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

To date, most critical discussions of the origins of surrealism have focused upon the high-brow cultural realms of literature and art criticism. In L'Histoire du Surréalisme (1944), Maurice Nadeau, the first chronicler of the surrealist movement, established an elaborate literary and artistic genealogy of surrealism. 14 Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Jacques Vaché provided the poetic impulses toward surrealism; Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Jarry, Lautréamont (Isidor Ducasse), and Arthur Rimbaud were its “literary stimulators”; Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia were its inspirational artists. As an avant-garde movement, surrealism was the heir of cubism and Zurich dadaism. In the main, Nadeau provides a good point of departure.

But it is a limited slice of cultural life. Such a list of origins cannot explain why, for example, Fantômas, the ambiguous anti-hero of a series of sensationalist pulp novels, occupied a place on the genealogical tree of “Erutaréttil” (Littérature spelled backwards). Or why serial murderer Henri Désiré Landru, the “Bluebeard of Gambais, ” was favorably ranked on a dada literary value chart. Or why the surrealist inquiry “Is Suicide a Solution?” was accompanied with dozens of suicide faits divers (sensationalist news blurbs) in the premier issues of La Révolution Surréaliste. With the exception of film, the popular origins of surrealism have been neglected. 15 In this book, popular culture takes center stage.

WHAT IS POPULAR CULTURE?
Popular culture, like surrealism, is difficult to define precisely. Yet here too an overview may assist readers unfamiliar with the issues, as well as clarify my own use of the term. Traditionally, a distinction is drawn between mass and popular culture. The opposition is based largely upon the differing social bases of cultural production; mass culture is produced by an entrepreneurial elite and marketed to the general population, while popular culture is generated by the people (populo, menu peuple, the folk) themselves. In France, and in Europe generally, the ascendancy of mass culture began in the sixteenth century with the advent of the printing press, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the social rise of European commercial and professional elites. 16 As the forces of Atlantic commercial capitalism and early industrialization began to transform traditional social relations at the end of the eighteenth century, a revival of elite interest in popular culture occurred among national folktale collectors and the Romantics. 17 The full flowering of mass culture commenced during the late nineteenth-century Belle Époque, with the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, the implementation of compulsory national education programs, and the advent of communications technologies such as the mass-circulation daily newspaper, the telegraph and telephone, the cinema, and soon thereafter wireless radio. 18 In the twentieth century, numerous European intellectuals generated critiques of mass culture, among which perhaps the most widely known are Henri Lefebvre's critique of the society of consumption, the culture-industry thesis of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and the concept of cultural hegemony extrapolated from the writings of Antonio Gramsci. 19

In recent decades however, some historians and intellectuals have questioned whether a sharp distinction between mass and popular culture can be maintained. Presumed processes of social homogenization and ideological domination associated with mass culture have been challenged by both social historians and critical theorists. 20 In this book, I also question the usefulness of maintaining a strict distinction between mass culture and popular culture, particularly in twentieth-century Western Europe and North America, where the popularity of mass culture vastly overreaches the influence of folk cultures. Instead, I employ the surrealists to help me sift through the morass of mass culture to recover a “secret history” of popular culture in early twentieth-century France. 21 That is, the surrealists guide me, as a cultural historian, to specific expressions of mass culture whose cultural meanings remain partially detached from the ideological interests or social values of their commercial production. I consider mass culture “popular” when it satisfies two requirements: 22 First, the source of mass culture must be socially widespread in its consumption, in aggregate numbers, across social classes, and at differing cultural levels.