What do you think?
Rate this book
Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism: Including Vaché's War Letters and other Writings
Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Biography. Conscripted into the French Army in World War One, Jacques Vache soon became not only the unsurpassed champion of "Desertion from Within," but also the master of "Disservice with Diligence." His post-humous slim book, War Letters (1919)--included in the present volume--is a classic of surrealist anti-militarism and subversion. Renowned as the Inventor of Umour (Humour without the H), Vache was--along with Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont--the major inspirer of Andre Breton and the surrealist revolution. The first of its kind in English, this book chronicles Vache's boundless originality, creative nonconformity, revolutionary morality (or umoral-ity), and his all-out turn-the-world-upside-down hilarity. Welcomed by Andre Breton himself into the Paris Surrealist Group in 1966, Franklin Rosemont took part in the Paris group's activities for several months and went on to co-organize the Chicago Surrealist Group later that year. Rosemont (1943-2009) died earlier this year.
- GenresArtNonfiction
388 pages, Paperback
First published December 30, 2007
About the author
Jacques Vaché
13 books13 followersJacques Vaché (7 September 1895 – 6 January 1919) was a friend of André Breton, the founder of surrealism. Vaché was one of the chief inspirations behind the Surrealist movement.
In 1914 he went in Brest to fight in WWI and to work as a translator; in 1915 was wounded and later in a Nantes' hospital he became friend with the physician André Breton. Since this moment Vaché became one the main inspirations for Surrealism and for Breton's anthology of Black Humour.
Jacques Vaché his also remembered when on 24 June 1917 dressed as a british soldier he jumped on the seats of Conservatoire Maubel just after the first act of Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Guillaume Apollinaire treating the public with a gun.
He died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 January 1919 from an overdose of opium. Alongside him lay the naked body of another French soldier. He was known for his indifference to French contemporary culture, for wearing a monocle and for being a bohemian dandy with a turbolent life. He didn't left any completed work of literature beyond his letters from the warfront published in 1919 and written to Breton, Louis Aragon, Fraenkel and others, which acquired a cult status among surrealists.
In 1914 he went in Brest to fight in WWI and to work as a translator; in 1915 was wounded and later in a Nantes' hospital he became friend with the physician André Breton. Since this moment Vaché became one the main inspirations for Surrealism and for Breton's anthology of Black Humour.
Jacques Vaché his also remembered when on 24 June 1917 dressed as a british soldier he jumped on the seats of Conservatoire Maubel just after the first act of Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Guillaume Apollinaire treating the public with a gun.
He died in a hotel room in Nantes on 6 January 1919 from an overdose of opium. Alongside him lay the naked body of another French soldier. He was known for his indifference to French contemporary culture, for wearing a monocle and for being a bohemian dandy with a turbolent life. He didn't left any completed work of literature beyond his letters from the warfront published in 1919 and written to Breton, Louis Aragon, Fraenkel and others, which acquired a cult status among surrealists.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 11, 2010
In describing this book, a friend of mine said that “it tells us more about Franklin Rosemont than about Jacques Vaché.” If one considers Jacques Vaché simply as the flesh and blood individual who died in January 1919, this is certainly true, but as the book shows, Vaché became something more than that flesh and blood individual, due to the relationships he developed in his brief lifetime. For André Breton, the other “musketeers” and the surrealist movement as a whole, Vaché became an imaginative force that continued to live and act in them. And if Rosemont’s book is about him, it is more precisely a loving, enthusiastic and “umour-full” reflection of his relationship the imaginative force that Jacques Vaché became. And since, just as no individual exists in complete isolation from other individuals, so no relationship exists in complete isolation from other relations, inevitably, Rosemont’s relationship with the imaginative force of Jacques Vaché interweaves with his relationships with a wide variety of ideas, movements, activities and beings. And this is also how I read this passionate speculative biography.
To give an example, on page 267 of Rosemont’s book, he brought up the importance of daydreaming in the lives of children and the tendency of children to elaborate their daydreams into sagas. He suggested that Vaché’s “collective elaboration” of this sort with his cousin was unusual. I had to question this. Memories from my own childhood and observations of children at play now convince me that children often elaborate their dream worlds “collectively”, and that when they do so, this elaboration often goes beyond reverie. This elaboration is rather a delightful form of Stirner’s “union of egoists” realizes these daydreams as games or as plays without spectators… The process of elaborating these dream worlds often involve intense arguments over whose vision will hold the day, but usually the children resolve these arguments by discovering ways to weave the apparently discordant visions together.
And many of the dichotomies that seem so clear-cut to us as adults have much fuzzier boundaries in childhood (if they exist at all), so even a dream world that appears solitary to us may not be nearly so solitary in the eyes of the child creating that world. As a young child, I had one friend I could always count on. I called him Bolivar Dick. To all appearance, he was nothing but some brown and tan cloth sewn together, stuffed with dark gray wool, with a smiling plastic bear snout and two buttons for eyes (one of which eventually disappeared). But Bolivar Dick was also my companion on most of my apparently solitary adventures into dream worlds. I didn’t just bring him with me; I conversed with him, consulted him, even argued with him. Does that fact that he was a projected aspect of myself make this any less a “collective” adventure?
I see the “Unique”, that is myself or yourself as unique being, as existing only in the present moment. The being of a moment ago that, for convenience, I also call “I” is not the same being as I am now, but rather a unique being with whom a have a specific relationship… this is why each actual “I” is a unique and unspeakable being. What is spoken is the relationships between unique beings. Thus, even if Bolivar Dick was a projection of my childhood self, this projections was its own unique being in relation to the ever-changing unique beings that were this childhood self, and the dream worlds I elaborated with him can seen as both “solitary” creations and “collective” creations, at the same time, merely depending on how one chooses to communicate about them.
As you can see, Rosemont’s book interwove with me in a way that reveals more about me than either Rosemont or Vaché. And yet it does reveal something about both of them as well. That is their capacity for evocative expression. Jacques Vaché’s War Letters (which comprise the last thirty pages or so of the book, in a beautiful translation by Guy Ducornet), along with the references in Breton and other surrealists to the brief life of this magnificent, chaotic, poetic rebel evoked nearly 500 pages of delightful speculation in Franklin Rosemont, who indeed may have been the inventor of a new form of literature—the speculative biography (a way to write about the life of one about whom very little is known)—and in turn, Rosemont’s speculations about Jacques Vaché’s life evoked my own reflections. I love a book that can do this for me.
To give an example, on page 267 of Rosemont’s book, he brought up the importance of daydreaming in the lives of children and the tendency of children to elaborate their daydreams into sagas. He suggested that Vaché’s “collective elaboration” of this sort with his cousin was unusual. I had to question this. Memories from my own childhood and observations of children at play now convince me that children often elaborate their dream worlds “collectively”, and that when they do so, this elaboration often goes beyond reverie. This elaboration is rather a delightful form of Stirner’s “union of egoists” realizes these daydreams as games or as plays without spectators… The process of elaborating these dream worlds often involve intense arguments over whose vision will hold the day, but usually the children resolve these arguments by discovering ways to weave the apparently discordant visions together.
And many of the dichotomies that seem so clear-cut to us as adults have much fuzzier boundaries in childhood (if they exist at all), so even a dream world that appears solitary to us may not be nearly so solitary in the eyes of the child creating that world. As a young child, I had one friend I could always count on. I called him Bolivar Dick. To all appearance, he was nothing but some brown and tan cloth sewn together, stuffed with dark gray wool, with a smiling plastic bear snout and two buttons for eyes (one of which eventually disappeared). But Bolivar Dick was also my companion on most of my apparently solitary adventures into dream worlds. I didn’t just bring him with me; I conversed with him, consulted him, even argued with him. Does that fact that he was a projected aspect of myself make this any less a “collective” adventure?
I see the “Unique”, that is myself or yourself as unique being, as existing only in the present moment. The being of a moment ago that, for convenience, I also call “I” is not the same being as I am now, but rather a unique being with whom a have a specific relationship… this is why each actual “I” is a unique and unspeakable being. What is spoken is the relationships between unique beings. Thus, even if Bolivar Dick was a projection of my childhood self, this projections was its own unique being in relation to the ever-changing unique beings that were this childhood self, and the dream worlds I elaborated with him can seen as both “solitary” creations and “collective” creations, at the same time, merely depending on how one chooses to communicate about them.
As you can see, Rosemont’s book interwove with me in a way that reveals more about me than either Rosemont or Vaché. And yet it does reveal something about both of them as well. That is their capacity for evocative expression. Jacques Vaché’s War Letters (which comprise the last thirty pages or so of the book, in a beautiful translation by Guy Ducornet), along with the references in Breton and other surrealists to the brief life of this magnificent, chaotic, poetic rebel evoked nearly 500 pages of delightful speculation in Franklin Rosemont, who indeed may have been the inventor of a new form of literature—the speculative biography (a way to write about the life of one about whom very little is known)—and in turn, Rosemont’s speculations about Jacques Vaché’s life evoked my own reflections. I love a book that can do this for me.
February 15, 2009
Fun! Chock-full of rare, juicy tidbits on a devil-may-care nut, who produced little but inspired many!
Jacques Vaché (known for his indifference and for wearing a monocle) had a healthy imagination. Full of savage wisdom (“Well then -- I see two ways of letting things take their course -- create one's own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words -- not often, mind you -- or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings -- those of the moment, naturally.”); madcap visions of a film that never was (“what a film I'll star in! -- with careening automobiles, don't you know, and collapsing bridges, and enormous hands creeping over the screen toward some document -- useless and priceless! -- with such tragic conversations, in evening wear, behind the palm trees with a thousand ears!"); and umor-ly influenced methods on movie-hopping as an exquisite corpse experience (“I agreed wholeheartedly with Jacques Vache in appreciating nothing so much as dropping into a cinema when whatever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and leaving at the first hint of boredom -- of surfeit -- to rush off to another cinema where we behaved in the same way.... I have never known anything more magnetizing... one came out 'charged' for a few days.) the book never fails to entertain and ignite one’s own unconventional impulses.
Jacques Vaché (known for his indifference and for wearing a monocle) had a healthy imagination. Full of savage wisdom (“Well then -- I see two ways of letting things take their course -- create one's own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words -- not often, mind you -- or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings -- those of the moment, naturally.”); madcap visions of a film that never was (“what a film I'll star in! -- with careening automobiles, don't you know, and collapsing bridges, and enormous hands creeping over the screen toward some document -- useless and priceless! -- with such tragic conversations, in evening wear, behind the palm trees with a thousand ears!"); and umor-ly influenced methods on movie-hopping as an exquisite corpse experience (“I agreed wholeheartedly with Jacques Vache in appreciating nothing so much as dropping into a cinema when whatever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and leaving at the first hint of boredom -- of surfeit -- to rush off to another cinema where we behaved in the same way.... I have never known anything more magnetizing... one came out 'charged' for a few days.) the book never fails to entertain and ignite one’s own unconventional impulses.
June 17, 2022
Franklin Rosemont's analysis is a bit wandering, though there are some really great thoughts hidden in there. With a subject like Vaché, about whom there are few biographical details, it was unfortunate that Rosemont chose to be obtuse about a few of them.
The real highlight here is the included War Letters and almost every other thing Vaché wrote. Such a small corpus and yet so important.
The real highlight here is the included War Letters and almost every other thing Vaché wrote. Such a small corpus and yet so important.
December 8, 2018
Surprisingly little is available on this incredibly influential figure of the early avant garde. As ambiguous in life as in his writings, this book is more of a theoritcal discourse on Umour than it is an actual biography (for the simple reason that not much biographical information exists for the short 23 years of his life). Very well written and researched, it is valuable no only for its direct content on the life and theory of Vache, but for the cultural perspective that unfolds throughout the telling of his tale. A minor caveat would be that there does exist a bit of a sectarian bias to some of the opinions put forth by the writer, being a member of the Chicago surrealist group himself. Nonetheless I greatly enjoyed it and have already ordered another of his books "Juice is stranger than fiction," on T Bone Slim, who I learned of in this book which as such also works as a great reference work for finding obscure figures and writers in the history of arts and letters.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews