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Sleeping fit

First hypnotic sleeping fits

Manuscript

Author

Author non identifié
Notes by Robert Desnos

Description

Manuscript in pencil of an annotated sleeping fit by Desnos in 1922.

Disjointed but still legible, here is a long evocation of a scene, or more precisely a state, in which the motifs of woman, stones, and the eye are woven together – to such an extent that in the reference to ‘stone on my eyelids’ one would think we were hearing an anticipation of ‘L'amoureuse’ by Paul Eluard, the woman who in his collection Capitale de la douleur is ‘standing on my eyelids’. As is often the case in the ‘sleeping fits’ we find the most obvious mundanities (‘I who love bananas’) alongside lyrical heights (‘topazes’), associations (topazes / stones / stoned / virgin and martyr), ending up by prompting a motto (‘you don’t improvise madness’) that in a note at the foot of the page is given to us in a reworked, more pithy and striking form by Breton: ‘madness cannot be improvised’.

4 in-4° manuscript pages, two of them on the headed notepaper for the ‘Congrès de Paris’ and two on the headed notepaper for the ‘Office français des Intérêts féminins’, written in pencil by Desnos: ‘On the sand, a hand on the riverbank… a pile of sand a hand (a woman’s?) no a hand I can no longer open my eyes.’