Susan Morris: Marking Time Margaret Iversen
1. The Shadow of the Subject In his essay ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’ (1994), Denis Hollier claims that early Surrealist autobiographical writing amounted to ‘the search for what, in literary space, would be an equivalent of what a shadow is in pictorial space; an index that makes the work lose all virtuality’.1 Hollier connects the incorporation of shadows in the visual arts in the 1920s with a contemporaneous form of diary-like literature, exemplified by André Breton’s antinovel Nadja (1928).2 Just as the cast shadow indicates the object, the ‘I’ indicates the subject of enunciation, opening up language to its immediate performative circumstances. By using a diaristic, first-person narrator, Breton adopted a verbal position that, like the shadow, is dependent on reality. One consequence of this strategy is that the unfolding of his autobiographical narrative was just as unanticipated by the author as it is by the reader. The first person, in this instance, is not an expressive subject, but one who combines a performative strategy with an objective, neutral stance. Breton was motivated by his sense that the so-called realist novel in fact suffered from ‘a paucity of reality’, so he included in his texts characters who existed, who were identifiable in ‘real life’ by their names. In Breton’s Mad Love (1937), the recording of experiences as in a medical report is recommended: ‘No incident should be omitted, no name altered, lest the arbitrary make its appearance.’3 His books are also liberally ‘illustrated’ with photographs. Hollier suggests that these, in combination with the inconclusiveness of the first-person narrative, effect an ‘indexation of the tale.’ The lack of arbitrary or fictitious elaboration, enforced by this indexical strategy, gives access to what
Maggie's essay_final copy_v6.indd 1
21/05/15 09:28