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Travel, Surrealism and the Science of Mankind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Michael Richardson
Michael Richardson*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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There is a mental geography that may find its explorers, but never its cartographers.

Annie Le Brun

The nature of the relationship between surrealism and anthropology has been a focus of recent anthropological debate. This relation has not been considered at the level of methodology and the aim of this article is to consider surrealism in specific methodological relation with anthropology, particularly about how the idea of travel has been conceptualized.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 38 , Issue 152 , December 1990 , pp. 19 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 See in particular articles by James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Surrealism", Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 23, 1981 [reprinted, with some modifications in his The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988]; Jean Jamin, "L'Ethnographie mode d'inemploi. De quel ques rapports de 1'ethnologie avec le malaise dans la civilisation", in J. Hainard & R. Kaehr (eds.) Le Mal et la douleur, Neuchâtel, Musée d'ethnographie, 1986; Frances M. Slaney, "Psychoanalysis and Cycles of ‘Subversion' in Modern Art and Anthropology", Dialectical Anthropology, 14, 1989, pp. 213/234.

2 Effenberger, "Le Surréalisme et la civilisation contemporaine", in Change, Paris, Seuil, 25, 1975, p. 117.

3 Edmund Carpenter, Oh What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me! London, Paladin, 1976, p. 67.

4 Georges Balandier, ‘"Terre Humaine' as a literary movement", Anthropology Today, Vol 3, n. 1, 1987, p 1. The article was written for Anthropology Today and has never been published in French.

5 Monnerot, Les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, Paris, Gallimard, 1946, p. 41.

6 Ibid., p. 50.

7 Ibid., p. 51.

8 Ibid., p. 71.

9 It might be argued that it is inappropriate to consider Monnerot within the con text of surrealism. His bizarre political trajectory, which has led him towards the extreme right, makes him something of an embarassment to surrealism. Yet although he was to some degree writing from outside surrealism in the forties, it seems to me that his work in the forties is still fully within the surrealist tradition. He did, in fact, take part in the major surrealist exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 and, within the terms of reference taken by this study, I feel it is essential to consider his books from this period, which are all major works, as being fully within the orbit of surrealist criticism.

10 Calas, Confound the Wise, New York, Arrow Editions, 1942, p. 107. Although Calas uses the word "artist" here, it is clear that he means any form of research.

11 One might note that though Freud was dogmatic in asserting how crucial the idea of infantile sexuality or concepts such as the Oedipus Complex or the Primal Horde are for psychoanalysis, these are concepts that, no matter how much they may be open to question, emerge from within the data and can be questioned within the methodological framework that Freud himself sets up. That is, his con cepts are not imposed upon it from without, whereas with Adler and Jung social and metaphysical ideas are assumed from without and cannot be challenged within the material itself.

12 Quoted in Thirion, Revolutionaries Without Revolution, London, Cassell, 1978, p. 483.

13 Calas, Confound the Wise, p. 5.

14 Ibid., p. 107.

15 This argument clearly has something in common with the one advanced by Fou cault in Les Mots et les choses, although Caillois, unlike Foucault, does not suggest that classification is thus arbitrary.

16 Caillois, Cases d'un échiquier, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, p. 54.

17 Caillois, Pierres réfléchies, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 9.

18 Breton, "The Automatic Message", in F. Rosemont (ed.), What is Surrealism?, London, Pluto Press, 1978, p. 105.

19 Breton, "Crisis of the Object", in Surrealism and Painting, New York, Harp er and Row, 1972, p. 271.

20 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 35.

21 Annie Le Brun, "Objets d'identité", in A Distance, Paris, Carrère, 1985, p. 42.

22 Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the Object", in Manifestos of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, 1974, p. 260.

23 Annie Le Brun, op. cit., p. 42.

24 Jean-François Chabrun, in Michel Fouré (ed.), Histoire du Surréalisme sous l'occupation, Paris, Table Ronde, 1982, p. 400.

25 Michel Leiris, L'Afrique fantôme, Paris, Gallimard, 1934.

26 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 20/21.

27 On this question we might note the revealing example recounted by Jamake Highwater concerning an encounter between the Swiss artist Rudolph Friedrich Kurz and a Sioux Indian in 1852. The Indian expressed dissatisfaction with Kurz draw ing and said that he could do better. The Indian drew a man on horseback in a way that both of the man's legs could be seen. Kurz objected that this was wrong because one of the man's legs could not be seen from the angle from which it was painted. "'Ah', the Sioux said softly, ‘but, you see, a man has two legs.'" (High water, The Primal Mind, New York, Harper & Row, 1981, p. 57.)

28 Victor Segalen, Notes sur I'Exotisme, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1978, p. 25.

29 Victor Segalen, Équipée, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, p. 11.

30 Yvonne Y. Hsieh, Victor Segalen's Literary Encounter With China: Chinese Moulds, Western Thoughts, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988, p. 124.

31 J.K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, (1946) [translated by John Howard] Lon don, Fortune Press, p. 136. The symbolists should perhaps be distinguished from the surrealists in this respect, for although the surrealists appear to have been largely indifferent or had a rather ironical attitude toward the idea of travelling, they never had any of the active contempt for travel displayed by the symbolists. This is an important distinguishing feature, for ultimately symbolism retreats before the ex igencies of the real world into an inner sanctum of the imagination, whereas sur realism always sought to hold imagination and reality in tension.

32 Segalen, Équipée, op. cit., p. 11.

33 Raymond Queneau, Le Voyage en Grèce, Paris, Gallimard, 1973, p. 55.

34 Letter of 26 May, 1958.

35 Letter to Guy Mertens, April 1965.

36 Luis Buñuel, Mon Dernier soupir, Paris, Laffont, 1982, p. 167.

37 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, op. cit., p. 173.

38 Ibid., p. 173.

39 See interview with Jean Jamin and Sally Price in Gradhiva, 1980, no. 4.

40 Interview in Gradhiva, p. 42.

41 Leiris, Manhood, London, Cape, 1968.

42 Letter to Jean-Louis Barrault dated 10 July, 1936 in Oeuvres Complètes, tome 8, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p. 366.

43 Lourdes Andrade told me that the particular Tarahumaras tribe with which Ar taud stayed has remained completely isolated to this day and that Artaud has been the only European they have allowed to live among them. Two anthropologists who tried to study them were murdered. I have not been able to verify this.

44 The Monkey Grammarian, New York, Seaver, 1981, is clearly influenced by Tristes Tropiques, with which it has much in common. Paz has written a book on Lévi-Strauss and has clearly learned a great deal about anthropology from him, although his philosophical position is somewhat different.

45 The film is F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1923), the first film version of Dracu la. The image is an inter-title which does not in fact appear in the original version of the film, being a mis-translation that occurred when the inter-title was rendered into French. The scene itself is when Hutter leaves the common road to take the path to Dracula's castle.

46 Breton, "As in a Wood", in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and its Shadow, London, BFI, 1978, p. 44.

47 Ibid., p. 44.

48 Sidney W. Mintz, preface to the second edition of Voodoo in Haiti by Alfred Métraux, Cambridge, Mass., Schocken, 1972, p. 7.

49 Ibid.

50 Jean-Louis Bédouin, Segalen, Paris, Seghers, 1962, p. 11.

51 Victor Segalen, Équipée, p. 145.