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FROM MUSE TO MILITANT:FRANCOPHONE WOMEN NOVELISTS AND SURREALIST AESTHETICS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School

of The Ohio State University

By

Mary Anne Harsh, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University2008

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras, Advisor Professor Karlis Racevskis ______________________________

Advisor Professor Sabra Webber French and Italian Graduate Program


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ABSTRACT

In 1924, André Breton launched the Surrealist movement in France with his

publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. He and his group of mostly male disciples,

prompted by the horrors of World War I, searched for fresh formulas for depicting the

bizarre and inhumane events of the era and for reviving the arts in Europe, notably by

experimenting with innovative practices which included probing the unconscious mind.

Women, if they had a role, were viewed as muses or performed only ancillary

responsibilities in the movement. Their participation was usually in the graphic arts

rather than in literature. However, in later generations, francophone women writers such

as Joyce Mansour and Suzanne Césaire began to develop Surrealist strategies for enacting

their own subjectivity and promoting their political agendas. Aside from casual mention,

no critic has formally investigated the surreal practices of this sizeable company of

francophone women authors. I examine the literary production of seven women from

three geographic regions in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice

to express human experience in the postcolonial and postmodern era.

From the Maghreb I analyze La Grotte éclatée by Yamina Mechakra and

L'amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée by Evelyne Accad.

These novelists represent mental and physical trauma and the fragmentation of

male/female relationships in times of combat. Célanire, cou-coupé by Maryse Condé and


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Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle by Simone Schwarz-Bart illustrate how

Antillean literature reflects the oral traditions, supernatural beliefs and the heterogeneous

cultural inheritance of its peoples. Both Jovette Marchessault’s visionary novel, La mère

des herbes, which draws upon her autotchonous heritage and lesbian orientation, and

Anne Hébert’s transgressive Les Enfants du sabbat , poignantly sabotage the paternalistic

domination of the English-speaking Canadian government and the Catholic Church

which relegated women to the role of reproductive automatons. I also examine feminist

collaborative writing in Quebec to understand how it kindled an intellectual revival and a

sophisticated field of literature and literary criticism.This dissertation charts the evolution of francophone women’s involvement with

Surrealism from its inception, when they played only the passive, objective role of Muse,

to the middle of the Twentieth Century when women writers became active militants for

equal rights while expanding the definition of surreal practice.


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Dedicated to

Fred and Marian Roberson

You always told me I could do “... anything I set my mind to.”

Michael A. Harsh, my very patient husband

Now you finally have your kids out of college.

My daughter, Molly Harsh, and my son, Leo J. III

The only regrets you’ll ever have are for the adventures you haven’t taken.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my advisor, Danielle Marx-Scouras, for her fervor and fire, her

zealous scholarship and her confidence and encouragement from the very beginning of

this journey. She has unselfishly shared her excitement, her impeccable judgment and

her animated personality with all of us fortunate enough to have worked with her.

I wish to thank Professor Judith Mayne, who welcomed me to The Ohio State

University ten years ago to begin my M.A. studies, in spite of my greying hair, and

Professor Karlis Racevskis, who continued to reassure all of us “late bloomers” that we

really did belong in academia. I am grateful to have come into contact with perspectives

outside my field in classes taught by Professor Racevskis and Professor Sabra Webber

and for their participation on my committee.

I appreciate Professor John Conteh-Morgan’s and Professor Christiane Laeufer’s

enthusiastic support in their classes and in the preparation of my minor fields of study.

Professor Diane Birckbichler’s wisdom and counsel have widened my experience

and encouraged me to integrate both sound practices and good humor into my teaching.

I wish to thank my Department Chair, Rich Hebein, at Bowling Green State

University and my colleagues for their encouragement while I completed my writing.

My first Surrealism class—Jocelyn Atkins, Cullen Colapietro, Teresa Eyler, Donna


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Figura, Naomi García, Hannah Neville and Ashley Rearick—have expanded my horizons

and helped me to fine-tune my conclusions.

Finally, I thank my colleague, Oniankpo Akindjo, for a thousand kindnesses.


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VITA

December 27, 1946 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Born – Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA

2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . M.A. French, The Ohio State University

1999 – 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Research & Teaching AssistantThe Ohio State University

2001 – 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Director French Individualized Instruction Center

The Ohio State University

2004 – 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of FrenchSaint Michael’s CollegeColchester, Vermont

2005 – 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Teaching AssistantThe Ohio State University

2007 – Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of FrenchBowling Green State University

Bowling Green, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

Research Publication

1. " The Grotesque and the Carnivalesque in Roch Carrier's La Guerre, Yes sir !: A

Twentieth-Century Narrative with Renaissance Echoes." Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Works in North America, eds. Mark Anderson and Rita Blayer. New York:Peter Lang Publishing, February 2005.

2. Book Review of Valérie Orlando's Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls. Research in African Literatures, (Autumn 2004).


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3. Book Review of Mildred Mortimer's Maghrebian Mosiac: A Literature inTransition. Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003).

4. Online Learning Packets to accompany Invitation au monde francophone to beused by instructors and students in levels 101.51-103.51 in the French Individualized

Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Jarvis, Gilbert A. and Thérèse M.Bonin and Diane Birckbichler. Invitation au monde francophone, 5th ed. Fort Worth:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000.)

Module 6, Chapter 7: "Le temps passe."Module 7, Chapter 8: "La Pluie et le beau temps"Module 8, Chapter 9: "Le monde du travail"Module 9, Chapter 10: "On fait des achats"Module 10, Chapter 11: "Être bien dans sa peau"Module 11, Chapter 12: "Des goûts et des couleurs"Module 12, Chapter 13: "Le passé et les souvenirs"Module 13, Chapter 14: "Le monde d'aujourd'hui et de demain"

Module 14, Chapter 15: "Les arts et la vie"5. Online Learning Packets to accompany Bravo! Communication, Grammaire,Culture et Littérature to be used by instructors and students in level 104.51 in the FrenchIndividualized Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Muyskens, Judith A.,Linda L. Harlow, Michèle Vialet, and Jean-François Brière. Bravo! Communication,Grammaire, Culture et Littérature, 4th. ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2001.)

Module 16a, Chapter 1: "Heureux de faire votre connaissance"Module 16b, Chapter 2: "Je t’invite"Module 17, Chapter 3: "Qui suis-je?"

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field : French


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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Vita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Chapters:

1. The Fathers and (M)Others of Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1A Political and artistic revolution: Surrealistic practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Automatic writing and dream transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11Collective and collaborative experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Shocking the public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Genre boundaries, the marvelous: Visual and textual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Shell shock, insanity and altered consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Eroticism and the woman as Muse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Outside the Hexagon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

2. Nightmares of War and Dreams of Peace: Traumatized Subjects in theMaghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Introduction to the Maghreb and Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Yamina Mechraka and La Grotte éclatée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43Assia Djebar and L’Amour, la fantasia .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45Evelyne Accad and L’Excisée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Surrealist Practices for Mechakra, Djebar and Accad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52The Capacity of the written word to “translate” trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Trauma writing and history in L’Amour, la fantasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69Civil and Family War in Lebanon: Evelyne Accad & L’Excisée . . . . . . 80Psychoses, textual fragmentation and genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

A Novel and much more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85French newpaper accounts, letters, theater: Djebar’s history . . . . . . . . . 91The severed hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99Accad’s genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103


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The French language subverted and elaborated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

3. Resistance to DOM(ination): Maryse Condé’s and Simone Schwarz-Bart’smagical (Sur)realism and traditional culture in the Caribbean . . . . . . . 114

Geography, history and language in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114

The DOM’s resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism . . . . . . . . . 117 Négritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117Valorizing orality, writing literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Maryse Condé: Writer, teacher, critic, storyteller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128Condé and Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134Simone Schwarz-Bart: Ethnographer and novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136Schwarz-Bart and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

Folk proverbs and oral tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141Proverbs and storytelling in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . 145Folk language and storytelling in Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Superstition, folk religion and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Condé’s linguistic treatment of the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160Simone Schwarz-Bart and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164The (DOM)inated French Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

4. A Not-so-Tranquil Revolution in Quebec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

The French language in the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177A Negative image of Quebecois culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180Quebec’s “Grande Noirceur” and the Carnavalesque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185Coming out of the darkness: The Automatists and Refus Global . . . . . 187

The Women make a fuss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Nurturing the Quebec imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194Anne Hébert, Québécoise de souche, privilégiée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195Jovette Marchessault, blue collar, native and lesbian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198Hébert’s prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201Psychology and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208Jovette Marchessault’s benevolent sorceress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212La misère noire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Nature as redeemer, Grandmother as guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216Common ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Surrealists, idealists, feminist outlaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233Theory and practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

The Maghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235The French Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242The Province of Quebec .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243


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Bibliography and works cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248


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CHAPTER 1

THE FATHERS AND (M)OTHERS OF SURREALISM

In her 1999 study of the European Surrealist movement, entitled Surreal Lives:

The Surrealists 1917-1945 (1999) Ruth Brandon notes that the adjective "surreal," which

leaps so readily to mind as a definition of "the disjunctions, the bizarre concatenations,

the dreamlike illogic ..." of the past century, had not found common usage until the

French avant-garde literary and artistic movement headed by André Breton defined it.

Basing their research on a "super-reality" that they believed dwelled in the unconscious

mind and that had been largely unexploited by earlier writers and artists, Breton and his

followers chose the word that Brandon believes "perhaps more than any other, defines

our time" (485).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with political trouble brewing in

various corners of the world, bizarre events that defied description became everyday

occurrences providing writers with phenomena that required different techniques to

portray than they had previously employed on a regular basis. The emerging field of

psychoanalysis offered fresh approaches for describing and explaining human mental and

physical phenomena. Later, at mid-century, reports of revolutionary wars for

independence in the former French colonies and the ensuing struggles of minority races

and women for human rights in these locales were similarly rife with allusions to the


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"surreality" of life experience. In this study, we will examine the literary production of

seven women from three geographic regions—the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the

province of Quebec—comparing their concerns and techniques with those of the early

Surrealists, in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice to express

human experience in postcolonial and postmodern eras.

In 1924, Breton officially launched the Surrealist movement in France with the

publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. In the Manifeste, he speculated that the

subconscious mind might comprehend a plethora of creative sources and proclaimed that

he and his associates would search for links between what he called the "two adjoiningrealities," the previously untapped subconscious and the realm of conscious thinking:

Si les profondeurs de notre esprit recèlent d’étranges forces capablesd’augmenter celles de la surface ou de lutter victorieusement contre elles,il y a tout intérêt à les capter, à les capter d’abord, pour les soumettreensuite, s’il y a lieu, au contrôle de notre raison (20).

Impressed by Sigmund Freud's work, Breton speculated that psychoanalytic methods

might provide a model for pioneers outside the medical profession—for authors like

himself and for artists—to discover creative and previously unexplored resources within

themselves rather than relying solely upon external inspiration. Brandon terms this

search "the great artistic journey of the ... [twentieth] ... century" (157).

Norbert Bandier's Sociologie du Surréalisme reveals the social and professional

trajectories of the young Surrealists, who philosophically distained "real" work.

However, they managed to become well-enough connected in the Parisian publishing and

art worlds to garner a certain credibility among their peers—if not subsequently to be


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recognized as either famous or infamous by the general public.1 Throughout the most

productive years of the movement, the period between the two World Wars, personality

conflicts and ideological differences with Breton precipitated rapid turnovers in his

surrounding cast of comrades, although a handful of associates remained loyal to

surrealist principles until his death in 1966. Alain Joubert's Le Mouvement des

Surréalistes ou Le Fin Mot de l'histoire: Mort d'un groupe--Naissance d'un mythe (2001) ,

tolls the death of Surrealism as a dynamic movement and posits its conversion to the

status of a myth.

However, if we look beyond the chiefly French context of the surrealist current,we see that it did not so rapidly vanish in other corners of the world as it did in Europe

when its tenets were superceded by other avant-garde movements such as the nouveau

roman, Tel Quel and the feminist movement. The seeds of revolt against reigning

artistic ideologies and literary traditions are often sown at the same time that untenable

social and economic conditions provoke political upheaval. At times of turmoil in

society, literature and the arts transcend their aesthetic bounds, acquiring the role of

documenting struggle as it unfolds, and the artistic elite can be found at the forefront of

political revolution. Such was the situation, in the 1950s and 1960s, when a few subjects

who had been fortunate enough to gain access to a formal education in the French

1 Norbert Bandier, Sociologie du Surréalisme 1924-1929 (Paris: Dispute, 1999).

Bandier's sociological study of the founders of Surrealism is particularly interesting inthat it documents the primarily bourgeois and provincial origins of its members and

points out the various trajectories of the participants in terms of the social and financial

success that each gained. He maintains that André Breton was the only member of thegroup to stolidly eschew monetary pursuits. He placed himself in a position from which

he could readily criticize the moneymaking projects of the others, which contributed to

dissention in the group and often undermined its theoretical solidarity.


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colonies began to foment social and economic change and to document their resistance

against overseas dominance while employing practices heretofore unprecedented in

Francophone literature. They availed themselves of a few of the same practices that the

young French intellectuals who had created the Surrealist movement had utilized in

metropolitan France in the period between the two World Wars.

Until the 1970s, the majority of studies about Surrealism focused solely on the

male French writers and artists of the movement. The earliest feminist critique to appear

was Xavière Gauthier's Surréalisme et sexualité (1971), which has been compared to

Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe in terms of its analysis of the sexual attitudes of the group and its practice of excluding women from full membership. According to

Susan Rubin Suleiman in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde

(1990):

Whether they idealized the female body and their love of it, as they didin their poetry, or attacked it and dismembered it, as they did in their paintings, the male Surrealists, according to Gauthier's analysis, wereessentially using the woman to work out their rebellion against theFather (18-19).

Two years after Gauthier's study, further scholarly articles highlighting women's

contribution to the Surrealist art movement began to appear. The first was Gloria Feman

Orenstein's "Women of Surrealism" which appeared in Feminist Art Journal in 1973,

although it was not until twenty-four years later that she again took up the subject of "La

Femme Surréaliste" in the periodical Obliques. In 1985, Whitney Chadwick published

Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement , which deals primarily with the women

artists associated with the first generation of Surrealists. A decade later, in 1998, she was

responsible for editing Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, the


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catalog of a traveling art exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which

underscored the partnership roles which a few women played in the inspiration and

production of the first and second generations of Surrealists.

In the meantime, Mary Ann Caws set her course for a career which has spanned

more than two decades when she published an article in Diacritics, entitled "Singing in

Another Key: Surrealism Through the Feminist Eye" in 1984. In a number of other texts

prepared both alone and in conjunction with other scholars, including Surrealism and

Women edited with Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (1991), The Surrealist Look:

An Erotics of Encounter (1997), she has devoted herself to recuperating the artistic and

literary work of a handful of the women who were unofficially connected to the

movement.

The works of the wives or lovers of the first Surrealists gained credence during

the later years of Surrealism. It is Caws's Écritures de femmes: Nouvelles Cartographies

(1996), co-edited with Mary Jean Green, Marianne Hirsch and Ronnie Scharfman, while

it does not speak of the Surrealist movement per se, that does undertake a more expansive

"double revision of the history of 'French' literature of the twentieth century" by

… re-thinking the traditional definition of periods, of genres, and of geniusin order to make them include women, on the one hand, and colonial subjectson the other ... in order to ... comprehend the radical displacement [of literaryhistory] from the [geographical] territory of France to the French language (6-7).

I share with Caws, et. al., an interest in focusing attention on women's literature written

in French and the promotion of its more notable examples to their rightful places in the

literary canon. Because a significant percentage of the widely acclaimed fiction of

French expression to appear in the past half century has been written by women who also


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hail from former French colonies, I believe that it is important that these novels be

"centered" alongside literature written by men, both French and Francophone, so that

neither the designation Francophone nor feminine will continue to carry a stigma. I also

wish to contribute to the venture of amending Francophone literary history through the

project of this dissertation by establishing a link between the surreal practices found in

the work of important Francophone women authors and those of their male precursors

while comparing the motives, methods, and products of the two groups. I will note the

similarities between two bodies of work that, at first glance, seem incompatible because

of the time periods in which they were produced, the geographic origins of their authors,and the gender politics of their creators.

From the Maghreb I have chosen to analyze La Grotte éclatée (1986) by Yamina

Mechakra and L'amour, la fantasia (1995) by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée

(1982) by Evelyne Accad. These authors describe the mental and physical trauma

suffered by victims of wartime violence as well as the fragmentation of male/female

relationships in times of combat. I will examine how the first generation of Surrealists

portrayed post-traumatic stress syndrome and insanity after World War I in France and

compare it with how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad dealt with mental illness in the

literature of the former French colonies during and after their wars for liberation.

Stepping beyond the pale of wartime trauma, we will scrutinize Accad's socio-

political theories which also concern themselves with the so-called "gender wars," so

common in regions of the world where fundamentalist hegemony denies equal rights to

women. She compares family and religious battles about the place of women in society

to actual armed conflict. Therefore, in the context of the economic and social changes


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that accompany the liberation of a nation, it is crucial to examine the resistance put in

motion by women against paternalistic prohibitions that continue to burden them after

their nations become free from French rule. Furthermore, it is significant that both

Djebar's and Accad's theories and fiction attempt to reconcile the victims of past wars as

well as the current generation to the "surreality" of peacetime violence.

From the Caribbean, I have chosen the novels Célanire, cou-coupé (2000) by

Maryse Condé and Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (1980) by Simone Schwarz-Bart.

These works vividly illustrate how Antillean literature draws deeply from the

heterogeneous cultural inheritance of its peoples and resources itself in their oral traditionand supernatural beliefs. Many of the critically acclaimed authors—past and present,

male and female, Francophone and Anglophone—who have roots in the French

Caribbean départments outre-mer, share an interest with the first generation of French

Surrealists in the central role of the occult and the marvelous in literature. I include these

two works by Condé and Schwarz-Bart from Guadeloupe in this study so as to illustrate

the bridge that oral tradition and religious belief build between the largely illiterate

inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and the literature created by intellectually elite and

politically savvy indigenous authors. The first Surrealists appreciated the folk artifacts

and folklore of so-called "primitive" peoples as representative of a more natural state of

human existence; so, too, do these contemporary female authors value the rapidly

disappearing cultural artifacts of their people for their capacity to encourage solidarity

and anchor regional identity.

As in other regions of the former French empire, women have also waged

personal and public battles through the literary medium in the province of Quebec on the


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North American continent. Just as the Surrealists attacked the French government for its

complicity in World War I and ridiculed the presence of the Catholic church in everyday

affairs, Anne Hébert and Jovette Marchessault poignantly strike out against the

authorities that denied French-speaking citizens of Quebec entry into the modern world

until the second half of the twentieth century. Their primary targets were the

conservative and paternalistic English-speaking Canadian government that treated

Francophones as second class citizens and the Catholic Church that relegated women to

the role of reproductive automatons. Hébert's protagonist, a sorceress who infiltrates a

novitiate in the novel Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), suggests that the crimes visited uponwomen and children by the Catholic Church would delight the Prince of Darkness rather

than the Almighty it professes to serve. As well, Marchessault's visionary literature,

including La mère des herbes (1980), draws upon her autotchonous heritage, creating a

supernatural utopian world of women who encourage one another to create a "Feminist

Renaissance." I will use the theories spelled out by several Quebecois feminists to

examine the works of Hébert and Marchessault and to look at the phenomenon of

feminist collaborative writing and its contribution to the field of literary theory in

Quebec. This movement has given rise to an impressive slate of women authors and

critics whose engagement in literary as well as political issues is unprecedented in any

other region of the French-speaking world.

Before outlining works which illustrate surrealist practice as drawn upon by these

Francophone women novelists—which will be detailed in their historical and social

contexts later in this study—it is essential to become familiar with the genesis of the

Surrealist movement so that we can understand how it continues to influence studies of


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the unconscious mind as a wellspring of inspiration in artistic creation and how it informs

my investigation of the works chosen for this study.

A POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC REVOLUTION: SURREALISTIC PRACTICES

It is important when documenting an artistic movement to situate it within its

social and historic context. The founders of a new movement generally denounce the

earlier dominant movement, develop their own strategies, advertise their innovative

approach as they denigrate the practices of their predecessors, and move toward an

apogee that provides a point of departure for the movement that will eventually supersedetheirs.

In Surreal Lives Brandon notes, "Surrealism began among poets whose aim it was

to create a revolution, both political and artistic" (3). Their movement set out to

revolutionize the world of literature by making a dramatic break from bourgeois ethics

and esthetics. Serge Gavronsky explains in Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,

Poétique (1986) that Breton had to define his own movement by denouncing "the grand

paternal traditions of poetry and culture in France" that had guided previous generations:

It is essentially about the tyranny of reason such as the disciples of Descarteshad imposed it and not only in the domain of philosophy, or even positivism, but also in writing, whether it is about realism or the romantics whoseverbal expression was dominated by the message (38).

Breton poignantly illustrates this rejection of preexisting esthetics in the Manifestes du

surréalisme (1924), "… l’attitude réaliste, inspirée du positivisme … m’a bien l’air

hostile à tout essor intellectuel et moral … faite de médiocrité … ses goûts les plus bas …

la clarté confinant à la sottise, la vie des chiens" (16).


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Having served his country on the field of battle and in the wards of French mental

hospitals during World War I, where he treated wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, he

vowed to fight a second crucial battle—this time on the literary front:

Le surréalisme, tel que je l’envisage, déclare assez notre non-conformismeabsolu pour qu’il ne puisse être question de le traduire, au procès du monderéel, comme témoin à décharge. Il ne saurait, au contraire, justifier quede l’état complet de distraction auquel nous espérons bien parvenir ici-bas (60).

Post-World War I literary historians point out that the first world war had as profound a

psychological effect upon non-combatants as it did on soldiers who carried arms. A

number of future Surrealists who saw combat in the War were as appalled by the so-

called "rational" political regime that had led France into it as they were disgusted by the

French people's tolerance of generalized inhumanity and savagery. When they undertook

their revolt, it encompassed not only the renunciation of government policies but also the

rejection of realist, symbolist, and Dada literary principles and practices—in short, a

comprehensive rebellion against the reigning political and artistic status quo. Searching

for a less compromising approach to life and creativity, they mounted “a campaign of

systematic refusal” to conform to society's mores that extended into all domains of life

including philosophy, ethics, mental and physical health, social interaction, politics, and

art. Hédi Abdel-Jouad summarizes some of these refusals in his Fugues de Barbarie: Les

Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998):

... l’arsenal de négations qui marquent son écriture: refus de l’orthodoxie,du statu quo, de la raison raisonnante, du discours langue de bois, …le refus de tout tabou pour une libération totale de l’éros, le refus del’interdit religieux … le refus de toute compartimentation de l’hommeque le rationalisme a écartelé entre Orient et Occident, raison etimagination, rêve et réalité … de l’une à l’autre s’ouvre, immense,


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le champ d’expérimentation, du rêve et de l’imagination ….2

Having enunciated these refusals, the Surrealists began to develop a set of positive

practices, including delving into the unconscious mind, which were to dictate the path

that esthetics would take into the future.

AUTOMATIC WRITING AND DREAM TRANSCRIPTION

It is through the practice of automatic writing that the Surrealists first attempted to

coax an individual’s desires from the subconscious into the realm of artistic experience

and the raw material of the dream world into the light of day. Automatic writing was tofunction as the poetic link between unconscious and conscious worlds. In their first

attempt at automatic writing, Breton and Philippe Soupault experimented with a variant

of the "speaking cure" that Breton had found effective in treating his shell-shocked and

insane patients during the war. Rather than free-associating aloud, as he had encouraged

his patients to do, he and Soupault decided to write down, as quickly as possible and with

no concern for the organization of their thoughts or the grammar of the results, whatever

came into their minds. The result was a process that Breton describes in Les Manifestes

du surréalisme in this way:

… je pris du papier et un crayon sur la table qui était derrière mon lit.C’etait comme si une veine se fût brisée en moi, un mot suivait l’autre,se mettait à sa place, s’adaptait à la situation, les scènes s’accumulaient,l’action se déroulait, les répliques surgissaient dans mon cerveau, je jouissait prodigieusement. Les pensées me venaient se rapidement etcontinuaient à couler si abondamment que je perdais une foule de détailsdélicats, parce que mon crayon ne pouvait pas aller assez vite, et

2 It will be seen later that Abdel-Jouad's study of Surrealism in the Maghreb is pertinent

to my investigation into the novelistic practices of Mediterranean women who wrote

about the trauma of war and their revolt against Islamic male hegemony.


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cependant je me hâtais, la main toujours en mouvement, je ne perdais pas une minute. Les phrases continuaient à pousser en moi, j’étais pleinde mon sujet (33).

When the two finally stopped writing, they were elated by the results and surprised that

what they had written was similar on many counts: each man's work revealing

extraordinary energy, an abundance of emotion, some unusual imagery, and a measure of

absurdity. (According to Breton, Soupault was somewhat obsessive about his attempts to

organize certain snatches of thought or to give them a title, while he had felt quite free

from formal literary constraint). The content of this first written experiment was entitled

Les champs magnétiques ( Magnetic Fields) and was published in 1920. In retrospect, itis considered to have been the first surrealist literary work.

During the early years of the movement, automatic writing was the first and the

most frequently used practice for probing the subconscious. Until other techniques came

into use, the name of the practice was often conflated with the name of the movement, as

it is here in the first Manifesto:

SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se proposed’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, lefonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de toutcontrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique oumorale (36).

It was not until the Surrealists began to experiment with the transcription of dreams that

they made a distinction between the two terms and recognized that automatic writing was

merely one of several practices that would define Surrealism. From these first attempts at

written free association, it is important to emphasize the importance of its evolution into

one of the main practices of the Surrealists as a group as it furnishes us with a


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background that explains the collective element of many of their beliefs and practices, a

subject which we will discuss more fully in Chapter Four.

Giving credit to Freud for his investigations into the labyrinths of sleep, Breton

asked himself why it was that the workings of the mind during sleep had been relegated

to a status inferior to the workings of reason while an individual was awake. He was

convinced that the free flow of an artist's inspiration was more likely to be sidetracked by

the interferences of everyday life than it would be when he was asleep. He pointed out

that while he was awake, man was "the plaything of his memory" which allowed him

only clumsily to recall the inspiration he perceived while sleeping (21). The experiencewould effectively “lose in translation” from one state to another. He also concluded that

the dream state possessed its own logic (or a lack thereof) and that waking broke the

thread of this organization.

Another of the Surrealists, Louis Aragon, in his Traité du style (1928), concurred

with Breton on the importance of the oneiric in artistic inspiration believing that

rationality does not get between reality and the dreamer to censor an experience when

one is asleep, although it does temper one's creative decisions when s/he is awake.

Wondering, "Can't the dream also be applied to the resolution of the fundamental

questions of life?" the Surrealists set out to systematically study it, believing in "the

future resolution of these two states, in appearance so contradictory, as are dream and

reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality ... " (24).

One major inconsistency arises when critics discuss the surrealist practice of

dream transcription. Breton based his theories on the spontaneous reception of

knowledge and inspiration from the nether side of consciousness. Surrealists set out to


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systematically study the phenomenon, using automatic writing to script the acquired

impulses and information. In an attempt to preserve the most ephemeral of contacts

between the sleeping and the waking worlds, they ended up resorting to a scientific

organization of information obtained through the mechanical process of transcription. In

doing so, a portion of the spontaneity of the experience was lost. In short, the Surrealists

faced a crisis of representation which was similar to that faced by the other esthetic

movements which had preceded theirs when they grappled with the corporeal aspects of

translating surreal experience into the written word.

COLLECTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE EXPERIMENTATION

Band. Cast of characters. Clan. Clique. Crew. Crowd. Flock. Gang. Throng.

Troop. Synonyms for the collective, which privilege group status over individual

achievement, abound in chronicles of the Surrealist movement. From the outset, Breton

and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing points out the propensity for working

together that infused the Surrealist movement. Although the two men recorded separate

experiences, they worked together at the end of the day to analyze collectively what they

had produced, publishing the resulting Champs magnétiques (1920) together.

A typical outing for members of the group consisted of strolling about the streets

of Paris in hopes of stumbling upon an extraordinary incident or of encountering

someone they hadn't expected to meet. Such an afternoon might be followed by an

evening spent together in a café discussing the role of "objective chance" or accident in

providing fodder for creativity. Together, the Surrealists might play "Exquisite Corpse."

This was a game in which four different artists could participate. The first person drew


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the head, folded the paper over, and passed it along to the next participant whose task it

was to draw the torso. The third person might draw the legs and the last person the feet.

The group then unfolded the paper to study and interpret their collaborative drawing.

Sometimes the group would borrow from the rituals of popular spiritualists of the era and

participate in séances hoping to receive motivation from the "other side." Breton did not

personally believe that it was possible to contact spirits from another sphere, but he

supported spiritualism as a possible means of seeking inspiration. The group also

experimented with "collective sleeping" and hypnotism as means of gathering

information about various sorts of sleep. Despite frequent quarreling, the members of this movement prized the outcome of combined effort and codified the doctrine of

collaborative production.

SHOCKING THE PUBLIC

Iconoclasm was the watchword of the Surrealist revolt. The movement is

notorious for having deliberately transgressed the social and moral norms of the period,

shocking the public and incurring sharp disapproval by its critics. Breton’s disturbing

goals are publicized in the second Surrealist Manifesto,

... comment veut-on que nous manifestions quelque tendresse, que mêmenous usions de tolérance à l’égard d’un appareil de conservation sociale,quel qu’il soit? ... Tout est à faire, tous les moyens doivent être bons àemployer pour ruiner les idées de famille, de patrie, de religion ... (77).

His calculated statement infuriated all sectors of French society since it attacked family

life, the nation, the government, and the Church in one fell swoop.


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In La Défense de l'infini (1927), Aragon describes his literary mutiny against the

canonical masters of French literature:

I'm not following the rules of the novel or the rhythm of the poem. I'm

writing and speaking as if Gustave Flaubert had never lived ... MarcelProust bores me to death and M. Giraudoux is a rabbit's fart ...When Ithink of Honoré [de Balzac] I can understand why people like Paul Valéryand André Breton pour scorn on their novels. But after all, I'm spitting inBalzac's face"(269).

An anecdote that illustrates the most blatant of the Surrealists' attacks against literary

tradition concerns the nation’s honored novelist, Anatole France, who had won the 1921

Nobel Prize for literature and was a longtime member of the French Academy and is

described in Bandier's Sociologie du surréalisme (1999) as "... Celui dont le style est

présenté comme modèle de finesse aux étudiants en lettres ..." (130-1). While he lay

dying, the group prepared a brutal pamphlet entitled Un Cadavre in which they unleashed

a tirade of criticism against his work. Joseph Delteuil stated, "Cette perfection formelle

manque de profondeur et de jus," and Aragon added, "Il écrivait bien mal." 3 Brandon’s

retelling of their bombastic attack on the previous generation of revered authors includes

the anecdote in which the Surrealists suggested that someone should empty out an old

box of France’s books, put him in it, and throw it into the Seine. In recounting the

incident, she concludes, "... though it caused a tremendous scandal, [it] did not bring

3 Bandier makes an argument that differs from most accounts concerning the Surrealists.

He uses Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to explain the trajectories of its

adherents during the first five years of the movement. He details the rise of many of themembers from provincial bourgeois backgrounds. For the most part, they were poets at a

time when novelists possessed the most symbolic and financial capital. He presents a

well-documented account of the collective strategies used by the group as its membersstrove to unseat the novelists who dominated the literary scene in Paris in the early 1920s

in order to usurp their places. He concludes that, at least in the beginning, their

"revolution" intended to be cultural rather than political.


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upon its authors the retribution that might have been expected ..." (230-1). What it did

accomplish, however, was to confirm that the Surrealists would stop at nothing to

vanquish both the survivors and the deceased of previous artistic movements.

GENRE BOUNDARIES, THE MARVELOUS: VISUAL AND THE TEXTUAL

Apollinaire, one of the most influential precursors of Surrealism, explained that

his poetry broke the rules of classical form in an attempt to reflect the unexpectedness of

life itself. Since the Surrealists had vowed to forego productive work, in the bourgeois

sense of the word, fantasy, childlike play, exploration, and experimentation occupiedtheir days. Declaring reason and rationalism irrelevant, the direction of their ventures

was often determined by accident, happenstance, or "objective chance" which was

reflected in poetic forms which defied conventions. They abandoned typical artistic

subjects in favor of everyday topics and found the beautiful in unexpected juxtapositions

of incongruous objects.

Another element of their practice that is very important to this study is the

Surrealists' belief in the marvelous and the supernatural which they saw depicted in

indigenous art and in native myths and folklore. During the founding years, the

Surrealists perceived the so-called "primitive" beliefs of African tribalism, folklore, and

indigenous folk artifacts as reflections of a former time when human art had not yet been

confined within the narrow limits that rational academism dictated. As an antidote to the

positivist view that every happening was explainable by reason and science, they

borrowed inspiration from the artistic practices of the so-called “unspoiled” cultures

which remained in the world. Later on in his career Breton became interested in the


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influence voodoo might have had on the "surreality" of Caribbean experience and the

literature and artwork that descended from it.

During the earlier Dada period and during the first years of the Surrealist

movement, writers and poets made up the majority of its members. To these were

associated, from time to time, Soupault, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray,

Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, who represented the graphic arts world. By 1928, so

many artists had joined the ranks that Breton published an essay entitled "Surrealism and

Painting." The Surrealists were also particularly intrigued by the rise of the cinema in

France because of its capacity to create bizarre images and to visually attack bourgeoissensibilities. However, since Surrealists had spoken out against the bourgeois practice of

actually working to earn a sustainable income, moving picture artists such as Dalí and

Luis Buñuel suffered from the dilemma of having to raise the funds they needed to

finance their cinematic projects from members of the same bourgeois society that the

Surrealists disdained. Since their range of interests was so wide and their aversion to

accepting support from wealthy supporters so strong, the mundane problem of financial

subsidies often threatened the ideological basis of "play" as they defined it.

Since the Surrealists were interested in such diverse projects, it is not surprising

that their writing practices would also reflect a wide range of styles. In his first

Manifesto Breton criticized the novelistic genre, particularly in the realist novels of his

predecessors', as incapable of expressing Surrealist innovation:

Chacun y va de sa petite “observation.” ... On ne m’épargne aucune deshésitations du personnage; sera-t-il blond, comment s’appellera-t-il, irons-nous le prendre en été? ... Et les descriptions! Rien n’est comparable aunéant de celles-ci; ce n’est que superpositions d’images de catalogue, l’auteur en prend de plus en plus à son aise, il saisit l’occasion de me glisser ses


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cartes postales... (16-17).

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he and nearly all of his followers, although

privileging poetry, also indulged in book-length storytelling pursuits at one time or

another. A prime example is that, over the past seventy-five years, literary critics have

classified Breton's own Nadja (1928) as a novel which illustrates all of the practices of

Surrealism—even though its structure does not fit the classic definition, and in spite of

the remonstrations that Breton has raised to the contrary. As with the definitions of

written genres, the Surrealists also rejected commonly-held laws governing the

appearance of works of art. They would spontaneously combine words and images intheir texts and paintings thereby creating hybrid images and new mixed genres: their

films, their paintings and collages—and their literature—all reveal the syncretism of the

visual and the textual.

SHELL SHOCK, INSANITY, AND ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS

As a youth, Breton had studied medicine. During World War I, he worked at the

Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where he first used techniques of psychoanalysis in

treating the mentally ill. According to Brandon in Surreal Lives, he, together with

Soupault,

... discussed these studies and their implications. For with that unerringinstinct for the significant ... Breton had realized that here, in Freud'swritings, lay the route-map for the great artistic journey of the comingcentury: the journey to the interior (156-7).

In 1916, he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Dizier where he worked

primarily with shell-shock patients who had returned from the battlefront. These patients


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presented a variety of neurotic physical symptoms such as blindness, deafness or

paralysis as well as violent bodily tremors and recurrent nightmares. After coming into

contact with these mental cases, Breton began to realize the importance of bringing fears

repressed in the subconscious to the surface in order to alleviate the pain of their trauma.

This is not to say that, later, he and his group did not harbor some objections against

Freudian analysis. Against it, they expressed, " ... une critique explicitement dirigée

contre la sublimation et la banalisation de la sexualité dans les recherches

psychoanalytiques" (Serge Gavronsky, Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,

Poétique, 1986, 59). Because of their clinical experience with this treatment on mentallydisturbed patients, they theorized that healthy artists might also be able to unlock the

creativity residing in the unconscious and try to funnel its inspiration into their works.

The character of the artwork sometimes produced by the insane population, who

were housed in the asylum alongside shell-shocked patients, also stimulated the interest

of the Surrealists. They became acquainted with the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, and this

relationship yielded a body of knowledge about paranoia that intrigued the Surrealists

painters, in particular Dalí, and pushed him to "move away from passivity towards the

active harnessing of this paranoiac power" (Surreal Lives 378-80). He was convinced

that graphic artists as well as authors could benefit from what he called his paranoiac-

critical method :

I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advanceof the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passivestates) to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completelythe world of reality ("The Rotten Donkey." This Quarter, trans. J. Bronowski. NP:1932, 378).


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By simulating the state of insanity, active observers might tap into the artistic reserves

that appeared to lodge in the minds of the insane.

The Surrealists promoted any and all methods of achieving an altered state of

consciousness. Not all of them used illicit drugs, but several in the group used opium and

cocaine, and many were heavy users of alcohol. Using the argument that prohibition in

the United States had not effectively curtailed the use of alcohol, Antonin Artaud, whose

deep depression improved only while he was taking legal anti-anxiety medication, argued

for the suppression of laws forbidding or limiting the use of narcotics in his newspaper

column "Sureté générale." A few starved themselves in order to experience thelightheadedness that hunger brings, and still others experimented with sleep deprivation

hoping that they could induce a mental ambiance somewhere between the dream state

and waking.

EROTICISM AND THE WOMAN AS MUSE

It is to Katharine Conley's Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in

Surrealism (1996), that I owe the most interesting explanation to date of the role of the

woman within Surrealism's first and second generations. She states that, for the first

generation, a woman's body reflected the male artist's self "usually buried in the

unconscious," and conflated the woman's corps which provided insight with the corpus of

the text in the process of the automatic writing exercise. In short, the Surrealists "used a

woman's body as a metaphor for the automatic text, which is itself also a tangible

'medium' between the poet's conscious and unconscious thoughts" (9). In André Breton:

Naissance de l'aventure surréaliste (1988), Marguerite Bonnet distills this explanation of


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the role of the woman's body as the object of desire that "... caused the subject to

experience, confusedly, a revelation concerning itself. The object/subject distinction

totters and becomes muddled; an interpenetration occurs" (133).

To balance this blatantly sexist appropriation of the woman's body, it is to her

credit that Conley redeems the concept by comparing it to the French feminist practice, in

the 1970s, of écriture féminine that “...similarly encouraged the practitioner to express

her innermost, uncensored thoughts, with a higher awareness of the body—an awareness

anticipated by the pre-1970 writing of women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and

Unica Zürn," whom she sees as belonging to the post World War II movement (24).Conley points out the practice of automatic writing as practiced by women members of

the second generation of Surrealism, as a point of encounter between the Surrealist

women and the feminist movement.

The surrealist practice of exploiting woman as a muse is more complicated than

simple sexual desire inspired by physical appearances. It is not surprising, given the

social climate of the times, that the Surrealists, too, would see women as second-class

citizens. Like the bourgeois men they deplored, they didn't consider their female

companions as true equals in their revolt against society's mores. Women, for the most

part, were not to be accepted as equal partners in the household any more than they

would be considered equal partners in business or in intellectual circles. They existed

only to facilitate the lives of men: they typed the proceedings of meetings and

experiments; they cared for their physical needs; and their family wealth often paid living

expenses so that the Surrealists themselves would not have to break their pact of idleness.

Women were also there to be adored and idealized. What is ironic is that this first


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generation of Surrealists did not comprehend, in spite of their desire to break with

bourgeois ideals, that they envisioned the role of women in exactly the same way as did

the rest of the French male population. Had they accepted women as their equals in an

era when this would have shocked bourgeois society, they might have appeared even

more revolutionary.

What separates the surrealist concept of women from that of classical mythology

is that their doctrine endowed women with erotic images to accompany their mystical and

supernatural symbolic powers. Woman became an icon, the incarnation of amour fou,

the closest man could approach to the mystical without being pulled into the whirlpool of insanity himself. Furthermore, an insane woman, rather than being marginalized as she

might have been in other circles, was seen to possess a special access to the unconscious.

The most famous example of this, Breton's frequenting of Nadja in his most celebrated

work, is admittedly an attempt on his part to gather information and inspiration from her

because of her special status as intermediary between the worlds of sanity and insanity.

Although Breton criticized the institutional treatment of the insane in Nadja, his callous

abandonment of his muse to the insane asylum can hardly be read as an act of kindness.

Surrealist art depicts an enormous amount of cruelty toward women. While

Conley asserts that the visual slicing and dicing of female bodies so often seen in

paintings by Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Hans Bellmer was both an acting out of the

men's worst nightmares and an exercise pursued primarily for its shock value, la femme

chez-d'oeuvre is a frightening rendition of woman (21). Fortunately, as Suleiman points

out in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1997), the second

generation Surrealist women who maintained relationships with these


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artists—Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, and Zürn—were able to establish

artistic dialogues with the works of their partners. She suggests,

… that such internal dialogue is to be found in not only in the work of

women directly involved with male Surrealists to whose work theywere specifically responding, but was a general strategy adopted, inindividual ways, by [other] women wishing to insert themselves as subjectsinto Surrealism (27).

Both Conley and Suleiman emphasize the ability of a select group of women poets and

artists to prevail despite the overt misogyny of the earlier years of the movement.

OUTSIDE THE HEXAGON Now that we have surveyed the social and cultural scene which gave rise to the

movement of Surrealism and followed its evolution through two generations in France, it

is time to turn our attention to the regional sites from which the works of our authors

originate in order to survey the development of a third generation of Surrealists who

were, in the second half of the twentieth century, more likely to welcome women artists

and authors into their midst. By retracing the paths of others who have employed

Surrealist practice, we will come to a better understanding of what it has meant and still

means to live in a surreal world.

In Fugues de Barbarie: Les Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998), Hédi

Abdel-Jouad examines the influence of the Surrealist literary movement and the Sufist

religious movement on a few of the earliest male authors from the Maghreb. He quotes

the Algerian poet Habib Tengour: "Le Maghrébin a été longtemps surréaliste sans le


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savoir"(5).4 In particular, Abdel-Jouad studies the literary pursuits of Tengour, Jean

Amrouche, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, Nabil Farès, Mouloud Feraoun, Tahar Ben

Jelloun, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Abdellatif Laâbi, Farid Lariby, and Youcef Sebti—all male

writers, well-recognized in the literary tradition of this region—whose careers began

either during the struggle for independence or in the immediate aftermath of liberation

from France. In the course of my study, this is the group that we will classify as the third

generation of Surrealists. Their first wave of literature deals with the wretchedness and

confusion of life and the psychological alienation of the Algerian, Tunisian, and

Moroccan peoples held powerless and voiceless under French occupation. A secondcycle of writing is rife with the disillusionment that resulted when citizens realized that

their new sovereign nations did not provide them with the freedom from oppression they

had expected (5).

Only a few pages of Adbel-Jouad's analysis are devoted to Nina Bouraoui's La

Voyeuse interdite, and further inclusion of women authors from the North Africa whose

works demonstrate surreal practice is limited to brief mentions of Assia Djebar, Leïla

Sebbar, and Joyce Mansour. To be fair to Abdel-Jouad, his argument traces the

"filiation" and affilation of the male writers with such male precursors as Arthur

Rimbaud and Gérard Nerval and the first generation of male French Surrealists.

However, his extensive investigation of the relationships of North African writers with

their French predecessors does not include a similar study of the most familiar women

4 Hédi Abdel-Jouad uses the historic term Barbarie to encompass the present nations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria and the word fugue in two ways: one to denote the artistic

content of poetry and literature as being akin to music; and the other, as a flight from the

physical present and conscious thought.


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writers whose works demonstrate a "filliation" with Surrealism and which followed the

men's work by a few years. Chapter Two of this dissertation will examine the surreal

practices of three of these female writers, Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar from

Algeria, and Evelyne Accad from Lebanon, in the context of the psychological and

physical effects of civil war and domestic conflict on their work.

Michael Richardson's Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean

(1996), details the support that the first generation of French Surrealists gave black

students from the Caribbean who later became leaders in both the Surrealist movements

in their homelands and in the ensuing Negritude movement. He describes "a uniqueseries of encounters" between 1931 and 1946 " [which] took place between Francophone

Caribbean writers and French Surrealists that constitute an important moment in the anti-

colonial struggle in the French-speaking world" (1). These elite black students

established or contributed to journals with political bents leaning toward Marxism and

anti-colonialism and with a literary content infused by revolutionary surrealist tendencies.

In 1931, Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyote, both École Normale Supérieure

students from Martinique, published the first and only issue of Légitime Défense, a

journal which questioned the foundations of European culture from the perspective of

blacks. Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, and Léon Damas

from Guyana who were also students at the École Normale during this period may have

read this fledgling periodical. In 1934, they collaborated to publish L'Étudiant Noir ,

which laid the foundations of the Négritude movement, although it was criticized for

approaching problems in the overseas departments from the perspective of the French and

for imitating French Surrealist and Marxist models of writing rather than creating


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revolutionary models reflecting the indigenous black identity of its authors. In 1937,

Damas published Pigments, a collection of poetry introduced by the French Surrealist

Robert Desnos, which was decidedly Surrealist in style and a prime example of black

pride in content. In 1939, at twenty-six years of age, Césaire published the epic poem

Cahier d’un retour au pays natal . In it, he documents his journey as a youngster raised

in Martinique under French rule and sensitized to his blackness in France, where he came

to realize that the important cultural foundations of African tradition and Martinician

identity had being erased by the French colonial policy of assimilation. He returns to his

homeland with a mission to improve its cultural and political landscape. Richardsonwrites that the Cahier "... helped to define a specifically black Caribbean sensibility, but

also announced a changed relation between black and white in the French colonies: no

longer would assimilation be taken for granted as the destiny of the colonized" (6).

Breton would later praise Cahier d’un retour au pays natal , in his preface to the

1947 edition under the title of “Un grand poète noir,” as "... rien moins que le plus grand

monument lyrique de ce temps” (81). During his visits to Martinique and Haïti, he

encouraged the adoption of Surrealism by people of color because, as he wrote in What is

Surrealism, edited and translated by Franklin Rosemont in 1978:

... in considering race and other barriers that must before all else becorrected by other means, I think that Surrealism aims and is alone inaiming systematically at the abolition of these barriers [of difference between people]. You know that in Surrealism the accent has always been on displacing the ego, always more or less despotic, by the id, heldin common by all ... Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first becauseit has always taken their side against all forms of imperialism and white banditry [ ...] and secondly because of the profound affinities that exist between Surrealism and so-called 'primitive' thought, both of which seek the abolition of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory emotion (258-61).


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In the context of recent social and literary theory, these comments are disturbing because

they seem to relegate the black race to a "primitive" access to the unconscious. However

it may be criticized, Surrealism opened up new opportunities for black people in the artsand in politics.

In Negritude Women (2002), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting breaks new ground by

insisting that a few black women also made significant contributions to the literary and

political pursuits of the Negritude movement although,

… the masculinist geneology constructed by the founding poets and shored

up by literary historians, critics, and Africanist philosophers continues toelide and minimize the presence and contributions of French-speaking black women to Negritude's evolution (14).

In 1931, Paulette Nardal co-founded La Revue du monde noir while her sister Jane

published poetry about Africa and the Antilles and wrote essays on black humanism and

pan-Africanism. Sharpley-Whiting claims that the efforts of these sisters were the basis

upon which Senghor later built his theories of race and global consciousness. The Nardal

sisters kept a literary salon in Paris, that according to Senghor, was a place "where

African Negroes, West Indians, and American Negroes used to get together" (Lillian

Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, Rev. ed., 1991). The author also maintains that

Suzanne Césaire has always been portrayed as walking in the shadow of her husband,

dwarfed by his lyricism and his political connections to Marxism and the Negritude

movement, while her Surrealist bent seems to have taken second place to her duties as

homemaker.

Just as women had first been considered as marginal to the Surrealist movement

and their participation required re-evalution in ensuing years, Sharpley-Whiting claims


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that several women of West Indian origin should also be considered as more central to

the Negritude movement. In Chapter Three of this dissertation I go a step further than

either Richardson or Sharpley-Whiting by discussing Maryse Condé and Simone

Schwarz-Bart's contributions to mainstream Caribbean literature—a literature infused, as

were Négritude and Surrealism, with the magic of voodoo, the (sur)reality of magical

realism, and the orality of the Creole tradition. I show not only how their contributions to

the literary canon can be traced back through a community of male participants in the

Surrealist and Magical Realist movements and the Césaires, (both Madame and

Monsieur) but also how Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s authorial practices have surpassed both movements.

Each Francophone region, however unlike the others it may be in geographic

location or natural environment, shares the common bond of its historic and existing ties

with France, just as the authors from each region share some version of the French

language as a medium of expression. As we have already seen, in spite of Surrealism's

revolutionary influence on literature and the arts in the Caribbean during the first half of

the twentieth century, Martinique and Guadeloupe remain in a "neo-colonial" relationship

with France as evidenced by continued economic dependence and their departmental

political status.

By contrast, Quebec—which France established as la Nouvelle France four

centuries ago and then lost to the English a century later—is three hundred years removed

from French domination. However, the province has been forced to deal with a set of

postcolonial issues resulting from its lengthy domination by Great Britain, the

overwhelming cultural paternalism of anglophone Canada, and the cultural and economic


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dominance of its superpower neighbor the United States. Terminating the dominance of

the Catholic church while continuing to promote the use of French in social and

economic situations has taken a route that is, surprisingly, quite similar to other

Francophone regions where persons of color have employed Surrealist practice in the arts

to counteract oppression.

In 1948, a group of Quebecois artists denouncing the values of the Catholic

church and the stifling conservatism of the Duplessis government signed a manifesto

entitled “Refus global” which reiterated in many ways the refusals enumerated in the

Surrealist Manifesto which had preceded it by twenty-four years. In Les femmes du Refus Global (1998) Patricia Smart explains this revolutionary act by the fifteen artists

surrounding Paul-Émile Borduas as the result of

… sept années de discussions et d’expérimentation, en lisant Marx et Freud, enécoutant la musique moderne de Stravinski et de Varèse, du jazz et des rythmesvaudou, et en créant au théâtre, en poésie et en danse des productions d’avant-garde qui ont scandalisé les critiques et le public bien-pensant. Si un mouvementa exercé une influence prédominante sur leurs idées et leur esthétique, c’est lesurréalisme, par son insistance sur l’interdépendance de l’art, de la libération del’inconscient et de la transformation sociale (9-10).

This group was known as the Automatists and was immediately distinguishable from the

Surrealists by the fact that they dedicated a larger portion of their attention to the

techniques of automatic writing and painting than did Breton's group. Another difference

that is particularly salient to our argument is the fact that seven active women artists

signed the Refus global along with eight of their male associates. The greater visibility

and equality of women as signitaries distinguished the Automatists from the Surrealists in

a very significant way.


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With its origin within this small team of artists, a vigorous spirit of intellectual

rebellion began to spread throughout the Canadian province of Quebec. Side by side

with men, women contested the power of the Church in their private lives, the domination

of the English language in business, and the influence of the United States on many

aspects of their culture and their natural environment. The Quiet Revolution evolved

from this movement, and poetry was once again put to the service of politics.

In Chapter Four of this dissertation I will analyze Anne Hébert's Les enfants du

sabbat and Jovette Marchessault's La Mère des herbes, whose preoccupations with the

occult and the surreal at specific moments in their careers link their work to the novels of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart and the movements of Magical Realism and

Surrealism in the southern hemisphere of the American continents. These feminists were

pioneers in depicting the psychological conflicts that women experienced in Quebec

because of their second-class status. For almost forty years Hébert wrote about her

homeland with an uncanny clarity from self-exile in Paris. Marchessault embarked upon

an artistic journey that began as singular and personal and evolved, over time, into theater

pieces in which multiple characters—and multiple creators—interacted. Her later works

are particularly marked by the collaborative aspect of writing that proved so fruitful for

Canadian women authors. I will use the theoretical works of Nicole Brossard, Patricia

Smart, Madeleine Gagnon, Lise Gauvin, and France Théoret to chart the trajectory of

women’s writing in Quebec from Hébert through Marchessault toward the collaborative

phenomenon which continues to distinguish a portion of Quebec’s feminist writing from

the francophone literature of other regions.


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Aside from casual mention, no critic has formally linked the surreal elements

found in the work of a sizable percentage of francophone women authors in the last half

of the twentieth century with those of their male precursors. It is my project to fill this

critical void by closely examining the surreal components present in the novels of

Mechakra and Djebar from the Maghreb, of Accad from the Mashrek, of Condé and

Schwarz-Bart from the Caribbean, and of Hébert and Marchessault from Quebec.

In all of the Francophone regions surveyed, one surrealist tenet holds constant,

which will be discussed in Chapter Five: the premise that the private and political spheres

are always/already inseparable in the works of Francophone women in the second half of the twentieth century. What combination of postcolonial and postmodern conditions in

these geographically and historically diverse zones has stimulated women to choose

authorial practices that resemble those promulgated by the first generation of male

Surrealists? Have the subjugation and revolt, the anguish of mental illness, the dreams

and nightmares of social disintegration, war and exile obliged women authors to venture

beyond conscious experience and realist writing in order to exorcize the humiliation and

horror of their reality? It is the project of this dissertation to document how feminist

Francophone authors, either consciously or unconsciously, have described the (sur)reality

of life in their particular regions while narrating the coming to subjectivity of their

protagonists who must reconcile the trajectories of their lives with both their tumultuous

pasts and their yet unexplored futures.


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CHAPTER 2

NIGHTMARES OF WAR AND DREAMS OF PEACE:

TRAUMATIZED SUBJECTS IN THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK

Comment imaginer, rêver, inventer quand la vie vous est uncauchemar de chaque instant rythmé par l'assassinat de tous vos

amis, la peur, les cris, les larmes, le sang? (Hayat, La Nuit, 7 )

INTRODUCTION TO THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK

This chapter will examine how Yamina Mechakra in La Grotte Éclatée (1979),

Assia Djebar in L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Evelyne Accad in L'Excisée (1982)

narrate traumatic events and how the creation of each of these tales represents a

transgressive political act intended to document the escape of North African and Middle

Eastern women from colonial and gender subjugation. These authors describe the

violence of war and its attendant traumatic effects, women’s post-independence and post-

nationalist efforts to extricate themselves from traditional gender roles, and the reshaping

of male/female relationships during their respective conflicts.

I am interested in studying the surrealist practices used by francophone women

writers in the last half of the twentieth century and charting their development from

techniques that originated in the French Surrealist movement led by André Breton in the

1920s. To make this connection, I will relate how the first Surrealist movement’s

exploration of madness and post-traumatic stress syndrome was adapted by a significant


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circle of male writers from the Maghreb during Algeria’s war for independence, and

ultimately how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad have depicted psychosis and trauma in their

fiction.

As was previously mentioned, the founder of the Surrealist movement studied

medicine as a young man. During World War I, he and Philippe Soupault worked at the

Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where they first used techniques of psychoanalysis in

treating the mentally ill. They discovered implications of Freud’s work for artists and

writers that went beyond its clinical use with soldiers returning from the front and other

victims of psychosis in the civilian population. They came to realize that healthy artistsmight also unlock the unconscious in order to take advantage of whatever aesthetic

inspiration might be hidden there.

It is the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s that provides the most significant link

between the first Surrealist generation’s interest in trauma victims and insanity and the

predilection for re-telling trauma that is evident in the novels of postcolonial authors of

the second half of the century. It is his study, in the 1940s and 1950s, of the divergent

reactions of European and North African patients to psychological testing that expands

our understanding of how an individual’s imagination is culturally bound by his/her

surroundings. It is also his documentation of the change in family relations that occurred

during the Algerian war for independence that forms a basis for the questions these

authors raise in their novels.

Fanon had been trained in France to explore the logic of the European imaginary

life, but his work with psychiatric patients in Blida, Algeria, taught him that he would


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also have to become familiar with the North African subconscious if he hoped to treat

patients coming from very different cultural backgrounds successfully:

The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life; the concrete

and objective worlds constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found theimaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feedsthe concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible onlyto the extent that the real world belongs to us.5

Regrettably, Fanon did not have long to learn more about Algerian customs and tradition

nor to adjust his methods of treatment for the mentally ill before his medical work was

disrupted by the outbreak of the Algerian war and he became more involved as a political

activist for the Front de Libération Nationale. Nevertheless, it is his theorization (asopposed to Freud) of the culture-boundedness of the imaginary that allows us to propose

a link between the two historic artistic currents which we are considering here: the first

generation of French Surrealists and future generations of men and women whose

aesthetic inspiration originates in the unconscious, is filtered by one’s belonging to a

particular society, and whose artistic practices can be studied in the light of a surrealist

approach to the unconscious. It is a valuable step—in the context of mental health, which

was Fanon’s primary concern—and in the sphere of artistic creativity, which is mine in

this work—to affirm his discovery that a subject's imagination is inextricably linked to

his/her society.

5 Frantz Fanon and C. Geronimi. "Le TAT chez les femmes musulmanes: sociologie de laperception de l'imagination" Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et

des pays de langue française. LIVe Session: Bordeaux, 1956, 367-8. Translated byDavid Macey in Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2001) 234-5. Only the

portion of the original document that is reprinted in translation in Macey’s biography of

Fanon appears to be available at this time.


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On first inspection, my use of the concepts of a radical male theorist to make vital

connections between a male-oriented movement such as Surrealism and a trio of women

authors—none of whom would challenge the designation “feminist”—may seem

surprising. After all, Fanon preceded the feminist movement by at least two decades, and

his essays which touch upon the role of women during revolution are among the least

known of his political works. “L’Algérie se dévoile” in Sociologie d’une révolution:

L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959) has been more frequently discussed and

contested in feminist cir

djebar et surréalisme

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