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Question / answer

First hypnotic sleeping fits

Manuscript

Author

Author Robert Desnos
People cited Louis Aragon, Jacques Baron, Simone Kahn, ép. Breton puis Collinet, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault

Description

Desnos speaks, replies to questions and writes, often briefly (‘Yes’, ‘No’) and sometimes at greater length in this manuscript of a particularly fertile session of sleeping fits.

The extent of this collection firstly reflects an exceptionally long session, during which Desnos speaks, answers and writes, often briefly (‘Yes’, ‘No’) and sometimes at greater length. The sleeper alternates between writing and speaking, in which case his words are noted by the scribe. A few drawings are interspersed in a set that is studded with sometimes astonishing insights – such as that ‘heart syphilis’ to which Soupault seemed to have fallen victim, or that ‘cerebral circus’ that would lead to Desnos’ death; note moreover that this phrase reappears in Les Pas perdus, when Breton evokes ‘a sequence of drawings including The nameless town of the cerebral circus.’ As is often the case, the questions hinge on the future, and the surrealists can’t help falling prey to spiritualist models, with the ‘medium’ being solicited in the same way as a clairvoyant. The answers are striking for the irony of the information they provide – such as that future attributed to Breton: ‘He will hunt for butterflies’... A clairvoyant in the sense of Rimbaud’s writings as well, in Desnos’ attitude in some of his replies, striking less for their quality as predictions than for the density of their phrases: ‘What will Aragon be doing in two years’ time? He will observe beings.’ And Aragon’s future appears, in other words the truth of the novelist within him.

First hypnotic sleeping fits.
86 large in-8° manuscript pages by Desnos for the answers, in blue or black pencil; each page includes a question and a reply in the form of a word, a phrase or a drawing. 

The questions relate to the date of the death of each of the participants, to their meetings and their journeys; the first sleeping fit evokes, in this order, an unidentified woman,  Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon; the second one (folios 91 to 105, 15 pages) evokes  Aragon and Nazimova (a Hollywood actress of Russian origin, whose name appears for the first time during a sleeping fit session on 27 September 1922).

Exhibition.
- La Beauté convulsive, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1991.