On Valerie, Nezval, Max Ernst, and Collage: Variations on a Theme by Giuseppe Dierna in Place of a Prologue Vítězslav Nezval 1
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
On Valerie, Nezval, Max Ernst, and Collage: Variations on a Theme by Giuseppe Dierna The Reverend Father Dulac Dessalé: “Rise, bride of Jesus. Follow me, my beauty, to the cracks in the walls, I who am called cock- roach and kill-joy . .” 1 in place of a prologue Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was written in 1935 at the height of Surrealist activity in Czechoslovakia, but stayed tucked away in a drawer for a decade before being pub- lished. Perhaps the most surrealistic of Nezval’s fiction, it is a text where the Gothic novel and dream theory combine to produce one of his more compelling works.2 the gothic novel Valerie clearly belongs to the tradition of both the roman noir and the serial novel — tales dispensed in weekly booklets quickly crum- pled by impatient readers — by virtue of the author’s deliberate use of some of the compositional elements that define this particular literary genre.3 The entire plot, for example, revolves around a sin- gle protagonist, and the narrative structure is broken into short 199 chapters where many things happen — a repeating microstructure that concludes with a sudden, unexpected turn of events. Nezval, however, has stripped these devices of their earlier function, which was to keep the reader’s attention and pique interest for further installments. And if we are to adopt Louise Reybaud’s definition, the genre is also defined by a typical constellation of characters: Take a young, unhappy, persecuted woman. Place next to her a brutal blood-thirsty tyrant, a refined, virtuous squire, and a hypocritical, perfidious confidant. Once you have all these characters in hand, briskly mix together into six, eight, or ten installments and serve warm.4 Yet in Valerie, Nezval frequently likes to break these rules, when for example he refuses to define with any sort of precision the time and place where the action is occurring. In other words, though he drew on Gothic and serial novels for his model, he placed “certain limitations” on how this model was to be employed. Wherever possible he lets the narrative slip into the indeterminate and inexact, ill-defined feelings joining with the imprecision of tangential details. a romanticism of the impossible As is generally known, with the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 the French Surrealists began immediately to revalue the most gory offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, the Gothic novel, 200 which they held up as the antithesis of “realistic,” psychological prose. In 1931 ex-surrealist Antonin Artaud publishes his transla- tion-adaptation of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, one of the most popular Gothic novels, and in 1932 André Breton writes: All those castles of Otranto, of Udolfo, of the Pyrenees, of Lovel, of Athlin, crevassed with great cracks and eaten by subterranean passages, persisted in the shadiest corner of my mind in living their factitious life, in presenting their curious phosphorescence.5 Nezval echoes a similar sentiment in his Foreword to Valerie: “I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes, declining to convey to me their content.”6 Though it certainly was not unusual for the Czech avant-garde to devote attention to genres that were considered “lowbrow,” in the 1920s their poetics of the “miraculous” and exoticism differed from their contemporaries among the French Surrealists in that it steered clear of violence and intractable contrasts, mysteries, enig- mas, and literature noir. But by the end of this generally optimistic decade the artistic conception of the Prague Poetists began to change. In 1929 the Odeon publishing house (which from the outset supported the group’s publications) brought out a Czech translation of Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror, the selection having been made by Karel Teige and Philippe Soupault,7 and between 1929 and 1930 ten installments of Pierre Souvestra and 201 Marcel Allain’s Fantômas adventures, with collages by Jindřich Štyrský as cover art. So captivated was Štyrský that he wrote in Odeon’s Literary Bulletin: “In the Fantômas series there is concen- trated so much horror, blood, and corpses, and yet so much poetry, moonlit nights, garden parties, the sea, and maidenly charm, it is simply unthinkable that its author was a mediocre scribbler-storyteller.”8 One of the key aspects marking the transition of the Czech avant-garde from Poetism to Surrealism is just this replacement of the world of poetry and earthly joys, which was the ideological linchpin of Poetism, with the macabre and dramatic world of the subconscious and unknown — Teige’s “black revolutionary roman- ticism.” Max Ernst thus takes the place of Le Douanier Rousseau. Teige’s comment about the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha in a 1936 essay is telling: In the Romantic fondness for phantoms and for the lurid, for evil and for vice as a means of disturbing the moral order, for dream, delirium, and the open acceptance of erotic desire [. .] in this speculative mix of dream, won- der, and adventure we see a tendency to escape the narrow confines into which the bourgeoisie have placed Beauty, which it has identified with Good.9 And in one of the manifestoes of Poetism, “Kapka inkoustu” [A Drop of Ink] (1928), Nezval remarks that “the zeal for war is an infernal obsession devised for the emasculation and eradication of mankind. The fact that mankind is prey to this deception is 202 evinced by a special aura, a veiled drama.”10 But a few years later, as if echoing the speculations of Edmund Burke on horror as a form of the sublime, at the premiere of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in Prague’s Metro cinema in 1933 he declares: “In art horror is delight- ful [. .] In art horror must be more than horror, it must be poetry if we are not to mistake it for the reading of crime tabloids.”11 When Poetism was finally able to accept the principle that the nature of drama, and therefore that which inspires horror, can be the bearer of beauty, the Czech avant-garde entered the subse- quent, Surrealist phase of its development. (darkness again) childhood The Gothic novel interested Nezval not only for its ability to flush out hidden, “subterranean” human instincts, but also as a way to extract childhood memories, as if a magnet reaching into the very depths of memory. His fascination with Murnau’s film was evi- dent: The material for the fantastic in Nosferatu is reality, real objects, obsolete objects, therefore capable of touching our memories and our dreams, and in this reality lies the film’s surrealistic charm.12 And as if he were drawing on the magic of objects mentioned by Breton in Mad Love (“The objects that, between the lassitude of some and the desire of others, go off to dream at the antique fair . .”), 203 which again appear in Jiří Sever’s cycle of photographs Bez protijedů [No Antidote],13 Nezval continues: What makes this old film surrealist is the peculiar selection of objects which here have their presence [. .] And if I’m to express this schematically, they are generally objects having a patina. That is, what I call a patina is the special aura surrounding these objects, which are no longer used in practical life, which were current in our childhood and have now gone out of fashion and use, having become a bit ridiculous and very poetic, and while not the most attractive, they hold captive many of our memories of the past.14 In addition to rediscovering the time of childhood concealed in the banal and rather predictable plot structure of the Gothic novel, Nezval also sets himself the task in Valerie of altering lan- guage. The attention he gives to language in the novel is far from negligible. The reader notices right off a stylistic distinction between the language of direct speech (used by the characters) and that of indirect speech (used by the narrator), which becomes a linguistic cliché when the novelistic stereotypes of Valerie, Orlík, and the other characters are juxtaposed next to the lyrical, metaphorical voice of the narrator. The syntax imitates the sen- tence structure of nineteenth-century Czech, and the rhythm of compound sentences increasingly slows and disintegrates. In this context, Orlík’s first letter — with its vapid rhetoric, its almost puerile earnestness — is an excellent example of clever apocrypha. 204 The atmosphere of the Gothic novel is also suggested by the constant repetition of adverbs such as “unexpectedly,” “at once,” “suddenly,” and a whole host of “howevers,” “althoughs,” and “yets,” often employed not for the purpose of moving the plot forward, but to give the false impression that something unfore- seen has happened, or to jolt and startle the drowsing reader.15 In his attempt to rediscover the Gothic aura and the time of childhood, Nezval selected words that had been either phased out of common lexical usage or extracted directly from the traditional vocabulary of the serial novel, words that were as outdated as the objects embellishing the background of Murnau’s film: constable, bed jacket, scapular, burial ground, a convent school for young girls, an oil lamp . and the butterflies have begun to sing The magic of oil lamps! A round oil lamp standing on the cliff (the moon) watches the river’s current carrying off the corset-swan in Toyen’s collage made for the anthology Neither Swan nor Moon, published in 1936 by the Czechoslovak Surrealists to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of K.H. Mácha’s death.