Maurice Nadeau Reviews Surrealist Subversions

Maurice Nadeau, now 90, is one of France’s most esteemed literary critics, noted especially for his pioneering 1945 Histoire du surrealisme (warning: R. Shattuck’s English translation is severely bowdlerized), and his important autobiography. For many years Nadeau has edited La Quinzaine litteraire, a biweekly roughly comparable to the New York Review of Books but much more radical. Although the paper almost never notices books in languages other than French, the issue of 16-31 December (No. 844) devotes a third of a page to Nadeau’s review of the new Autonomedia book Surrealist Subversions. Here is the substance of that review:

We have received, from Chicago, news of the Surrealist Movement in the United States -- tracts, protests, and above all a work of nearly 800 pages, Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and Images by the Surrealist Movement of the U.S. The movement that seems to be winding up here in the flea market [Nadeau is referring to the impending auction of Andre Breton’s collection in April], is being born in Chicago, or rather was born in 1966, when the Chicago Surrealist Group was founded. It is difficult to estimate the number of its adepts, but for the most part they are poets, painters, and activists in the labor movement.

One of their recent tracts, "Poetry Matters: On the Media Persecution of Amiri Baraka," defends a poet who has been subjected to virulent attack in the U.S. press. The fact that Baraka was chosen as Poet Laureate [of New Jersey] was clearly too much for the American middle-class!

The tract "Another Stupid War," denounces the war Bush is preparing against Iraq. In this declaration, the Chicago surrealists say -- in well-chosen and very reasonable terms -- what many French people (and no doubt Americans, too) are thinking.

The entire book, Surrealist Subversions, is written with the same ink. We have not had the courage to read every one of its nearly 800 pages. Wistfully, however, as we leaf through it and read this or that text, we note that it includes -- sixty years later -- many of the illusions of our own [revolutionary] youth, an experience all the more moving in view of the upcoming auction [of Breton’s collection] at the Hotel Drouet.

But how can one not salute the audacious iconoclasm of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont and their friends?

From the book, I cite the following from editor Ron Sakolsky’s Warning to the Reader: "Surrealist Subversions is simultaneously a sustained attack on the institutions and ideologies that maintain human misery, a manual of cultural/political sabotage, and a navigational chart to certain hidden territories of Freedom and the Marvelous."

And this precision from Franklin’s Foreword: "No other book offers so much on the relation of surrealism to Black liberation, urban rebellion, ecology, everyday life, the critique of work, capital, patriarchy, prison, whiteness, the traditional Left, the media, the degradation of language, and all forms of miserabilism."

In brief, what the American surrealists offer us is "the revolutionary context"!

Here is the address of the publisher, from whom copies of this book can be ordered: Autonomedia, POB 568, Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568.

—Maurice Nadeau (Le Quinzaine litteraire No. 844, 16-31 December 2002)