Beyond Surrealism: Georges Limbour

Abstract

It is curious that formal Surrealist movement produced almost no fiction of any importance. Partly this was because of quite personal animadversion of Breton for novel as a form, for all that partakes of anecdote. Like Val?ry he refused to write that Marquise went out at five o'clock. The trouble with novelists, he offered in first Manifesto, was the circumstantial and uselessly particular character of their profusion of references, which leads me to think they are amusing themselves at my expense. The documentary, that is mime tic, was rejected in favor of oneiric. Yet for whatever reason his own Nadja, like Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, was unable to break through reportage and memoir to creation of a genuinely imaginative narrative, one that would relate not only happened, either outside or inside author's head, but what might be, and what existed only after its construction by creative imagination. This achievement was left to a later wave of writers only peripherally connected to Surrealist movement or not connected to it at all: Borges, Calvino, Cort?zar, Limbour, and Julien Gracq. The peculiarity of this tendency (it is not a school, and its members are hardly in communication with one another at all) is that realistic revolution in technique is not repudiated, but neither does writer limit himself to description of real world. Instead documentary method is used as a base for extrapolation into fantastic and artificial, for creation of synthetic worlds which may then be inhabited, like worlds of Magritte and Paul Delvaux. This might in true sense of word be termed a fiction, and in fact Borges calls his tales Ficciones. Limbour was born in Courbevoie in 1900 and was thus only a little younger than main body of Surrealists. His early association with movement was due more to a misunderstanding than anything else. He is mentioned three times in first Manifesto (1924), and his poems of this period somewhat resemble those of Apollinaire. The difference of opinion was over whether one ought to write for a readership, however small, and in general over question of com municability and coherence. A split also developed between political activists and advocates of art-for-art. By 1929 movement had become increasingly politicized, and increasingly under domination of Breton's ego. Limbour stood accused of complacence toward literature, and Breton definitely threw him overboard in second Manifesto, along with Artaud, Soupault, Vitrac, and painter Andr? Masson. Limbour later wrote two books on Masson, one in collaboration with Michel Leiris. The interest in Masson's anecdotal but frac