opening sentence of “Du surréalisme en ses oeuvres vives” (1953), “Il est aujourd'hui de notoriété courante que le surréalisme, en tant que mouvement organisé, a pris naissance dans une opération de grande envergure portant sur le langage” (ibid., p. 355).

10. In his first Manifesto Breton speaks of “L'intraitable manie qui consiste à ramener l'inconnu au connu” (ibid., p. 21). The Péret quotation is the title of a brief statement in VVV, no. 4 (Feb. 1944), s.p.