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 Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris
-- Book by Robin Walz; University of California Press, 2000
In February 1924, surrealist Louis Aragon read the following in the daily Parisian newspaper L'Intransigeant: "Anniversary of the fall of the pickaxe. Boulevard Haussmann has reached rue Laffitte. " 1 The "huge rodent" of the boulevard's expansion, as Aragon later described it in Le Paysan de Paris, was about to devour the "pâté of shops" in one of his favorite urban hideaways, the double-galleried Passages de l'Opéra. For more than half a century, the modest shopping, business, and residential arcade had been fortuitously spared Baron Georges Haussmann's design for the completion of his namesake boulevard. In the years immediately following the Great War, the marginal establishments of the passageway had delighted members of the Paris dadaist and surrealist movements, who enjoyed a Dada cocktail at the Certa café, the outmoded melodramatic performances staged in the Théâtre Moderne, and the sensual pleasures of the arcade's baths and Madame Jehan's massage parlor. As the "Great Opening of Haussmann Boulevard" progressed and the inevitable demolition of the arcade drew near, Aragon ruminated, "No one can anticipate the consequences or repercussions of that kiss upon the vast body of Paris. " 2
Of course, Aragon knew the principal result, as did every other newspaper reader: the triumph of la circulation across the city. It marked an end to the first quarter of the twentieth century, when pedestrians, carts, horses, bicycles, and automobiles shared the boulevards. Henceforth, automobiles would dominate the hierarchy of transportation on the streets, relegating pedestrians to the sidewalks, leaving cyclists at their peril, and banning carts and horses altogether. But beyond these surface effects, Aragon wondered about the as-yet indeterminate cultural and intellectual forms that would emerge out of this latest wave of urban modernization. Old habits of la flânerie, Aragon predicted, would be transformed by new and unknown modes of strolling, radically changing not just a city neighborhood, but an entire mentality. One of these perceptual reorientations was provided by surrealism, the science of the ephemeral.
Personally, Aragon experienced surrealism in a double sense-as the surrealist literary and artistic movement organized by André Breton and as a cultural passage of time. For a few decades, beginning about 1890 and ending somewhere around 1930, cultural and technological modernities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries overlapped, and their ruptures were evident everywhere: International expositions and commercial mass marketing signaled a growing shift in economic orientation from industrial production to consumer capitalism. Paris had been electrified, but the amalgamation of the gas industry since the mid-nineteenth century guaranteed that gas lighting held a secure position in Paris until the 1920s. An array of public transportation vehicles were variously powered by steam, gasoline, or electricity, while the automobile was rapidly replacing horse-drawn carriages and bicycles for personal transportation. The development of the subway-the Métropolitain- and overland suburban rail systems displaced social identities, allowing for swift passage between Parisian localities, as well as making possible the separation of residence, work, and entertainment between Paris and the suburbs. And while the telephone provided instantaneous personal communication within Paris and between the metropolis and the city's periphery, the relatively underdeveloped telephone system constrained the use of that technology in creating a transgeographic sense of personal identity. |
Surrealism exploited this transitory moment for its own avant-garde artistic and political purposes. The juxtapositions of everyday life in the rapidly transforming Parisian landscape inspired the movement's members. In his surrealist novel of Paris, Aragon committed himself to inhabiting old cultural spaces, open to the chance sensations they offered, trying to capture something of their fleeting nature. "Each day alters the sense of modern existence, " he wrote. "A mythology comes together, and comes apart. It's a knowledge of life only for those with no experience. It's a gay science that begets itself and then commits suicide. " 4 The goal of surrealism was not simply to create an artistic movement but to reconfigure human consciousness in objective accordance with this new and constantly changing reality. By formulating new associations out of the incoherences of everyday life, the entourage proclaimed surrealism an objective reality infused throughout contemporary culture.
This book provides an interpretive history of the cultural intersection between mass print culture and surrealism in France during the early twentieth century. At the founding of their movement, the surrealists drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and social rebellion that ran through certain expressions of mass culture, such as fantastic popular fiction and sensationalist journalism. The provocative nature of such insolent mass culture, displaying a flagrant disregard for cultural conventions and social proprieties, resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists. Sometimes the connections were pronounced, as these sources of mass culture produced surreal visions in advance of the surrealist movement itself. In other instances, mass-produced commodities served as points of departure for surrealist inquiries. Yet these artifacts of mass culture and surrealism were neither subsumed by nor reducible to each other; what they shared was an overlapping and intersecting cultural terrain.
The following chapters explore this cultural intersection between mass print culture and surrealism. This project implicitly calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism by looking for surreal perspectives at the level of mass culture itself. Here, I follow the lead of intellectual historians Stephen Kern and Donald Lowe, who have argued that a "perceptual revolution, " emphasizing modernist synchronies of time and space, occurred in the realms of physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, literature and the arts at the turn of the century. 5 My focus on mass print culture broadens the social and cultural base of this perceptual revolution by demonstrating that such modernist sensibilities were not only generated from the "high" cultural realms of experimental art, literature, music, philosophy, and physics but were woven into the cultural fabric more generally, in such "low" sources as pulp novels and newspaper sensationalism. This book also supplements, and to some extent displaces, the place of the Great War as the harbinger of twentieth-century modernity, a standard historical thesis that, in my view, overemphasizes the destructive and negative aspects of modernity. 6 While the Great War was the most cataclysmic and traumatic event of the early twentieth century, it should not overshadow the multitude of less dramatic cultural connections that bridge the historical break between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Toward this end, this book explores mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged. 7 The surrealists did not so much create as discover the surreality of their epoch. I am less concerned in the chapters that follow with the activities or opinions of the surrealists themselves than in enlisting their service in directing me, as a cultural historian, toward caches of mass culture that display affinities with surrealism. It is precisely this connection that wrests a popular dynamism out of what is otherwise merely commercial mass culture. It is my hope that this book will provide historians and cultural-studies critics, as well as general readers interested in French popular culture, with a fresh basis for reevaluating both the popular aspects of mass culture and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement... |
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