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Sleeping fit

First hypnotic sleeping fits

Manuscript

Author

Author Robert Desnos
Person cited Tristan Tzara

Description

Manuscripts and drawings of a sleeping fit by Desnos who, asleep and questioned by Breton, produces troubling prophecies.

‘A rebus only dies once it has been solved’ says Desnos in his sleep, perhaps giving us the secret of his enigmatic drawings, whose entire power is perhaps that of staying alive. In effect, here lies a poetic lesson of the highest order, one that Breton and later Char would come to understand: darkness, breeding the electric circulation of meanings and images, would lie at the heart of the most important surrealist productions – including the least legible ones, in the way that literary criticism understands this term. Desnos, asleep and with no concern for the future implications of his oracles, here proves to be reticent at first, wrapped up in a deeper sleep than usual from which emerge only a few practically illegible words that are curiously curled up. Then, as is often the case, after a particular question a dazzling image springs from this withdrawal, those lands where ‘women’s thoughts take the form of a mechanical razor’ – a perfect instance of the surrealist image that in a dense network of meanings (man – woman, and so on) combines two terms that are as distant as possible. 

First hypnotic sleeping fits.
9 in-4° manuscript pages in black pencil, one of them with a drawing by Desnos showing a face and signed by him on the reverse. Breton asks Desnos:
‘Why shall I not die?’ – ‘Because a rebus only dies once it has been solved’.