Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris
Book by; University of California Press, 2000

The following chapters explore this cultural intersection between mass print culture and surrealism. This project implicitly calls into question assumptions about the avant-garde origins of modernism by looking for surreal perspectives at the level of mass culture itself. Here, I follow the lead of intellectual historians Stephen Kern and Donald Lowe, who have argued that a “perceptual revolution, ” emphasizing modernist synchronies of time and space, occurred in the realms of physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, literature and the arts at the turn of the century. 5 My focus on mass print culture broadens the social and cultural base of this perceptual revolution by demonstrating that such modernist sensibilities were not only generated from the “high” cultural realms of experimental art, literature, music, philosophy, and physics but were woven into the cultural fabric more generally, in such “low” sources as pulp novels and newspaper sensationalism. This book also supplements, and to some extent displaces, the place of the Great War as the harbinger of twentieth-century modernity, a standard historical thesis that, in my view, overemphasizes the destructive and negative aspects of modernity. 6 While the Great War was the most cataclysmic and traumatic event of the early twentieth century, it should not overshadow the multitude of less dramatic cultural connections that bridge the historical break between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Toward this end, this book explores mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which surrealism emerged. 7 The surrealists did not so much create as discover the surreality of their epoch. I am less concerned in the chapters that follow with the activities or opinions of the surrealists themselves than in enlisting their service in directing me, as a cultural historian, toward caches of mass culture that display affinities with surrealism. It is precisely this connection that wrests a popular dynamism out of what is otherwise merely commercial mass culture. It is my hope that this book will provide historians and cultural-studies critics, as well as general readers interested in French popular culture, with a fresh basis for reevaluating both the popular aspects of mass culture and the revolutionary aims of the surrealist movement.

WHAT IS SURREALISM?
Like so many titles in the Que sais-je? (What do I know?) series of pocketbooks, “What is surrealism?” is a larger and more complex question than one of those slim volumes, or this one, can adequately address in a condensed manner. André Breton, founder and magus of surrealism, himself was continually asking the question, and he answered it in various formulations throughout his life. 8 The present work is neither a general introduction to surrealism nor to its basic corpus; those tasks have been more than amply covered. 9 Neither is this book a substitute for reading the great surrealist novels of Paris, Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, Breton's Nadja, and Philippe Soupault's Les Dernières nuits de Paris. 10 Yet a brief overview of surrealism may be useful in understanding the designs of this book. In this endeavor, I apologize in advance both to aficionados, who may find my characterizations of surrealism crude, and to the uninitiated, who may find them esoteric.

The surrealist movement was founded in 1924, an outgrowth of the Paris dada movement of 1919. In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism, ” founder André Breton proclaimed, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin, once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. ” 11 The goal of surrealism was to objectively reconfigure consciousness according to the double processes of “ideological unchaining” (désenchaînement, a radical critique of status quo values and common sense), and the reformulation of thought according to previously unknown associations. 12 These new, surreal visions were expressed principally through poetry and prose, collages and paintings, exhibitions and manifestoes. The revolutionary nature of surrealism as an intellectual project lay in the degree to which its adherents pushed their peculiar blend of skepticism and self-authority. All forms of received knowledge were rejected out of hand and were replaced by new associations: “The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be— the greater its emotional power and poetic reality…. ” 13 This higher reality, a sur-reality, dismantled, reformulated, and expanded one's perceptions of common reality.