1 - Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

Summary

‘L'Aspiration viscérale à un système qui serait à la fois esthétique, moral et scientifique. Le Vrai, le Beau, le Bien donnés en bloc. Une seule chose.' Michel Leiris's 1988 definition of surrealism could equally describe the general aspirations of his mature autobiographies, and in particular La Règle du jeu. The remark demonstrates quite clearly how Leiris never abandoned the moral and aesthetic precepts of his surrealist apprenticeship and regarded himself to the end of his days as a surrealist. This is all the more significant for his work as a whole, given that, according to the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, compiled by André Breton and Louis Aragon, first published in 1938, Leiris belonged officially to the movement only between 1924 and 1929. These dates in themselves, of course, make Leiris an interesting case-study in the evolution of surrealism, since they mark two of the most decisive moments in the history of the movement: 1924 saw the publication of Breton's first Manifeste du surréalisme, while 1929–30 witnessed the first serious schism within surrealism (ostensibly over the movement's political identity) whose acrimony is recorded in Breton's 1930 Second manifeste du surréalisme. Within these dates, Leiris's surrealist productions fall fairly convincingly into the two main phases proposed by Maurice Nadeau in his Histoire du surréalisme: an initial ‘période héroique’, running from 1923–5, in which the dominant trait was the first flush of poetic fervour as yet untainted by internecine polemic; and a subsequent ‘période raisonnante’, lasting from 1926–9, in which the increasing intensification of the surrealist voice passes the point of near inarticulacy, giving way to the institutional consolidation of surrealism as a specific literary and social practice.