The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader

edited by Claudine Frank; translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Nash
Duke University Press, Durham, NC 2003
423 pp. Trade $79.95; paper $22.96
ISBN: 0-8223-3056-3; ISBN 0-8223-3068-7

Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008, USA
a.graubard@starpower.net

Roger Caillois holds a distinct place among French intellectuals between the two world wars, and after the defeat of Fascism. First seen as a member of the Paris surrealist group (1932-34), he contributes to the then vital discussion on the origins of myth by balancing his interest in poetry, as a project of being and a means of becoming, with a scientist’s rationality through the lens of biology. His attempt to bridge the distance between the two will provide him with a particular view of how acute the project is, given the values each term promotes, the traditions they stem from, and the variable confusions attending "rapprochement." That we are still prey to a general failure here, which Caillois could not extricate himself from, does not in the least diminish the project’s urgency, especially now with technology’s ever more attractive simulations that the two are merging at last — and that the "absence of myth," a subject that compelled so much comment during Caillois’ time, no longer matters.

I do not know what Caillois would have made of all this, save for returning perhaps to his analysis of biology as a basis for myth, eschewing much else as a detour, and his fascination with mimicry in the insect world — the subject of his influential 1937 text, The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis — all in the service of an attempt to discern, as he put it, a "lyrical ideogram" as an objective nexus where poetic thought and lucid reason intersect.

Caillois’ contestive spirit here also characterizes him, and our current interest in him, at least in terms of the world we know and our need for forceful intellects with wide-ranging passions free from careerism or institutional constraints — a freedom that Cailllois advocated more in principle than in fact. But of course it was there, an animating force and a horizon toward which to turn as he did. In this regard, his break with surrealism as being overly "indulgent" on the side of poetry is also born from a desire to recast the movement’s focus on myth and myth-making: from its collective origins and orphic cast to its sectarian momentum, social economy and general phenomenology. It is here as well that we can chart his collaboration with George Bataille, his work with Michelle Leiris and Jean Paulhan, his arguments with Levi-Strauss, whether for good or ill, during and after the College of Sociology, which Caillois helped to form and sustain. Among his other accomplishments I include Les Lettres francaise, which Caillois launched from his inter-war exile in Argentina (1941-1947) and the magazine Sur, edited by Victoria Ocampo, in which he played a pivotal role, along with the UNESCO-sponsored "transdisciplinary" journal Diogenes, which he established as editor in 1952, and, of course, his books.

Thus has Claudine Frank given us a sampling of Caillois’ texts in translation, the most complete in English so far, written over four decades 1934 to 1978, along with informative introductions to each period, at times to each text. Indeed, I am indebted to Frank for the historic frames she provides despite her passing disputes with other commentators, which may be of interest to experts alone, and her sometime opacity.

I have mentioned myth, myth-making and the absence of myth; I do so again. It is the ground Caillois believes his own, at least as far as his analyses take him. But as Caillois’ thought matures his sense of the poetic, its orphic heritage, and myth change. He comes to recuperate a type of formalism that reason embraces as an epitome of Western civilization, and which Breton, for one, repudiates (see Breton’s brilliant response to Caillois thoughts on poetry in Ars Poetica, coauthored with Jean Shuster, which appears in the surrealist review BIEF/Jonction surrealiste, no. 7, June 1959).

Nor is this repudiation an abstract or literary affair. It focuses on the heart of a dispute that anthropology finally came to grips with, and which Aime Cesaire targeted in his scorching critique of Caillois’ defense of Western civilization, and the blind eye he turned to its murderous impulses; a critique I refer readers of Caillois to as a clarifying lens (see Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1955 by Editions Presence African, republished in translation several times thereafter).

Who was Roger Caillois? Certainly, this book will help us draw the character. Will it also act as a mirror to the reader, and the intellectual or poetic currents that resonate within him or her? That is another question. It is not a small one.