"Not a Nervous Woman": Robert Desnos and Surrealist Literary History

Abstract

In a letter to her cousin Denise, Simone Breton once described Robert Desnos in a trance during the surrealist period of sleeps as even more impressive than a Greek sibyl, it isn't a nervous woman who is speaking, but a poet, impregnated with everything we love and believe approaches the ultimate word of life (Monday, 9 October 1922).1 With this description of Desnos as not a woman Simone Breton brought the question of woman into the picture of the dawning surrealist movement and implicitly foretold what would be Desnos's fate within that movement. For, like many women in the movement, Desnosdescribed by Andre Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism from 1924 as he who, more than any of us, has perhaps got closest to the Surrealist truth-would be put on a pedestal only to be silenced, marginalized, and set aside.2 I contend that it was his very star status that condemned him to this outcome, because his glamour, like that of some of the women, could not be controlled or contained within the masculine confines of the group in its first, defining phase. That Desnos claimed his own right to pronounce the nature of surrealism in his third manifesto of surrealism has not been sufficiently heard until now, just as the presence of women was not adequately recognized before Whitney Chadwick's groundbreaking study from 1985, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. The most influential of surrealism was penned unofficially by Breton himself beginning in 1924 with The Lost Steps and continuing until his death in 1966, in essays, talks, manifestoes, pamphlets, and interviews.3 The first official history as such,