Aurora and Cardinal Point

by Michel Leiris

This volume collects two classics of Surrealist fiction, both long out of print, by the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901–1990). Close to Georges Bataille, Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Bacon, and a director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Leiris was a pivotal figure in postwar France. He wrote important works in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, as well as a sequence of autobiographical works regarded as classics of modern French literature (most famously Manhood [1939]). "There is scarcely a literary opus today that can compare in authenticity and stature to that of Michel Leiris," Maurice Nadeau wrote of him. In Aurora, Leiris pursues his eponymous heroine through a visionary landscape shot through with catastrophe. His lucid yet baroque language, with its rich descriptions and ever more extravagant metaphors, is only just able to keep pace. Looking back on this novel, Leiris described its tone: "despite the ‘black’ or ‘frenetic’ style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity." Cardinal Point is Leiris’ first prose work. Written in 1925, soon after he had joined the Surrealist movement, it employs "automatic writing" to excavate the hidden meanings of ordinary words, a procedure that was to underpin his most vital future works.

Genres: Fiction, France, 20th Century

176 pages, Hardcover

First published November 8, 2013

About the author

Born in Paris in 1901, Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. In the 1920s he became a member of the surrealist movement and contributed to La révolution surréaliste. In those years, he wrote a surrealist novel: Aurora.

After his exit from the surrealist group, he teamed up with Georges Bataille in the magazine Documents.

Reviews

[Keith [on semi hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

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Paris,
October 1925.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2.5)

Aurora is Michel Leiris's only 'novel.' Cardinal Point, also included in this volume, is even shorter and less novelesque in form, though somewhat more lucid in its telling. Written at an early age, Aurora was not published until 1946, when in a post-WWII world Leiris deemed it more apropos for release, given its apocalyptic subject matter. Leiris would move on after his involvement in Surrealism to publish travel diaries and other autobiographical works. Aurora is also travel-themed, inspired in part by a solo trip Leiris took to Egypt and Greece. Heavily symbolic, it follows in shifting point-of-view a series of travellers as they move through various apocalyptic landscapes that read on the page like descriptions of Surrealist paintings, fixed in time by the written word.

Leiris's love for language is clear, though it's coupled with a Surrealist resistance to its fixity, and while his baroque prose can be heavy-handed, it can also be beautiful in its bizarre juxtapositions, aided here in this edition by the work of translator Anna Warby. Unfortunately a lot of the crucial wordplay doesn't translate from the French, and reading the explanations in endnotes is not the same. Both Aurora and Cardinal Point are written very much in the spirit of André Breton's first manifesto, in which he wrote: 'Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations.' This approach of fully embracing the ambiguity and slipperiness of language can result in a tedious reading experience. It naturally inhibits the development of any semblance of lucid ongoing narrative, instead rendering the text into a kind of ornate soup, composed of intriguing ingredients that never cohere to produce a uniquely satisfying flavor. In addition, the Surrealist trope of the unattainable, unknowable woman, repeatedly violated and severed into parts in these texts (and elsewhere throughout Surrealist works), does not hold up particularly well to a contemporary reading (though the Surrealist conception and treatment of women is admittedly far too nuanced to explore here).

When it comes to reading Surrealist prose, I much prefer the playful, absurdist tales of such writers as Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos to the dense dreamscapes that can be found in these two works by Leiris. But if you are a diehard purist regarding Surrealism (if that's even possible; Breton would likely both agree and disagree with its possibility), these early works of Leiris may appeal to you, for they certainly hold significance within the movement.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not in a right frame of mind, nor having the patience to truly appreciate this. The scenes described are painterly, lush, otherworldly (yet distinctly of this world). Dark, anxiety inducing, beautifully written. Leiris certainly knows how to appreciate the beauty of the female form.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Surrealist mythic cosmology relating the body to the heavens, corridors to sexes, and to visions that softly collapse. The prose is never stable and endlessly signifies new chains of erotic images, which create a modern myth through symbols within modern man's unconscious. Essential Surrealist writing from a dissident surrealist who was pals with Bastille and participated in the Collège de Sociologie.