On Valerie, Nezval, Max Ernst, and Collage: Variations on a Theme by Giuseppe Dierna
The Reverend Father Dulac Dessalé: “Rise, bride of Jesus. Follow me, my beauty, to the cracks in the walls, I who am called cockroach and kill-joy . . .” 1
in place of a prologue Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was written in 1935 at the height of Surrealist activity in Czechoslovakia, but stayed tucked away in a drawer for a decade before being published. Perhaps the most surrealistic of Nezval’s fiction, it is a text where the Gothic novel and dream theory combine to produce one of his more compelling works.2
the gothic novel Valerie clearly belongs to the tradition of both the roman noir and the serial novel — tales dispensed in weekly booklets quickly crumpled by impatient readers — by virtue of the author’s deliberate use of some of the compositional elements that define this particular literary genre.3 The entire plot, for example, revolves around a single protagonist, and the narrative structure is broken into short 199
chapters where many things happen — a repeating microstructure that concludes with a sudden, unexpected turn of events. Nezval, however, has stripped these devices of their earlier function, which was to keep the reader’s attention and pique interest for further installments. And if we are to adopt Louise Reybaud’s definition, the genre is also defined by a typical constellation of characters: Take a young, unhappy, persecuted woman. Place next to her a brutal blood-thirsty tyrant, a refined, virtuous squire, and a hypocritical, perfidious confidant. Once you have all these characters in hand, briskly mix together into six, eight, or ten installments and serve warm.4
Yet in Valerie, Nezval frequently likes to break these rules, when for example he refuses to define with any sort of precision the time and place where the action is occurring. In other words, though he drew on Gothic and serial novels for his model, he placed “certain limitations” on how this model was to be employed. Wherever possible he lets the narrative slip into the indeterminate and inexact, ill-defined feelings joining with the imprecision of tangential details.
a romanticism of the impossible As is generally known, with the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 the French Surrealists began immediately to revalue the most gory offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, the Gothic novel, 200
which they held up as the antithesis of “realistic,” psychological prose. In 1931 ex-surrealist Antonin Artaud publishes his translation-adaptation of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, one of the most popular Gothic novels, and in 1932 André Breton writes: All those castles of Otranto, of Udolfo, of the Pyrenees, of Lovel, of Athlin, crevassed with great cracks and eaten by subterranean passages, persisted in the shadiest corner of my mind in living their factitious life, in presenting their curious phosphorescence.5
Nezval echoes a similar sentiment in his Foreword to Valerie: “I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes, declining to convey to me their content.” 6 Though it certainly was not unusual for the Czech avant-garde to devote attention to genres that were considered “lowbrow,” in the 1920s their poetics of the “miraculous” and exoticism differed from their contemporaries among the French Surrealists in that it steered clear of violence and intractable contrasts, mysteries, enigmas, and literature noir. But by the end of this generally optimistic decade the artistic conception of the Prague Poetists began to change. In 1929 the Odeon publishing house (which from the outset supported the group’s publications) brought out a Czech translation of Lautréamont’s Les chants de Maldoror, the selection having been made by Karel Teige and Philippe Soupault,7 and between 1929 and 1930 ten installments of Pierre Souvestra and 201
Marcel Allain’s Fantômas adventures, with collages by Jindřich Štyrský as cover art. So captivated was Štyrský that he wrote in Odeon’s Literary Bulletin: “In the Fantômas series there is concentrated so much horror, blood, and corpses, and yet so much poetry, moonlit nights, garden parties, the sea, and maidenly charm, it is simply unthinkable that its author was a mediocre scribbler-storyteller.” 8 One of the key aspects marking the transition of the Czech avant-garde from Poetism to Surrealism is just this replacement of the world of poetry and earthly joys, which was the ideological linchpin of Poetism, with the macabre and dramatic world of the subconscious and unknown — Teige’s “black revolutionary romanticism.” Max Ernst thus takes the place of Le Douanier Rousseau. Teige’s comment about the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha in a 1936 essay is telling: In the Romantic fondness for phantoms and for the lurid, for evil and for vice as a means of disturbing the moral order, for dream, delirium, and the open acceptance of erotic desire [. . .] in this speculative mix of dream, wonder, and adventure we see a tendency to escape the narrow confines into which the bourgeoisie have placed Beauty, which it has identified with Good.9
And in one of the manifestoes of Poetism, “Kapka inkoustu” [A Drop of Ink] (1928), Nezval remarks that “the zeal for war is an infernal obsession devised for the emasculation and eradication of mankind. The fact that mankind is prey to this deception is
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evinced by a special aura, a veiled drama.”10 But a few years later, as if echoing the speculations of Edmund Burke on horror as a form of the sublime, at the premiere of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in Prague’s Metro cinema in 1933 he declares: “In art horror is delightful [. . .] In art horror must be more than horror, it must be poetry if we are not to mistake it for the reading of crime tabloids.”11 When Poetism was finally able to accept the principle that the nature of drama, and therefore that which inspires horror, can be the bearer of beauty, the Czech avant-garde entered the subsequent, Surrealist phase of its development.
(darkness again) childhood The Gothic novel interested Nezval not only for its ability to flush out hidden, “subterranean” human instincts, but also as a way to extract childhood memories, as if a magnet reaching into the very depths of memory. His fascination with Murnau’s film was evident: The material for the fantastic in Nosferatu is reality, real objects, obsolete objects, therefore capable of touching our memories and our dreams, and in this reality lies the film’s surrealistic charm.12
And as if he were drawing on the magic of objects mentioned by Breton in Mad Love (“The objects that, between the lassitude of some and the desire of others, go off to dream at the antique fair . . .”), 203
which again appear in Jiří Sever’s cycle of photographs Bez protijedů [No Antidote],13 Nezval continues: What makes this old film surrealist is the peculiar selection of objects which here have their presence [. . .] And if I’m to express this schematically, they are generally objects having a patina. That is, what I call a patina is the special aura surrounding these objects, which are no longer used in practical life, which were current in our childhood and have now gone out of fashion and use, having become a bit ridiculous and very poetic, and while not the most attractive, they hold captive many of our memories of the past.14
In addition to rediscovering the time of childhood concealed in the banal and rather predictable plot structure of the Gothic novel, Nezval also sets himself the task in Valerie of altering language. The attention he gives to language in the novel is far from negligible. The reader notices right off a stylistic distinction between the language of direct speech (used by the characters) and that of indirect speech (used by the narrator), which becomes a linguistic cliché when the novelistic stereotypes of Valerie, Orlík, and the other characters are juxtaposed next to the lyrical, metaphorical voice of the narrator. The syntax imitates the sentence structure of nineteenth-century Czech, and the rhythm of compound sentences increasingly slows and disintegrates. In this context, Orlík’s first letter — with its vapid rhetoric, its almost puerile earnestness — is an excellent example of clever apocrypha.
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The atmosphere of the Gothic novel is also suggested by the constant repetition of adverbs such as “unexpectedly,” “at once,” “suddenly,” and a whole host of “howevers,” “althoughs,” and “yets,” often employed not for the purpose of moving the plot forward, but to give the false impression that something unforeseen has happened, or to jolt and startle the drowsing reader.15 In his attempt to rediscover the Gothic aura and the time of childhood, Nezval selected words that had been either phased out of common lexical usage or extracted directly from the traditional vocabulary of the serial novel, words that were as outdated as the objects embellishing the background of Murnau’s film: constable, bed jacket, scapular, burial ground, a convent school for young girls, an oil lamp . . .
and the butterflies have begun to sing The magic of oil lamps! A round oil lamp standing on the cliff (the moon) watches the river’s current carrying off the corset-swan in Toyen’s collage made for the anthology Neither Swan nor Moon, published in 1936 by the Czechoslovak Surrealists to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of K. H. Mácha’s death. Nezval himself in Prague Walker fantasizes about an encounter on Old Town Square where a widow appears to him who “as a sign of mourning is carrying a large mirror under her left arm and under her right an oil lamp of the kind no longer in use,” or how in the locked halls of the National Museum he encounters a “somnambulant woman with a lamp in her hand, wandering through the centuries.”16 205
What attracted and fascinated the Surrealists, however, was not only the undeniable mystery of these oil lamps and lanterns — “projectionists of images,” “talismans of dreams” (Bachelard)17 — but the coming together of moths and an entire array of nocturnal insects toward the source of light. Like the tiny mayflies excitedly circling the skeleton-candle rising from a candleholder in one of Toyen’s drawings from her 1944 cycle War, Hide Yourself!, the Surrealists, too, were drawn to the almost irresistible Baroque enchantment with light engulfing the body.18 Under figure no. 120 in Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes appears the following caption: “And the butterflies have begun to sing.” Small butterflies and insects of all types assemble around the flame of a gaslight, while looming in the background is a gloomy cemetery with tombstones and skeletons.19 Lamps and moths often meet in the photographs of Brassaï from the 1930s. In one of Toyen’s later collages, Natural Law (1946), a lone oil lamp standing on a table in an empty room casts a triangle of light, inviting an agitated swarm of tiny winged creatures, and Nezval in Woman in the Plural recalls “my nights like flies meeting Chinese lanterns over a pile of feathers.”20 On the novel’s first page “Valerie, an oil lamp in her hand, entered the yard” and immediately: “A moth circled the lamp. Then a second, and a third” (13). After a while the setting grows even more tenebrous: “Not that the lamp could be recognized: swirling about it were moths from all the surrounding gardens” (14). And when Valerie quickly runs home in fright at the sight of her (menstrual) blood: “The moths flew after the lamp as she took
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it with her to light the way down the long corridor leading to her room” (20). Similarly, it seems to Valerie as if the moths are the sole inhabitants of the Chirico-like deserted town square to where Valerie has strayed: “Her eyes settled on a tall gas lamp with moths fluttering around it” ( 39). Yet when Valerie and Orlík have moved to the idyllic region of the novel’s last chapter, we learn that “The lodge was so high up that not a single moth came flying to the lamp” (193).21 And it should be kept in mind that the Czech noční můra (lit. night moth) means a nightmare, an incubus.
a week of wonders In his Nosferatu speech Nezval outlined the elements of analogy found in poetry and dream that were used to elicit fear in the viewer (the miraculous in contrast to logic and the “highly absurd display of the principle of causality”).22 A careful reading of Valerie reveals it to be an exact description of a dream that gradually passes into the realm of reality, only to end up in the realm of myth, a surreal Eden resounding with Mácha’s verse. That the entire first part of the novel — until Chapter xxxii — is a narrative of the dream that Valerie is having on the night of her first menstruation is substantiated by various allusions which Nezval has scattered between the lines. In reference to the heroine he says, for example, that “She supposed she was asleep” (48), or “She stretched out in the carriage as if on a bed” (19), or that “her spirit wandered like that of someone sleeping” (39).23 207
The novel’s locations also correspond to the author’s impulse to make the countryside a setting for horror. There are the oppressive atmosphere of the vault under the grandmother’s house and the close spaces of more common interior, such as the attic and the henhouse. Even the exteriors, when they become the scene of the action, conform to this schema. They are either indeterminate, repeating themselves as if a bad dream (“For the third time, without knowing how, she had entered a deserted square that seemed to be enchanted” ( 39)) or they are as dark and oppressive as the interiors. The same goes for the sounds that — again as in a dream — come to Valerie’s ear muffled and faint (we never know whether the sound is actual or just a general impression), for everywhere around her the “silence was so intense she could hear the brook running” (14). The dream-like nature of the novel’s first part is further confirmed by the composition of Valerie’s character. Once again borrowing elements from the serial novel, Nezval has given her the ability to be everywhere at once. She continually appears in a variety of settings either in an active role or as a “passive observer.” Everything we as readers learn about the course of events (and thus even misleading information) comes to us via Valerie, who is in turn identified with the narrator’s voice, his contours and limitations.
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max ernst In his preface to Bridge, Nezval states that Valerie is a “concretely irrational psychic collage freely borrowing from the genre of socalled pulp literature everything belonging to the nethermost regions of our unconscious,”24 and if it is true that he was generally influenced by Ernst’s work from Une semaine de bonté (1934), then we should consider what influence the collage as a compositional technique and source of inspiration had on this curious novel. Nezval was certainly familiar with Ernst’s collages. He saw them exhibited in Prague (as he often mentioned in the 1930s), or in Paris in 1933,25 and the novel’s title clearly suggests a mix of Ernst’s collage novel and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.26 Further reference to Une semaine de bonté is made by the missionary in his sermon: “You are an alabaster hand extended in a house of plague, infested with flies” (33), which seems to come straight from Ernst’s “Third Visible Poem” where a long row of clasped white hands is situated before an empty arid backdrop with a lone egg in an eggcup an isolated, impassive viewer.27 Similarly, the constable with the head of a polecat evidently comes from those men with the heads of lions, roosters, and birds that inhabit the pages of Ernst’s collage novel, even though humans with the heads of animals (roosters, ostriches, owls, etc.) began to appear in abundance in Savinio’s work circa 1930-32.28 And in de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros (1929) — which according to Karel Teige was the “most magnificent novel in the world” — “the enigmatic, perturbing, alarming quality of the heads of birds
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had more than once sent Hebdomeros off into complicated meditations [. . .] In general he considered birds’ heads as bad omens, even bearers of misfortune.” 29 In my opinion, however, it is another of Ernst’s collage novels, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (1930), which provides a more direct model for Valerie. Indeed, at its very outset we read: On Good Friday night of the shameful year 1930 a child hardly sixteen years old dipped her hands in a sewer, pricked her skin and with her blood traced these lines: To Love the Holy and dip one’s hands in a sewer, such is happiness for us, the children of Mary. [She then] went to bed and had the dream that we will try to relate through pictures in this book.30
From here the novel is narrated in 79 collages, accompanied by captions at the bottom of the page narrating the young heroine Marceline-Marie’s quest for the “heavenly groom” in an atmosphere of sensual mysticism: “Dear Lord, fondle me as you knew so well how to do, during the unforgettable night when . . . my soul was flooded with heavenly dew . . .”31 We are reminded here of the subtle ambiguity of several passages in Valerie, like the homily from Chapter iv, for example, which naturally takes as its model the Song of Songs. And finally the relationship between MarcelineMarie and the cleric, a relationship built on sexual desire, again obliges us to draw parallels between Valerie and the missionary on the one hand and Ernst’s young maiden and the priest on the other:
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The priest, gone mad between two masses: “You’re the one who infests ships, and crawls over the sleeping passengers at night. You give off a sweetish odor in my most intimate depths. You are . . .” (Religious silence.)32
“who am i? i myself, my sister or this obscure beetle?” Even though the motive of doubling the heroine, originally the “victimized maiden,” is part and parcel of the compositional framework of the Gothic novel since the time of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764),33 we may also assume the name of the main heroine in A Little Girl Dreams is important for the implications it might have for Valerie. Ernst writes of his heroine: This double first name is of prime importance in the evolution of the dream that follows. Because it is probably due to the troubles provoked by the coupling of the two names of such a very different signification that we will see her slit herself up the middle of her back from the very beginning of the dream and wear appearances of two distinct but closely related persons. “Two sisters,” she told herself in dreaming, and called one of them “Marceline” and the other “Marie,” or “I” and “my sister.” 34
The halving of the main heroine into two figures is crucial. It allows for the physical transformation of Marceline-Marie in various collages (just as it allows for the introduction of the theme of
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a girl searching for her identity: “Who am I? I myself, my sister or this obscure beetle?”35), while at the same time it compels us to view Valerie and Orlík as two halves of the same being. The entire story of Valerie is a series of events which eventually culminates in the reunification of this original being. Considering the work from this perspective raises other questions, such as that of woman (love), which in turn is part of the wider Surrealist theme of searching for one’s soul mate, one’s opposite half. As Plato stated in Symposium: “For though ‘hermaphrodite’ is only used nowaday as a term of contempt, there really was a man-woman in those days, a being which was half male and half female.” Zeus, however, cut the being into two halves and from that time on “it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one.”36 And this is a model that forms the backdrop of a number of Surrealist works from the 1930s.37 The reader is presented with the fact that in the whole novel neither Valerie nor Orlík (nor actually any of the other characters) is clearly defined in terms of their sex. We should keep in mind the scenes where Valerie receives a passionate kiss from her cousin, her falling asleep in Hedviga’s embrace, or when Orlík dresses in the girl’s clothing and later comments to Valerie that he is like her sister. Likewise, Orlík confides that the constable tried to abuse him in the past, which brings us to another motif running through the novel: incest. The only relationships that fit the mold of “normality,” even
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though they seem to be intentionally given a negative hue, are those between the missionary Gratian and Valerie (rather violent) and her grandmother, and the sexual flirtations between Elsa and Andrei, the coachman. The other relationships are kept strictly within the family (into which the Polecat could be included as for a long while he is considered the father of both Valerie and Orlík). The form these relationships take often borders on the absurd and ludicrous: Valerie loves Orlík, her own brother; Elsa, Valerie’s and Orlík’s grandmother, makes a pass at the latter, her own grandson, and she kisses Valerie with such passion that we are left in disbelief. The Polecat for his part tries to abuse Orlík as well as Valerie (his own children according to the “truth” of the moment provided by the narrator), while at the end of the novel, as he is on the verge of dying from a lack of blood, he sucks life from Valerie’s bloodstained lips, which restores to him his lost strength. In A Little Girl Dreams, Ernst writes: “The father: ‘Your kiss seems adult, my child. Coming from God, it will go far. Go, my daughter, go ahead and . . . count on me!’ ” The collage to which this caption belongs, coming at the very beginning of the novel, depicts the forbidden nature of an incestuous kiss between a man and a young girl (the man’s daughter). By pasting a glass over the union of the lips it seems Ernst wanted to stress that this act was being concealed.38 The seventeen-year-old twins, each subjected to complementary trials (of initiation) from which one rescues the other (trial by water for Orlík, trial by fire for Valerie),39 at times exchanging clothes, search for one another over the course of the entire novel, often meeting for brief moments. But their quest is not
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consummated until the final chapter: after a number of swerves, anxieties, and ordeals, the original androgyne is once again made whole.
montage Turning our attention from the thematic to the compositional, it is conspicuous the extent to which Ernst’s three collage novels were also incorporated into the inner structure of Nezval’s narrative. If Ernst borrowed illustrations from the French serial novel Les damnées de Paris by Jules Mary (1883) for some of his collages in Une semaine de bonté, changing their meaning in a very slight, almost invisible manner so that they told an entirely new “story which the reader can connect to the apparent content of the novel, as if the content were additional and latent,”40 Nezval similarly enjoyed playing with the compositional elements of the Gothic novel’s codified system. Similar to Ernst’s collage novels, Valerie works on two different narrative levels: 1) as mentioned, that of the Gothic, the story of poor Valerie tormented by the typical inhabitants of this genre (a level that is weighed down by the ballast of situations and expressions that are largely pointless for advancing the plot); 2) the level of the reader, which Nezval accomplishes by incorporating elements of other genres, such as the head of a polecat affixed to the figure of the constable, the sexual ambiguity of the missionary’s words, or several images seeming to have been torn right out of
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one of those anatomical handbooks that so fascinated the Surrealists. One senses that behind the words the Polecat delivers in his sermon — “Your womb is an alabaster bowl, which I bless with forefinger and thumb” (37) — lies the practice of gynecology, informed perhaps by an illustrated Home Doctor, from which Štyrský liberally took material for his collages to Nezval’s “Sexual Nocturne” and his cycle Moveable Cabinet.41 That the novel continues to function simultaneously on these two levels until Chapter xxxii allows flashes of a hidden, latent layer, the world of sensuality — which in the Gothic novel is confined to the removed margins of violence — to penetrate the apparent tranquility of the guileless Valerie and her grandmother. And as a hall of mirrors, or a combination of redundancies underscoring (and transforming into metaphor) the dual level of the novel’s reading, like the long vaults under Bluebeard’s house where lie women’s hands and legs, the undeclared fragments of annihilated desire,42 Grandmother’s house also reveals to the reader its own secret life, an inconceivable labyrinth of twisting and turning subterranean passages that Valerie navigates in fear.
the monk and other models The underground spaces of the Gothic novel, the long corridors which “exist only for themselves, becoming the essence of the building,”43 the crypts and burial sites, borrowed directly from The Monk (a novel so loved by Nezval that he commissioned a private
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translation into Czech), form the focal point of the action, the most advantageous place to glean information and move the plot forward.44 Nezval borrowed, however, more from The Monk than just its spatial structure (which had already been codified into the Gothic tradition), he also made use of other elements (what have largely become the genre’s topoi) such as the sleeping potion that simulates the death of Antonia (in Valerie it is a pellet), or the themes and motifs of disguises, incest, siblings separated at birth; and even the story of Valerie’s mother, Matilda, who though sequestered in a convent still manages to become pregnant, bears a striking similarity to Agnes’s fate in The Monk. There are further parallels: Gratian’s violent attempt to deflower Valerie is based on the closing scene in the vaults of St. Clare, where Antonia is defiled by the monk Ambrosio; the frantic nighttime ride of the carriage without horses that in Lewis carries away the unsuspecting Lorenzo and the Bleeding Nun is a direct precursor to the carriage that drives off from Grandmother’s house only to return with Valerie’s mother for a final reunion scene. Even the dynamic between characters in Valerie mirrors The Monk. But whereas Nezval divides the character of Ambrosio between the Polecat and Gratian, his trio of Elsa, Gratian, and Valerie directly corresponds to the triangle of Ambrosio, Matilda, and Antonia.45 I would suggest Marquis de Sade’s Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu as another model for Valerie. It seems Nezval took from Justine both the motif of the victimized maiden and that of unreciprocated kindness (which in the first two versions of Sade’s novel
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is a structural element),46 and perhaps the final scene as well, where lightning rends the sky and penetrates Justine’s body, ripping her in two and thereby ending her terrestrial life in truly gruesome fashion. In Valerie, it is a thunderclap that brings her long week of wonders to an end.47 According to Silvio D’Arco Avalle: Justine is not merely a persecuted innocent young girl [. . .] Her adventures do more than demonstrate that it is virtue and not vice which is usually punished, and the story is primarily a sexual initiation that the heroine has refused in the name of ethical principles without taking into consideration the laws of nature.48
Yet Valerie is just the opposite: she is ardently seeking out her own sexuality and the trials that would allow her to attain it. And the place where this search occurs is the favored realm of the Surrealists: the dream. But rather than being rough documentary material encoded in subconscious communications in need of interpretation, it has become theater, mise-en-scène, spectacle: the dream has become the staging of the dream.49
(good night, echo) Valerie can be divided into three parts, each of which corresponds to three distinct locations: dream (i-xxxii); reality (xxxiii-xxxvi); a “new” reality (xxxvii-xxxviii); or, to use other words, the sub-
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conscious, the conscious, “surreality.” And it is precisely in this privileged realm of dream that the most important events take place. It is where Valerie gradually takes possession of her sexuality (which is identified with her coming closer to Orlík, her missing half ); where there are the trials of initiation by fire and water; and where there is a continual succession of finding and losing. This lasts until the end of Chapter xxxii, at which point the missionaries leave and the scene calms so that Valerie can finally go home and sleep without fear, because, as she thinks to herself: “I have nothing to fear if he [Orlík] is this close-by” (169). Chapters xxxiii to xxxvi are marked by a slow shift from dream to reality. The reconnections that occurred on the dream level should now be relocated to real time and space. Whereas the preceding chapters were marked by opacity and vagueness, everything, such as feelings and sounds, now gradually becomes more defined even though they are phenomena lingering from the dream realm. The elements that mediate this passage from the subconscious to the conscious are Orlík’s letter, confirming his presence on the narrative plane to which he doesn’t belong (i.e., the layer of reality), and the scapular. But these objects slowly fade away and disappear (turn to dust), like the memories of a dream at daybreak. At this moment nothing any longer prevents Valerie from connecting to her missing half to reunify the androgyne. And this concluding reunification (another reminder of the “recognition” of old serial novels) takes place in the embrace of mother.50 Reality now has no meaning or consistency: the scapular dis-
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integrates before Valerie’s eyes and Grandmother’s house, beset by cracks, comes crashing down in much the same way and with a similar roar like the House of Usher, or Castle Otranto. Dream and reality have finally coalesced into what Breton in the First Manifesto of Surrealism called: “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”51 The topography of the final chapter is quite the opposite of those dark, close, oppressive spaces found in the previous chapters. Now there appears an open sky and broad horizon.52 Even the style of the prose shifts. The artificial and at times stilted language of the characters as well as the metaphorical lyricism of the narrator, which exuded such a powerful, dominant sensuality, have ceased to have effect, fading away into a fairy-tale landscape, a minor Arcadia, and Orlík’s greeting to nature is virtually the same as Mácha’s pilgrim roaming the Krkonoše Mountains.53 All that remains is for Valerie with a final quiver to cuddle up to Orlík, her twin and double, and begin to sing a last song, a song addressed at the same time to both male and female lover: the reunified androgyne is now speaking with a single voice. Having narrated a quest, described the tenacious search for one’s identity — close kin to Ernst’s A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and Breton’s Nadja — Valerie and Her Week of Wonders closes in the serenity of gratification (where even Mácha’s antagonism between the individual and nature has been mollified), in the sublimation of conflict, in the “innocent, happy lost paradise of childhood.”
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1. Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil / Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 48-49. 2. When Valerie and Her Week of Wonders came out in 1945, Czech critics paid little attention to it. The reviews that did appear were largely negative. Only Ludvík Kundera in a review in Mladý archy II (1945/46): 133-34, drew attention to the “novel itself,” acknowledging its origins in the dark tradition of French and German Romanticism (while also making reference to Ernst’s Une semain de bonté ). 3. Recognizing that Valerie was written in the vein of a serial novel, Lhoták chose engravings from 19th-century illustrated magazines. The illustration on p. 71, for example, originally appeared in Světozor (12 (1890): 137) under the caption “Parisian wedding,” while the illustration on p. 35 accompanied an account of “Stanley’s expedition to rescue Emin Pasha,” (Světozor, 17 (1890): 201). In the review cited above, L. Kundera notes that the majority of Lhoták’s illustrations were “originally images from old children’s books, or travel books, from which Lhoták just made a selection.” 4. Louis Reybaud Jérôme Paturat à la recherche d’une position sociale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1842), 149. Reybaud further states: “Chiefly in the style, sir, will you recognize the natural author of a serial novel. It is important that each installment contains a succession of dramatic events, so that an umbilical cord of a kind connects it to subsequent installments, thereby evoking, provoking even, a craving and impatience to read further. Just a moment ago you spoke of art; and this is art. The art or arousing desire, expectation.” 5. André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 99. A Czech translation appeared in 1934. 6. Maurice Heine’s fascinating article on illustrations found in Gothic novels, “Promenade à travers le roman noir,” Minotaure 5 (May 1935), could have been another source of inspiration for Valerie. 7. The edition was translated into Czech by Teige and Jindřich Hořejší and included drawings by Jindřich Štyrský.
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8. Jindřich Štyrský, “Fantomas,” Odeon. Literárni kurýr, 1, no. 8 (Odeon, May 1930): 122. 9. Karel Teige, “Revoluční romantik K.H. Mácha,” in Ani labuť ani Lůna, ed. Vítězslav Nezval (Prague: Otto Jirsák, 1936), 23-24. And further: “Poetry as a manifestation of the contradictions between the primitive dream of freedom and the disgraceful absence of freedom in a world of classes [. . .] poetry as revolt, which has become an ingrained and allpowerful need of the being destroyed by society, was set ablaze by dark Romanticism” (24-25). 10. Vítězslav Nezval, “Kapka inkoustu,” ReD, 1, 9 (1927-28): 309. 11. Vítězslav Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” in Dílo, XXV (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1974), 465-466. On terror as a form of the sublime see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1756). 12. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 464. 13. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 28. An excerpt originally appeared in Documents 34 (June 1, 1934) and appeared in Czech translation in Surrealismus (1936). Sever’s photographs appear in Ladislav Souček, Jiří Sever (Prague: Odeon, 1968). 14. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463-64. It is worth noting the similarity between these objects and those “that can be found nowhere else: old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse — at least in the sense I give to the word and which I prefer,” mentioned by Breton in Nadja [trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 52; the Czech translation appeared in 1935]. Puppets, mannequins, and the object interested the Surrealists only insofar that they maintained a very loose connection to real referents, because, as Nezval explains in the preface to his play Milenci z kiosku [Kiosk Lovers] “by using junk items the artist disposes the spectator to accepting and grasping this wave of the surreal” (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1932), 16. 15. As Nezval explains: “The most typical element of surrealistic
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horror is surprise. If we were to record our dreams we would probably often use such words as ‘suddenly,’ ‘unexpectedly,’ ‘all at once,’ ‘at that moment.’ ” In V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463. 16. Vítězslav Nezval, Pražský chodec (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1938), 161, 182. Perhaps Nezval was thinking of Toyen’s collage for the Mácha anthology when in his book for children Anička skřítek a slaměný Hubert [Anna the Elf and Strawman Hubert] he writes: “and pour what’s left [in the bottle] into the lovely stream where glowing lamps are floating” (Prague: Dědictví Komenského, 1936), 56. 17. Gaston Bachelard, La flamme d’une chandelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). 18. As Fridrich Bridel (1619-1680) wrote in Co Bůh? Človek? (1658): “I am the torch of Hell / the eternally burning flame / an unquelled fire / food, nourishment, fodder.” The drawings from Toyen’s cycle Schovej se, válko! were published in 1946 by Fr. Borový. They are reproduced in Lenka Bydžovská and Karel Srp, eds., Český Surrealismus 1929-1953 (Prague: Argo, 1996), 343. 19. See Werner Spies, Max Ernst — Collagen, Inventar und Widerspruch (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), fig. 120. In English as Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. John William Gabriel (New York: Abrams, 1991). 20. Vítězslav Nezval, “Meteor,” in Žena v množném čísle, (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1936), 25. Brassaï’s photographs appear in Minotaure 7 ( June 1935). Toyen’s collage is reproduced in Štyrský – Toyen – Heisler (Paris: Centre G. Pompidou, 1982), 51. 21. In Nezval’s novel Posedlosti [Obsessions], which anticipates many of the themes he would return to in Valerie (the smell of incense in churches, dreams of lustful monks, incest), the hero, Ludvík, is initially saved from committing suicide by moths flying to a lamp (Prague: Sfinx, 1930), 243-45. 22. V. Nezval, “Upír Nosferatu,” 463. 23. Or: “A strange dream descended onto her eyelids, despite her
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being awake” (38); “She was moving as if in a dream” (45); “I’m acting like a sleepwalker” (118). 24. Vítězslav Nezval, “Předmluva k dosavadnímu dílu,” in Most (Prague: Fr. Borový, 1937), 54. 25. See in particular “Sexual Nocturne” in Edition 69 (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2004), 34 and Řetěz štěstí (Prague: V. Čejka, 1936), 90. 26. On the title page of the carbon copy, dedicted to Štyrský and deposited together with the original in the Museum of Czech Literature, next to the definitive title there is also an earlier working title: “Valerie and the Twenty-seven Wonders,” with the subtitle: “A Surrealistic Novel.” Both are crossed out. 27. Reproduced in Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 195. I presume that Nezval’s “alabaster hand” is also a reference to the “tiny alabaster hand” mentioned by Štyrský in his dream of May 25, 1928 and in his short prose “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream” where he relates his first autoerotic experience from childhood. For both see Edition 69 op. cit. Among Nezval’s papers is a copy of the fourth booklet of Une semaine de bonté (it was originally published in five booklets) bearing a dedication from Max Ernst. 28. See Fagiolo dell’Arco, Alberto Savinio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989) in particular figs. 43, 73-80, 89, 99, 101, 102. 29. Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992), 16. Teige’s statement comes from Zvěrokruh, 1 (1930): 38. Yet another model could be argued to have provided the general outlines for the Polecat based on Nezval’s comment about Lautréamont a few years before: “the poet of Maldoror appears to be an apocalyptic and Jesuit missionary, who, spiritually tending toward order, suggests all the horrors of hell. Hell is found in the human heart, in that horrific storehouse of evil, which human reason has endowed with greater cruelty than blood has an animal’s heart [. . .] It is no accident that the co-heroes of Maldoror’s clairvoyant chants are the most revolting of beasts.” V. Nezval, “Maldoror,” ReD, 2, no. 8 (1928/29): 262.
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30. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 8. 31. Ibid., 100-103. 32. Ibid., 52-53. 33. See Carla Corti, “Il doppio come paradigma fantastico-gotico,” Il confronto letterario, 16 (1991): 310. 34. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 9-10. 35. Ibid., 50-51. 36. Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 542-543. 37. Cf. Xaviére Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) for a limited interpretation of Plato by the French Surrealists. Also see Albert Béguin’s erudite article “L’Androgyne,” Minotaure, 4, no. 11 (1938): 10-13, 66; and Jehan Sylvius and Pierre de Ruysnes (long held to be Robert Desnos), La papesse du diable (1931) [The Devil’s Popess, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1999)], a winsome novella of fantastic-utopian eroticism that has as its central figure the Great Androgyne, a new deity ushered in by the Queen of the World, the Archimagess. The motif of the androgyne undoubtedly piqued Nezval’s interest. In a playful questionnaire circulated by the Czech Surrealists, “An attempt at recognizing the irrationality of a fountain pen,” his answer to the question “Define the sex of the object ‘pen’ ” was: “androgynous (hollow like a female while elongated like a male).” In Surrealismus, op. cit., 35. 38. Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 14-17. 39. And I think it is no accident that water and fire are the elements of the second and third books respectively of Une semaine de bonté. 40. Cf. Werner Spies, “Die Semaine de Bonté unseres Jahrhunderts.” in Max Ernst: Jenseits der Malerei — Das graphische Oeuvre. Exh. cat. (Hannover: Kestner Museum, 1972). 41. Manuals similar to those “illustrated appendices from medical folios” that young Ludvík of Posedlosti eagerly looks for in his family’s library (74) and from which Nezval possibly drew to create the dream
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images in Chtěla okrást lorda Blamingtona (Prague: Odeon, 1930): the mother with “her head covered by burning pustules,” or the grandmother lying “eviscerated on the ground” (15). For reproductions of Štyrský’s Stěhovací kabinet see Bydžovská and Srp, Český Surrealismus, 134-145. 42. Cf. V. Nezval, Řetéz štěstí, 160. 43. Jean Roudaut, “Les demeures dans le roman noir,” Critique no. 5758 (August-September 1959): 722. 44. In one poem from Žena v množném čísle Nezval writes: “Their unrusted curls / Scented with cellars / I enjoyed entering like a monk / With forbidden hymnals” (27). 45. And when Valerie finds Orlík on the square dressed in her clothes, he angrily cries: “I’m not a girl, do you hear? I’m not a girl”(40). The reader is at once reminded of the scene in The Monk where Matilda, dressed as the novice Rosario, reveals her identity to Ambrosio and opens her heart to him: “ ‘Father!’ continued He in faltering accents, ‘I am a Woman!’ ” (1796; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58. 46. When Orlík sees that Valerie is resolved to help her father who is dying from a lack of blood, he warns her: “Don’t be a victim of your own goodness!” (116). 47. Justine was first translated and published in Czech in 1932 (illustrated by Toyen) as volume 2 of Štyrský’s Edition 69 series (a fragment previously appearing in ReD, March 1929), and it was based on the original 1787 manuscript titled Les Infortunes de la Vertu, published by Maurice Heine in Paris in 1930. Štyrský was also responsible for printing in Erotické revue extracts from Sade’s Juliette (1930) and two of his short prose pieces (1933). A number of pieces he dedicated to the “divine marquis” were preliminary work on a planned biography that was left unfinished. Around the same time, Heine connected Sade to the tradition of the Gothic novel in his article “Le marquis de Sade et le roman noir,” La nouvelle revue francaise (1933): 190-206. 48. Silvio D’Arco Avalle, “Da Santa Ulivia a Justine,” in VeselovskijSade, La fanciulla perseguitata, (Milan: Bompiani, 1977), 15-16. There are,
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however, several clear signals scattered throughout the novel’s dialogue (“I’ve come to liberate you.”(91); “I don’t avoid suffering.” (92); “Well then, give me your hand. I’ll lead you.” (92); “Orlík [. . .] why have you forsaken me?”(159)) which give the impression that behind Valerie and Orlík stands the figure of the suffering Christ, the origin and dominant model for most of medieval hagiography from which Justine herself descends. For another historical perspective on the evolution of the “persecuted maiden” theme see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933). 49. Cf. Giovanna Franci, La messa in scena del terrore (Ravenna: Longo, 1982), 33-34. 50. After repeatedly stressing that the French Surrealists often identified the woman with the mother, X. Gauthier ends his analysis with the following: “In this fashion the Surrealist revolution again returns to the innocent, happy lost paradise of childhood, the golden age of the beginning. To remove the father, or to destroy him outright, implied a return to the singular relationship with the mother, to remaining in her womb, a return to the nirvana of the womb” (Surréalisme et sexualité, 224-25). 51. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14. 52. The final chapter differs from those preceding it in that it lacks a more precise title and there appears in it the only meta-narrative formulation found in the entire novel: “All my readers will surely have recognized the young pair” (193). 53. Cf. Karel Hynek Mácha, “Pouť krkonošská,” in Próza (Prague: SNKLU, 1961), 109-110.
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