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Rrose Sélavy’s Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos

Katharine Conley College of William and Mary, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Conley, Katharine, Rrose Sélavy’s Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos (2010). French Review, 83(4), 4-15. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs/1755

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rrose Sélavy's Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos Author(s): Katharine Conley Source: The French Review , April 2010, Vol. 83, No. 5 (April 2010), pp. 964-975 Published by: American Association of Teachers of French Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40650735

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This content downloaded from 128.239.99.140 on Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:35:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The French Review, Vol. 83, No. 5, April 2010 Printed in U.S.A.

Rrose Sélavy's Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos

by Katharine Conley

When Robert Desnos was nineteen years old in 1919, not long after beginning his first job in a local store in the Marais where he used his high school English to translate pharmaceutical prospectuses, he wrote a collection of poems humorously entitled Prospectus. He discovered about the same time and was surely familiar with 's injunc- tion in his "Manifeste Dada 1918" to let poetry come from advertising, following 's celebratory statement in "Zone" (1911): "Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut / Voilà la poésie ce matin" (7).1 Desnos incorporates daily life ex- perience into these early poems - many of which are dedicated to new friends who would become surrealists with him,2 by incorporating signs posted in his neighborhood, using all capital letters so that they would echo familiar quotidian sights visually as well as verbally: "ICI ON PEUT APPORTER SON MANGER"; "CUISINE BOURGEOISE"; "SI VOUS VOULEZ DU CHOCOLAT METTEZ DEUX SOUS DANS L'APPAREIL" and "IL EST INTERDIT DE CRACHER PAR TERRE" (O 20-25). This last phrase, the concluding line of a poem dedicated to Georges Gautré, also begins it, and sets off a poem of rhyming almost nonsensical verse that anticipates the first surrealist poems Desnos would produce three years later: "II est interdit de cracher par terre / et le plafond est de forme cir- culaire" (O 25). In a letter to Gautré written from Morocco where he did his military service, Desnos wonders if Prospectus will be published and explains how his poems come to him: "Ma tête est comme une tirelire où les mots et les idées les souvenirs tintent pêle-mêle. J'agite le tout. Ma bouche laisse échapper une pièce. . ." (D 382). No wonder that shortly after his return to Desnos was able to utter one-line poems with such facility, even when in a hypnotic trance. These poems resembled the ones by that were signed Rrose Sélavy and published in André Breton, , and 's facetiously titled journal Littérature. "Rrose Sélavy et moi estimons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis" came out in October 1922. In December, Desnos pub- lished 150 similar one-line poems under the title "Rrose Sélavy," after

964

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Duchamp, whom he had never met but with whom he purported to com- municate telepathically. "Qui dicte à Desnos endormi," wonders Breton,

les phrases qu'on a pu lire dans Littérature et dont Rrose Sélavy est aussi Théroine; le cerveau de Desnos est-il uni comme il le prétend à celui de Duchamp, au point que Rrose Sélavy ne lui parle que si Duchamp a les yeux ouverts? (OC 1, 286)

Apparently it was , during one of the experiments with self-hypnosis which the young surrealists conducted in Breton's apart- ment in the fall of 1922, who suggested to Desnos that he make up a Rrose Sélavy-type poem. Desnos's first effort, not unlike the rhyming playful verses of Prospectus, came out as a one-liner that indeed resembled the ones published by Duchamp: "Dans un temple en stuc de pomme le pasteur distillait le suc des psaumes" (O 502). This poem and the others like it incorporated everyday elements like the signs Desnos had put into the earlier poems, except this time the incorporation was not an instantly recognizable element from everyday life pasted into the poem in an immediately visually familiar form. Instead, the everyday element could be understood as logic, the very trait that desired to override with a defiant celebration of the irrational and the free reign of the imagi- nation. Breton had clearly explained his intention to free the mind from "le règne de la logique" in the first "Manifesto" of surrealism, inspired by, and published two years after, these experiments with visionary sleeping: "Si les profondeurs de notre esprit recèlent d'étranges forces capables d'augmenter celles de la surface, ou de lutter victorieusement contre elles, il y a tout intérêt à les capter," wrote Breton, "à les capter d'abord, pour les soumettre ensuite, s'il y a lieu, au contrôle de notre raison" (OC 1, 316). In Desnos's word-play poems, however, it is logic that underscores his rhyming phrases, logic that rushes beneath the nonsensical surface, logic that persists in forming ghostly doubles for these shimmering clever verses. It is the logic of everyday thinking, everyday activities that under- mines them, making of Desnos, the surrealist medium, a conjurer at once of the ordinary as of the humorous extraordinary, of the mundane as much as of the surreal. Underneath most of these poems another one lurks; each one has not only two parts, usually yoked together with the verb to be in the style of a mathematical equation,3 but two identities - one we see and hear and one we think internally and only imagine we have heard. The first playful, surrealistically irrational; the second, fol- lowing the logic of chiasmus, its corollary, the one that would make a kind of sense if we let it emerge fully. Where is the logic in Desnos's first "Rrose Sélavy" poem, one might ask? "Dans un temple en stuc de pomme le pasteur distillait le suc des psaumes" founders logically in the first half of the phrase with the absurd image of a building constructed of fruit stucco. Yet here already

This content downloaded from 128.239.99.140 on Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:35:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 966 FRENCH REVIEW 83.5 may be found the simple operation of Desnos's method. The first part represents a fun-mirror version of the second, which quite commonly prompts rereading. What does it mean? What was the temple made of and what was the pastor distilling - apples? psalms? And then, uncon- sciously, the poem's ghost, so to speak, may be teased out of the un- conscious mind in a way that doubles it, like the structure of the poem itself in two parts that complement and subvert one another, like the dis- tant realities typical of the surrealist image as coined by Reverdy and cited in the Manifesto: "L'image est une création pure de l'esprit. / Elle ne peut naître d'une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moin éloignées" (OC 1, 324). The distant realities in this first "Rrose Sélavy" poem clearly may be allied as follows: temple, pasteur, psaume, on the one hand, and stuc, sue, and pomme, activated by the verb distiller, on the other. Pastors can distill alcohol, of course, but generally it is not the first activity associated with their work in a temple, so that the image of a pastor distilling in a temple conforms to the surprising and humorous dynamic of the surrealist image's distant realities. Yet in Desnos's clever poems, the sounds draw these distant realities together, allowing the words to "make love" as Breton admiringly wrote about them (Lost 102, translation modified). The equation does not resolve into a valence of zero, rather it resolves with the suggestion that a supplement remains, the result of the encounter of the elements assembled for experiment. The similar sounds of pomme and psaume make of a holy prayer an edible fruit - even one that had been forbidden in the Bible. And this possibly even blasphemous image dove- tails neatly with a pious one, if followed metaphorically, with a logical filling in of the blanks instead of allowing its illogical juxtapositions to govern it - for a good pastor would indeed be as capable of the exegesis involved in "distilling" the sense of psalms as he might be in distilling a tasty Calvados, typical of the Desnos family's native Normandy. Even as we hear Desnos's short poem we also hear the ghost of another hidden within it: "In a stucco temple, the pastor distilled the sap of apples while reading psalms." We yearn to make something logical out of the auto- matic poem's word play, even though, through its tongue-twisting mouthfuls of syllables, and as it stands, it is closer to the surrealist anti- clerical ethos. For Desnos, participating in surrealism involved celebrating everyday life as a source of poetry and art, a perspective that came naturally to an admirer of Apollinaire who became involved in dada and played a central role in the founding of the surrealist movement.4 The interlocking set of critical and cultural concepts we now call the everyday drew from surrealism and, arguably, from Desnos himself as a pioneer of surrealist practice.5 "Never simply 'theory' or 'fiction,' philosophy or empirical observation, 'everyday life studies' exist on the borders and the gaps between these representational categories," explains Ben Highmore in

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Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (24). Desnos's particular everyday is rooted in the ordinary and the material, the sensual, including the intel- lectual sensation of inviting his reader-listeners to fill in the blanks he leaves like puzzle pieces within his mathematical syllable-games. Designed to be interactive, it draws his audience into a vividly present moment, forcing us to participate and to making poets out of us, how- ever unconsciously. The moment we are drawn in and complete the thought, complete the poem by divining its ghost, our instant of insight acts like the pivot of the chiasmic structure of the "Rrose Sélavy" poems only here the fulcrum is anchored within a reader's mind, a human body. Indeed, Desnos's "Rrose Sélavy" poems work as poems because of their double meanings which, at their best, complement each other and work together to form one poem on the page and another one in the mind that acts as a kind of supplement that we ourselves unconsciously produce. In "l'acte des sexes est l'axe des sectes," for example, Desnos playfully points to the ways in which we all understand, unconsciously at least, how religious sects, by repressing and reproving sexual activity, para- doxically almost make such activity the very axis of their focus, through the visual and aural resemblances - close enough to cause momentary confusion - between the double words on either side of the equational verb to be: acte and axe; sexes and sectes: "l'acte des sexes est l'axe des sectes." In the thirteenth poem, "Rrose Sélavy connaît bien le marchand du sel," Desnos casts Duchamp himself as the ghost minimally disguised as the marchand du sel. Certainly Duchamp knows Rrose Sélavy, since he invented her in 1920, making a fictitious person out of the phrase, èros, c'est la vie. Anyone hearing Desnos's poem would instantly hear the name of surrealism's favorite fellow- traveler. Yet another example, "Apprenez que la geste célèbre de Rrose Sélavy est inscrite dans l'algèbre céleste," invites the listener to see, momen- tarily, an ambiguously gesturing body from a night-lit constellation, con- fusing in an instant, like Rrose Sélavy her- or himself, the masculine body movement with the feminine medieval poetic form.6 The end of the phrase however leads back to one of Desnos's favorite themes - poetry as mathematical; form as containing within it every possible permutation akin to the functioning of chance in everyday life. A medieval song-cycle inscribed in the stars would be, then, as polymorphic as it would be permanent - shifting, turning, adjusting with the flux of the earth's movements from night to daytime, from the eternal to the everyday. "Je pense aujourd'hui que l'art (ou si l'on veut la magie), qui permet de co- ordonner l'inspiration, le langage et l'imagination, offre à l'écrivain un plan supérieur d'activité," he wrote in 1942 (O 976). Already in the 1920s he sought to achieve such balance, such a magical coordination. The moment where we see the stars come together in a constellation or the syllables in a poem that convey double messages come together into a comprehensible chiastic structure, can bring an instant of pleasure. At the

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same time this effect can linger, could even perhaps be transformational, like the future a constellation might astrologically predict. That pleasur- able instant of insight, like the moment we get a joke, pivots in our minds between past and future in an intensely present sense of the now typical of the Desnosian everyday. In the "Author's Note" to his last legally published collection of poems from the 1940s, Fortunes, Desnos explains how he aspired to make of Poetry "un chapitre des mathématiques. Projet démesuré certes, mais dont la réussite ne porterait prejudice ni à l'inspiration, ni à l'intuition, ni à la sensualité. La Poésie n'est-elle pas aussi science des nombres?" (O 976). Here is logic - the rational logic of numbers - working in concert with art for Desnos and no longer a hidden agenda to be teased out by unconscious means. One way he was mathematical about the everyday was in his practice of writing a poem a day, at a time when he was work- ing long hours on the radio. Starting in 1936, "jusqu'au printemps 1937, je m'étais contraint à écrire un poème chaque soir, avant de m'en- dormir," he writes. "Avec ou sans sujet, fatigue ou non, j'observai fidèle- ment cette discipline" (O 998; afterword to Etat de veille). He gave these poems the title "Portes Battantes" or swinging doors,7 and published eight of them in Fortunes; the remaining twenty-six were published only in 1999 in Marie-Claire Dumas's edition of Desnos's Œuvres. The last two of these, "Après moi" and "Bonsoir tout le monde," both relate to the idea of the swinging door since they both evoke departures and double realities as in the Rrose Sélavy poems: life and death, life and sleep, as mirror images of each other. The first of these poems, "Après moi," has the sing-song quality of both his "Rrose Sélavy" one-liners and the poems for children he had recently begun to write:8

D'une pluie une goutte, D'une goutte une poussière. De poussière en poussières Un grain de sable. D'un grain de sable un caillou. D'un caillou un coup de pied. Le coup de pied d'un voyageur Sur la route des montagnes. L'empreinte du pied s'efface dans la poussière. L'écho se perd de la chanson qu'il chantait.

Un voyageur de moins sur la terre Toujours semblable à elle-même Ou si peu s'en faut! (O 821)

The seemingly heartlessly cheerful persistence of life is emphasized by the short poem's repetitions: "goutte," "goutte"; "poussière," "poussière"; "grain," "grain"; "caillou," "caillou." The only distinction appears in the

This content downloaded from 128.239.99.140 on Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:35:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms DESNOS AND RROSE SELAVY'S GHOSTS 969 slippage from the indefinite to the definite article, from "un coup de pied" to "le coup de pied d'un voyageur." The traveler attains a small degree of individuality but cannot resist the overbearing presence of the earth. It does not take much, "peu s'en faut," for human beings to live and die. Not even a ghost remains of the imperfect form of the verb chantait dit the end of the poem's dominant section since it, too, "se perd." The traveler's loss is summarized philosophically: "Un voyageur de moins sur la terre / toujours semblable à elle-même." A human's trip through life is as natural as the rhythmic transpositions of dust and rain that surround him. Ultimately a person does not much trouble the cycle of life, which contin- ues inexorably, like a swinging door. Yet the title acts as a porte battante, and reverses all the losses recorded within it. The traveler, his footstep, his song, may all be lost but this poem remains après moi, as a verbal ghost of the speaker. It reverberates in a way the traveler's song does not. Here the chiasmic structure from the Rrose Sélavy poems attaches to more than play, even if this repre- sents another equation of sorts, since the question has turned from games to life and death, to a poet's legacy. The last of the "Portes Battantes" poems published posthumously, "Bonsoir tout le monde," again has a two-part structure since it is con- structed as a dialogue between a person preparing to sleep and the friend who bids him or her goodnight:

"Bonsoir tout le monde" - Couché dans ton lit Entre tes draps, Comme une lettre dans son enveloppe, Tu t'imagines que tu pars Pour un long voyage.

- Mais non, je n'imagine rien. Je suis pas né d'hier Je connais le sommeil et ses mystères Je connais la nuit et ses ténèbres Et je dors comme je vis. (O 822)

For the first speaker the sleeper's body is like a letter that will only reach its destination through the transportational envelope of sleep, of dream. This first stanza clearly enunciates the link between dream and poetry dear to the surrealists in the early days of the Rrose Sélavy poems. In the last line of the second stanza, however, the second speaker protests that sleep is no more or less wondrous than waking life: "Et je dors comme je vis."9 This second speaker shrugs off a degree of wonderment - "Je suis pas né d'hier" - while at the same time admitting that the mysteries and shadows of sleep and night also haunt waking reality, which seems to have increased in value for the poet as he matures. Despite a more jaded tone, this second speaker still believes in the interconnection

This content downloaded from 128.239.99.140 on Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:35:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 970 FRENCH REVIEW 83.5 between night and day, a ghostly awareness of the unconscious within consciousness. As in "Après moi/' "Bonsoir tout le monde" links sleep and the death it portends inexorably to life. There is nothing more vivid than a person's mortality, perhaps nothing more mathematical. And yet the sum of this mortal equation still is not zero. The supplement that lingers on in both of these poems is either the memory of a song's echo or the anticipation that a letter sent while asleep will reach its destination in another, wake- ful, dimension. It is perhaps his work on the radio that caused Desnos to become so aware of the intensity of the present-ness of every moment.10 Each instant as it passes is a fulcrum-point between the past and the future, a measure of our humanity. Even though the conditions of his practice may have changed from the wakefulness of hypnotic trances to the sleepiness involved in forcing himself to write at the end of each day, he still succeeds in conveying the experience of life as a balancing act. Death and dream in 1936 are closer to the actual mortal body of the poet than in 1922, yet still reversible. This capacity for reversal - for the hidden to become manifest and for the everyday manifest to disappear into the unconscious only to pop out like a coin from Desnos's piggy-bank brain in the earlier poems, and for death and dream to spill over into waking reality in the swinging door poems - attains a poignant dimension 23 years after the publication of the "Rrose Sélavy" poems. The uncannily oracular nature of one of these became apparent in his final letter to his companion Youki, sent on 7 January 1945, from the Nazi internment camp of Flöha on the German- Czech border:11 "Rrose Sélavy peut revêtir la bure du bagne, elle a une monture qui franchit les montagnes," he wrote in 1922. In this poem he seems to have anticipated, through his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, that he himself would be dressed in a prisoner's bure du bagne and would long for a horse capable of liberating him by crossing mountains. It had been his skill at double-speak, first seen in the "Rrose Sélavy" poems, which had allowed him to get away with publishing subversive newspaper arti- cles and poems during the Nazi Occupation of Paris for three and a half years before his arrest for "acts of Resistance" in February 1944. In the letter from 1945, written while wearing the striped prisoner's uniform typical of the camps, he remembers his earlier poem and suggests that poetry itself provides him with such an imaginative horse: "Pour le reste," he writes, "je trouve un abri dans la poésie. Elle est réellement le cheval qui court au-dessus des montagnes dont Rrose Sélavy parle dans ses poèmes et qui pour moi se justifie mot pour mot" (O 1279). Just as "Après moi" anticipated how his poetry would outlast him, this playful Rrose Sélavy poem seems to confirm an oracular premonition that he himself would become a prisoner. In retrospect it reads like a literal description of an actual situation. The everydayness of the earlier poem has become translated from the persistence of everyday logic

This content downloaded from 128.239.99.140 on Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:35:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms DESNOS AND RROSE SELAVY'S GHOSTS 971 within trance-poetry to an eerily literal, physical forewarning. It is as if the ghost of Desnos in the future were already present in the mathemati- cal games of Desnos in the past - as the supplement to the equation. Here the sensuality of his kind of surrealistic everydayness comforts him as well as his reader, since his comment to Youki suggests that poetry is as material and physical for him as Rrose Sélavy's horse, even if, at the end of the day, the mountains in that poem remained insurmountable for him, except in dreams. (We know he encouraged his younger fellow pris- oners to dream in the camp - to escape in any way possible.12) His last known poem from April 1944, the sonnet "Printemps," begins: "Tu, Rrose Sélavy, hors de ces bornes erres" (O 1259). Here he is enclosed within ces bornes, the walls of the transit camp of Compiègne north of Paris, from which he still hoped to be freed; but poetry in the form of Rrose Sélavy remains free. Ironically he had only just penned the state- ment: "En définitive, ce n'est pas poésie qui doit être libre, c'est le poète," shortly before his arrest (O 999). In the reading he gives to his earlier Rrose Sélavy poem in his 1945 letter to Youki, he and Rrose Sélavy are one. He wears her prisoner's uniform, remains capable of escape, and yet, in the letter, he is also the prisoner left behind from his later sonnet, "Printemps," while Rrose Sélavy, his dream-self, rides off into another dimension - as he did in his earliest hypnotic trances. Rrose Sélavy, then, is not only a version of himself but also poetry that lasts après moi, his legacy. The Rrose Sélavy from 1922 embodies himself, the poems he writes, and also his own future ghost, the figure through which we see the poet. His poems contain within them his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy but also remnants of himself, a living man. The true escape from his agony came only six months later through death - a month after the liberation of Terezin, the camp to which he had been forced to march from Flöha, and only one month short of his forty-fifth birthday.13 In another sonnet, "Crépsuscule d'été," from a collection entitled Sens left on Desnos's desk the day of his arrest and only published posthu- mously, poetry and the poet's body are closely allied through the metaphor of an abandoned house:14

Crépuscule d'été baigné de brouillard rose Déchiré par le bleu des ardoises des toits, Le bleu du ciel, le bleu de l'asphalte et, parfois Saignant sur une vitre où les reflets s'opposent

Reflet de la rivière en le feuillage enclose Reflet du son, reflet du lit en désarroi, Vibrations des carreaux au fracas des convois, Tout ici se rencontre et se métamorphose.

Le soleil lourdement roule sur les maisons, Dans la rumeur du soir et l'écho des chansons: La nuit effacera cet univers fragile,

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Le fantôme du lit quitté par les amants Et le défaut du verre imitant le diamant. Mais la vitre longtemps vibrera sur la ville. (Destinée 207)

Twilight is embodied in the sonnet: "washed" and "torn," it "bleeds" onto the windowpane, where flickering images mix reflections of the world without with the evanescent projections of the world within the house. Twilight humanizes the house, making of it a stand-in for the poet. The inanimate window demarcates the in-between membrane separating the empty bedroom and the street outside, where the passing "convoys" could be either troops or prisoners leaving for deportation. On the win- dow's deceptively transparent surface: "Tout ici se rencontre et se méta- morphose." The house itself lies in a border space, like another fulcrum-point or swinging door, on the outskirts of a town with alternat- ing views: of a leafy riverbed, on the one hand, and "over the city" on the other. The house, like a person, and similar to the multi-colored twilight that embraces it, also risks being "washed," "torn," and "bled." It is like the living body of a member of the Resistance who inhabits the border zone between public life and underground activities, like Desnos himself before his arrest. Over time that ghost comes closer and closer to the man, Robert Desnos, and, as in "J'ai tant rêvé de toi," the ghost finally overtakes the man as he anticipates the inevitability of his death. The rhymes in the sonnet underscore the uneasy cohabitation of multi- ple oppositions within the poem. Its syntax compares the convoys to a tank that "rolls" over the houses in the town like a hot summer sun, com- bining a sense of oppressive heat with dangerous light: being seen can be fatal to the fugitive. The tercets confirm the need to protect the inner house's univers fragile by evoking the transition from sunset to night with the future tense of the verb effacera, when night "will erase" all trace of the flickering images projected and reflected onto the windowpane.15 Yet this windowpane does more than witness the erasure of the absent presence of the house's endangered inhabitants: in the future tense it will continue to vibrate. This last verb, vibrera, is qualified by the adverb longtemps, announcing the lingering of this event. This empty house comes across as haunted, not by the future, like Desnos's twenty-second "Rrose Sélavy" poem, but by the past. It is like the poem itself, the only trace left of the sensual enjoyments typical of everyday life - love-making, the almost palpable absence of the lovers forced to flee, the shifting colors of twilight, the murmuring sounds of evening, the shifting reflections shining off the surface of a river. As Desnos's poems come closer and closer to anticipating his premature death, the everyday in them becomes more vividly allied to life and to the necessity of portraying it as sensually, materially ordinary and as pleasurable as possible so that a trace, as visible as the signposts from his childhood neighborhood of the Marais, could endure.

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The house also serves as a metaphor for himself: for three and a half years in Occupied Paris he had had to survive each day like an empty house, repressing his own inner liveliness - making it go away like the house's vanished inhabitants. Better to "reflect" the scenes projected onto oneself from without, like a window at twilight, than to reveal any of the emotions that occur within that self, especially if those emotions leave the individual trembling, like the house left to "vibrate" after the convoy has departed. Yet despite the fear, Desnos through this poem insists that the sensual pleasures suggested by "la rumeur du soir et Techo des chansons," are not forgotten. Life's alternations, glimpsed in Desnos's poems as though through a swinging door, call to the reader to see double logic in these later poems, as we were invited to do with the earliest ones: we see his death in his most ardent evocations; we re- member his life when he evokes death. Rrose Sélavy's ghost was always Desnos: within his poetry was always the material, sensual trace of everyday lived experience, and within that everyday lived experience was always a foretaste of death. Life in Desnos's poetry is persistently vivid yet consistently spiced by a realistic sense of mortality. His poems appeal to the reader to admit that illogically, even surrealistically, we all believe we will live forever, while the ghost of that thought, the logic repressed within it, reminds us that we will die. The punch-line of so many of Desnos's poems is the truth of mortality. And yet the afterthought, what lingers après moi, après lui, is the knowledge that in poetry lies a legacy and that in that legacy, a cer- tain kind of life can remain, as in the concluding sentence of his most famous poem from 1926, "J'ai tant rêvé de toi":

J'ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme qu'il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant, qu'à être fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois que l'ombre qui se promène et se promènera allègrement sur le cadran solaire de ta vie. (O 539)

The toi of this poem remembers the poet and carries his ghost with her - a supplement to his life's equation - like a shadow that follows her everywhere she walks at midday. He may be gone in his body but his ghost, his shadow, his trace, and his poems keep him alive. Rrose Sélavy's ghost - not only Desnos but his poetry - stirs with every reread- ing. Always a poet of the fully lived everyday, Robert Desnos showed throughout his life - with the help of Rrose Sélavy - how various yet enduring poetry can be, how mutable the experiences and forms it con- veys, so much like himself, so much like everyday life.

Dartmouth College

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Notes

Tzara declared in his "Manifeste Dada 1918": "la réclame et les affaires sont aussi des éléments poétiques" (23). 2René Crevel, Benjamin Péret, , . 3Desnos wrote in 1942 to Paul Eluard about the sonnets he had begun to write: "Je rêve de poèmes qui ne pourraient être que ce qu'ils sont. Dont personne ne pourrait imaginer un déroulement différent. Quelque chose d'aussi implacable que la résolution d'une équation" (O 1156). 4My book, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life, examines what I call the Desnosian surrealist view of the everyday and its contributions to our current view of this way of reading culture and art. It does not include the poems I study here. 5"Surrealism can claim a central place in any discussion of approaches to the everyday," argues Michael Sheringham, continuing that "[i]n fact, the surrealist imprint is perceptible in many recent approaches to the everyday that have no immediate connection to Sur- realism" (58). 6This notion of a version of Rrose Sélavy appearing in a constellation anticipates the simi- larly hybrid figure of the Bear in Desnos's final great poem-cycle, "Calixto," where the Bear is at once himself and the female Bear from Greek mythology, Callisto, transformed into an animal by an angry goddess (See RD 98-99). This title recalls Breton's stated goal in to write books that would remain open, like swinging doors. See Nadja and also Katharine Conley's Automatic Woman, chapter 4. 8He wrote "La Ménagerie de Tristan" and "Le Parterre d'Hyacinthe" in 1932 for the chil- dren of Lise and Paul Deharme, his colleague on the radio. These anticipate the enduring "Chantefables" and "Chantefleurs," published during the Occupation. This poem is reminiscent of "Les Espaces du sommeil" from 1926. In this earlier poem, the toi was like the seven wonders of the world and initially quite distant from everyday reality. But in the last line, dream opens onto waking reality as the speaker's consciousness rises out of his dream state: "Dans la nuit il y a toi / Dans le jour aussi." In the 1936 poem, Desnos states the reverse, not that everyday life might be a bit like a dream but that that dream and sleep are very much like waking reality. 10See Katharine Conley's Robert Desnos, chapter 3. "The ways these poems seemed to predict the future, to be oracular, were highlighted by both Breton and Aragon in their accounts of the early sessions of hypnotic sleeps. See Breton, Lost Steps 92-93; Aragon, Treatise of Style 104; and my Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life, chapter 1. 12See Conley, Robert Desnos, chapter 5. "Practiced extensively by Desnos in the 1940s, the sonnet, mathematically precise, was initiated as a patriotic form by Aragon during the Occupation with the combat poems he wrote about the fall of in the spring of 1940, a use of the sonnet also exploited by Desnos. Sonnets dominate Contrée, which evokes a counter-country to the one reified by Vichy France, another semi-legal collection from 1944, as well as Etat de veille, both pub- lished after his arrest, (see my Robert Desnos, chapter 4). ^Marie-Claire Dumas explains in Desinée arbitraire (Gallimard-coll. poésie, 1975) that the poems from this manuscript were first published in Europe 517, in May-June 1972. She republished them in Desintée arbitraire. "Crépuscule d'été" was not republished in her edi- tion of the Œuvres (Quarto, 1999). 15In describing how the first automatic phrase came to him in the Manifesto, Breton writes that it was like a phrase "qui cognait à la vitre" (OC 1, 324).

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Works Cited

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Alcools. Paris: Gallimard-folio-coll. poésie, 1920. Breton, André. Œuvres complètes. T. 1. Ed. Marguerite Bonnet. Paris: Gallimard-coll. de la Pléiade, 1988. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996.

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2000. Desnos, Robert. Destinée arbitraire. Ed. Marie-Claire Dumas. Paris: Gallimard-folio-coll. poésie, 1975.

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practicies from Surrealism to the Present. Ox- ford: Oxford UP, 2006. Tzara, Tristan. Sept Manifestes Dada. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963.

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