From the issue dated August 1, 2003
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Duke U. Press Publishes Anthology of Works by the Surrealist Thinker Roger CailloisBy SCOTT McLEMEESURREAL 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 assistant professor of French at Barnard College. "Breton wanted to preserve the mystery, whereas Caillois wanted to open it, to understand the mechanism." For Caillois, finding a worm inside the jumping bean would not have dispelled the mystery, only deepened it, according to Ms. Frank. The writings she has selected and translated for The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, recently published by Duke University Press, reveal a thinker for whom anthropology, literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences were just so many doors leading into the same labyrinth. In one of his earliest essays, for example, "The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis" (published in a Surrealist journal around the time of the jumping-bean colloquy), Caillois drew on both mythological and entomological sources to explore the fusion of sex and death embodied in that insect. Successive waves of existentialist, structuralist, and postmodernist thought had swept across Parisian intellectual life by the time Caillois died in 1978, leaving him an all but forgotten figure -- although careful readers of Jacques Lacan's influential study of "the mirror stage" of psychological development might have noted a respectful citation of one of his papers. Ms. Frank says she discovered Caillois while studying "the origins of French theory, as it's called. ... I was intrigued by him, by what seemed to be both the lucidity and the enigma" of his writings. "When I started doing research on him," she recalls, "I found that very little work had been done, and there wasn't even a bibliography." In the 1930s, many of Caillois's writings appeared in the journals of small political and intellectual circles. During World War II, he emigrated to Buenos Aires -- a move that paid long-term dividends for the world of letters, since Caillois later translated the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and other Latin American authors into French. After the war, he made an unsuccessful attempt to get an academic position in Paris. Instead, he joined the Office of Ideas at Unesco, where he oversaw translation projects and started a journal for interdisciplinary scholarship, Diogène (which also appeared in English as Diogenes). He continued to publish his own fiction, criticism, and theoretical writings. *** Contemptuous of the jargon-clotted prose that characterized postwar French intellectual life, Caillois wrote in a spare yet elegant style that seems, at first, wonderfully lucid. But his clarity can be deceptive. Beneath the surface, notes Ms. Frank, he is often carrying on a cryptic dialogue with other thinkers from the milieu of Surrealism and other avant-garde movements -- or arguing with his own earlier perspectives -- without making a formal declaration of that fact. In addition to her long introduction to the collection, Ms. Frank has prefaced each essay with an analysis of some of the hidden elements making it move. One of the subtexts is an incident that makes the Surrealist jumping-bean debate look much less strange by contrast. Following his break with the Surrealists, Caillois and a few other intellectuals created a group called the College of Sociology, a study circle he described as "exclusively devoted to the study of closed groups: societies of men in primitive populations, initiatory communities, sacerdotal brotherhoods, heretical or orgiastic sects, monastic or military orders, terrorist organizations, and secret political organizations of the Far East or from murky periods in European history." The group's interest in such matters was not strictly academic. One of its leaders was Georges Bataille, a philosopher and pornographic novelist expelled by the Surrealists for being, basically, too strange. His followers created a secret society within the college called Acéphele ("The Headless Man"), which practiced rituals in a forest just outside Paris. At some point, the group decided that the best way to consolidate itself would be to perform a human sacrifice. One of the members of Acéphele even volunteered to be the victim. The next step was finding someone to serve as executioner. Caillois was offered the job but declined. Not long afterward, he left the group and went back to Argentina. "In the end," he later wrote, "everything was left unresolved. At least, that's what I imagine, for I was one of the most reticent of members, and things may have gone further than I knew." By an uncanny coincidence, Ms. Frank turns out to have an indirect connection to the topic she has been studying. While working on her book, she learned that, during the 1950s, her parents belonged to a reading group in Paris that included two former members of the secret society. "My father says that they never mentioned anything about Acéphele," she says. There is something more than a little Dostoyevskian about a circle of intellectuals talking themselves into ritualistic murder. As it happens, Ms. Frank's father is Joseph Frank, a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Stanford University; the final volume of his biography of Dostoyevsky was published by Princeton University Press last year. Which shows just how small the world is, and how very strange. http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 47, Page A14
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education