Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (review)

When, just a few days before his arrest and deportation, Robert Desnos tried to imagine what, if anything, of his work would survive the test of time, he offered the following tersely drawn prediction: “J’appartiendrai au chapitre de la curiosité limitée” (Œuvres 1265). Coming from a writer known for his unwavering optimism in the face of adversity, such a bleak prognosis suggests an underlying fear that his numerous contributions to the culturally diverse landscape of the interwar and wartime periods might be forgotten in postwar France. Fortunately, this has not occurred. Sustained critical interest in Desnos’s work and, specifically, the recent publication of Katherine Conley’s study testifies to the poet’s enduring significance, not only for specialists of Surrealism, but for people interested in learning more about the various cultural contexts within and against which Desnos wrote in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Unlike earlier studies of Desnos’s life and works, including Marie-Claire Dumas’s ground-breaking Robert Desnos ou l’exploration des limites (Klincksieck, 1980), Conley’s study deliberately combines discussion of Desnos’s life with his writing. The result is a tapestry in which biographical and creative threads are tightly interwoven. The rich array of oral and written testimony Conley brings to bear on her study—some of which she garnered in interviews with people who knew Desnos or who were intimately familiar with some aspect of his life—constitutes one of the work’s most impressive dimensions. To cite but one example, in a meeting with novelist and scholar Pierre Lartigue, Conley was able to find out that Eirisch, a prisoner at Compiègne when Desnos was there, had bartered some of his cigarettes—obtained from the Nazi guards in exchange for some of his portraits—with Desnos who, in turn, gave Eirisch some verse, including the last poem he would ever write. Like a detective whose passionate pursuit of hidden meanings frequently takes her beyond the poet’s writing to shed light on some of the meanings contained therein, Conley’s use of oral evidence to trace the poem’s fortuitous circulation in the prison camp adds a poignant note to our understanding of Desnos’s last work. [End Page 162]