W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences 2010 Rrose Sélavy’s Ghosts: Life, Death, and Desnos Katharine Conley College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs Part of the Modern Languages Commons 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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Association of Teachers of French is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The French Review 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 Dada about the same time and was surely familiar with Tristan Tzara's injunc- tion in his "Manifeste Dada 1918" to let poetry come from advertising, following Guillaume Apollinaire'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 Paris Desnos was able to utter one-line poems with such facility, even when in a hypnotic trance. These poems resembled the ones by Marcel Duchamp that were signed Rrose Sélavy and published in André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault'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 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 965 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 Francis Picabia, 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 surrealism 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.