A Lover’s Lobster

Abstract

In the first Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton wrote that alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather series of dreams than the dream itself. (1) This excerpting reflects compulsive selectivity that paradoxically cuts out series of imaginary constructions from an unfigured dream. But if the serial structuring of imaginary constructions substitutes for the unfigurable dream, it also displays cross-references which have mysteriously occluded or forgotten their ties to the whole dream as such. In other words, the relays connecting figural series function in waking life more or less as means to decoy or displace any analysis or process that might be able to recapture the contents of the dream which are, apparently, unrepresentable and unrecoverable. This idea runs counter to Gaston Bachelard's conviction that in the repetition of memories the symptom of deep attachment to dream is recoverable, for the most part, through reverie. Indeed, Bachelard saw in phenomenology an opportunity to subject eidetic structures in literature to reverie in which latent dream could be remembered. In series of studies on the natural elements he focused particularly on how the writer's phenomenological experience of elements like air, water, earth, and fire mediated those imaginary constructions through which the world of dreams was given verbal expression. Breton rejected such phenomenology because he thought the unconscious was not accessible at those junctures where memory would make it noticeable to consciousness. Contrary to Bachelard, Breton's understanding of imaginary constructions rested on the conviction that the unconscious was to be found at those places where images or scenes are withdrawn, dormant, or unremarkable. When Breton says that surrealism is the resolution of dream and reality, he may well have meant that the surreal is an unmarked or matter-of-fact construction that is not interpretable. (2) It is here, according to Breton, that we may sense our closest proximity to the dream. This paper considers minor if not fleeting detail from Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu which easily escapes noticeability though it is signifier that reverberates with and, in fact, repeats the extremely well known epiphany of the Madeleine, though by way of an extremely muted parody that I doubt reader would notice if he or she had not stopped to examine it. This detail concerns lobster dismantled on Marcel's plate during lunch at the home of the Swanns. Comment aurais-je encore pu rever de la salle manger comme d'un lieu inconcevable, quand je ne pouvais pas faire un mouvement dans mon esprit sans y rencontrer les rayons infrangibles qu'emettait l'infini derriere lui, jusque dans mon passe le plus ancien, le homard l'americaine que je venais de manger? How could I ever dream again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the least movement in my mind without crossing path of that inextinguishable ray cast backward ad infinitum, into my own most distant past, by the lobster l'americaine which I had just been eating? (3) Here memory has excerpted the lobster as representation through which former state of consciousness can be recovered. In this sense, the lobster is trigger for reverie crucial to the Bachelardian project, one in which a literary image sometimes suffices to transport us from one universe to another (4) For Proust's narrator the lobster connects state of consciousness in which the fervid desire to be part of Swann's society appeared unachievable to state of consciousness in which the much hoped for social acceptance is suddenly taken in stride at that moment it is finally consummated. Significant in the contrast of these conscious states is the difference between type of reverie which occurs in the absence of the objects-a purely mental reverie which is obliged to imagine or constitute world it hopes for but which it has never really seen, in contrast to reverie which suddenly finds itself situated in an embodied or material world of artifacts in whose physicality reverie searches out magical or mysterious links to the past and the future. …