Chapter 6 - Surrealist Collage Narrative

Summary

Surrealist collage, favouring immediacy over sustained diegetic developments, would seem to contradict the possibility of coherent or cohesive narratives. Yet the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, which replaces in collage the (con)sequential links of conventional narratives, tantalizes the viewer-reader into searching for new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories or imagining potential scenarios. The chapter explores various key examples of surrealist collage narrative in both the verbal and visual fields: the micro-narratives suggested in André Breton’s early collage poems; Benjamin Péret’s collage poems made up of newspaper fragments; Giorgio de Chirico’s or René Magritte’s painted collages of enigmatic encounters; or Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský’s erotic scenarios. Focusing in particular on the parodic rewriting of the codes of melodrama in Max Ernst’s collage-novels, the chapter examines how fragments of popular nineteenth-century illustrated novels are recycled into new narratives. Finally, the study proposes a critique of psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that erase local disruptions in favour of a global coherence.