place of suicide in the French avant-garde of the inter-war period, The

Romanic Review, May 2000 by Livak, Leonid

As a "fashionable" theoretical problem, suicide was omnipresent in surrealist thought (Blanche 5). The first issue of La Revolution surrealiste endowed dream and suicide with the same transcendental function. The review interrogated its readers in the questionnaire devoted to the problem of suicide:

On vit, on meurt. Quelle est la part de la volonte en tout cela? II semble qu'on se tue comme on reve. Ce West pas une question morale que nous posons: le suicide est-il une solution? ("Enquete" 2)

Characteristically, responses to this questionnaire were accompanied by the drawing "Jacques Vache par lui-meme."

Among the first respondents was the poet and writer Jacques Rigaut. Seeing suicide as a more efficient means of transcendence than automatic writing or hypnotic dreams ("Jacques Rigaut" 57), he developed both aspects of Vache's death style. He wanted his future suicide to resemble both an accident and a "black joke" in which the suicide would die with company. Summing up his verdict on positivist reality, Rigaut wrote:

Nous savons trop de quoi ces choses sont faites pour y prendre garde; justes bonnes A propager quelques negligeables suicidesaccidents [ ... I Un regret subsiste: on ne voudrait pas partir avant de s'&re compromis; on voudrait, en sortant, entrainer avec sol Notre-Dame, l'amour ou la Republique. ("Jacques Rigaut" 56)

A comparison of Rigaut's suicidal program with the program of surrealism reveals affinities both with regard to Rigaut's view of everyday reality and of the means to transcend it. Extolling suicide as an artistically and existentially liberating act, Rigaut wrote:

Le desespoir, l'indifference, les trahisons, la fidelite, la solitude, la famine, la liberte, la pesanteur, l'argent, la pauvrete, l'amour, Fabsence d'amour, la syphilis, la same, le sommeil, l'insomnie, le desir, l'impuissance, la platitude, Part [ ... ] il n'y a pas la de quoi fouetter un chat [ ... ] Le suicide doit etre une vocation. ("Jacques Rigaut" 55-56)

By virtue of its enumerative form and its logic, this declaration of universal contempt for reality hearkens to Breton's Manifeste du surrealisme and provides an alternative to the means of evasion proposed by the "pope of surrealism." "Ce monde moderne," wrote Breton in his programmatic text, enfin, diable! que voulez-vous que j'y false? [ ... I Les sans-fils? Bien. La syphilis? Si vous voulez. La photographie? Je n'y vois pas d'inconvenient. Le cinema? Bravo pour les salles obscures. La guerre? Nous riions bien. Le telephone? Allo, oui. La jeunesse? Charmants cheveux blancs. Essayez de me faire dire merci [ ... I C'est vivre et teller de vivre qui sont des solutions imaginaires. L'existence est ailleurs. (58-60)

"To stop living" is a metaphor; Breton speaks about eluding positivist reality for another, "superreal" existence that can be found in the unconscious. But the "deadly" ambiguity of the dadaist-surrealist escape is certainly there. The "imaginary solutions" proposed in the Manifeste included automatic writing and hypnotic dreams. However, the expression itself could not but recall the "solution" discussed in La Revolution surrealiste. Breton himself viewed suicide as a "legitimate solution" ("Confession" 8). Since, following his own argument, one's attitude in life was more important than one's attitude in art, Litt&ature's question "Why are you writing?" found its logical continuation in La Revolution surrealiste whose questionnaire about suicide could be paraphrased: "Why are you living?"