Chapter 19 - The World of the Surrealist Novel

Summary

Surrealism is thought to have taken a very firm stance against the genre of the novel, a view based in much of the work of André Breton, who championed surrealist poetry and inveighed against the bourgeois commercialism of the realist novel. Yet the story is more complicated, and needs to be seen more broadly. This essay begins by contextualizing what André Breton meant in the 1920s by ’the novel’, in a kinship with a larger tradition of writers not formally associated with surrealism, especially Marcel Proust. Starting from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou, this essay tells the secret story of the production and circulation of the intellectual ideas that went into Breton’s fictions, but also of their ramifications through other world writers and filmmakers: from Dante, Nerval, and Proust to filmmakers like the Chilean Raúl Ruiz in Time Regained and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino in La grande bellezza. Through the complex network opened by Breton’s theoretical and literary texts, the novel changes significantly across this history, overlapping with poetry, the essay, autobiography, and with art film today.