August 1, 2003

Duke U. Press Publishes Anthology of Works by the Surrealist Thinker Roger Caillois

By SCOTT McLEMEE

SURREAL LIFE: Cultural historians may have overlooked the role of the Mexican jumping bean in French intellectual life. The leaping legume precipitated a debate among the Surrealists in 1934 -- pitting the movement's founder, André Breton, against one of its most brilliant young members, Roger Caillois, then a student of the social sciences at the prestigious École Normal Supérieure. "The main issue was whether or not to slice it open," says Claudine Frank, an