Contribution to Book
Autobiography
A History of the Surrealist Novel
(2023)
Abstract
Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.
Disciplines
Publication Date
February, 2023
Editor
Anna Watz
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
ISBN
9781316514153
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009082648.003
Citation Information
Katherine Conley. "Autobiography" A History of the Surrealist Novel (2023) p. 25 - 38 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/katharine-conley/51/