Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
impressed with the Gaspé's natural wildness
and its botanical and zoological fecundity.
Like most Europeans he thinks of time
in Europe as history, but of time in
America as geology. The striations of
Bonaventure Island's geological substrata
become the symbol of the ground of
human culture. It is on the indivisible rock
of nature that 'man's home' is constructed
and for that reason, 'Civilization,' he says,
notwithstanding all the evidence to the
contrary, 'is one! Those pesky little 'conflicts
of interest' in history (like the world
war) that undermine this primordial unity
are 'not unsolvable.' The lameness of this
kind of thinking cannot be camouflaged by
the visionary arm-waving.
The title, Arcanum 1/, is adapted from
the seventeenth card of the Tarot pack, the
card called 'The Star.' It depicts bright stars
above a naked woman who pours water from
two urns, one stream falling into a pool or
pond, the other on land. This card represents
the birth of hope and love from despair. As
the Breton text makes clear it also represents
for him the eternal strength of the
feminine. Drawing on the power of the
female as the foundation for redemption and
resurrection in time of war and loss, Breton
invokes powerful female deities from the
mythologies and folklores of Europe.
He is particularly interested in Mesulina,
half woman, half serpent, taken from a
French fairy tale. In Breton's feminism, she
symbolizes the fate of woman, reduced to
half her humanity by phallogocentric culture.
Mesulina's contact with the animal
world drags out the dreary old stereotype,
so dear to the male hearts of the early modernists
(Joyce, Lawrence, etc.), that woman
draws her strength directly from nature
itself. Breton sees this enforced contact with
the natural world, paradoxically, as the
source of a redemptive power that will rescue
a world dominated by phallic violence
and hysteria. His sojourn in Québec in the
autumn of 1944 brings the urbane exile back
to the basics of natural existence. Woman,
he seems to suggest, is already there.
This is all fine and good, but many readers
today will be embarrassed/ angered/
amused (choose one) by the limitations
and assumptions of Breton's feminism, if
that is what it is. Contemporary readers
will also be struck by the unabashed
romantic humanism. From an artist (and
veteran of World War One) who as a devotee
of Dada, Surrealism, and Freud had
done much to shake the foundations of
bourgeois consciousness and patriarchal
morality earlier in the century, the decrepit
Lawrentian 'feminism' and his clapped out
liberal humanism sounds rather odd
indeed. There is about the whole of
Arcanum 17 and its 1947 after-thought
Apertures, a very old-fashioned tone.
America as the simple historyless Eden of
plants, earth, and birds, woman as our
species' enduring contact with nature,
humanism as the discourse of human perfectibility
and progress, and, finally, a thoroughly
unreflective Eurocentrism which,
for one thing, makes Paris the center of the
universe, will make many readers wince.
This was Breton's last major work and most
readers today will be relieved to hear it; one
such 'detour through the essential (Breton's
emphasis) (or should we say, his detour
through essentialism?) is enough.
Hal Foster's splendid dissection of the
sewing machine of surrealism on the operating
table of psychoanalytic criticism is
one of the finest books on modern art so
far in the 1990s. His aim is to rescue the
history of surrealism from the chamber of
com(MERZ) (with apologies to Kurt
Schwitters) boosterism of none other than
André Breton. Breton always wanted surrealism
to be seen as a movement of love and
liberation grounded implicitly on a rather
conventional humanism. Foster wants to
uncover the other, darker sources of the
movement, the ones papered over, on the
one hand, by Breton's hippy talk, and, on
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