Dada, Surrealism, Antropofagia:

The Consuming Process of the Avant-gardes

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer

A
CCORDING TO PAUL MANN, avant-gardes rely on an ambivalent
kind of recuperation: “In the twentieth century every explicit form of
cultural opposition contains an implicit alliance and every alliance is
also a confrontation, a break.”1 Cannibalism is a paradigm that makes it pos-
sible to understand an alliance that is at the same time a confrontation. The
cannibal needs the strength of his enemy in order to survive: killing and eating
the other is also a way to celebrate his heroism, to commemorate the beauty
of the fight.2 At the point of contact between the old and the new, between tra-
dition and innovation, cannibalism establishes an aesthetic and symbolic link
between the famous European-centered Dada and Surrealism movements and
the lesser known Brazilian Antropofagia movement.3 What is shared is the act
of consuming culture via creations such as collages, as well as a figurative
violence with regard to previous avant-gardes. Dada devoured Futurism. Sur-
realism will devour Dada. And Antropofagia will feast on all of them.

Dada eats the roaring-twenties cannibal

On March 1, 1902, Alfred Jarry published in La Revue Blanche a short
article entitled “Anthropophagie,” in which he criticized and mocked the
intersection between anthropology and colonialism.4 In 1909, in his “Apolo-
gie du cannibalisme,” Remy de Gourmont ironically described the physio-
logical and dietary benefits of cannibalism, and he wondered about the ethi-
cal and moral issues of an old practice suddenly rehabilitated by science: “La
science vient de réhabiliter les anthropophages.”5 Throughout the twenties an
entire cannibal culture can be found in popular newspapers and caricatures, as
well as in most of the posters created for Marseille’s Colonial Exhibition.
Even popular songs presented figures of cannibals who swallow everything
they find: “C’était une cannibale / Qui mangeait tout ce qu’elle voyait / Un
jour elle avala cent balles / et ne rendit pas la monnaie” (Fauchereau 520). It
is hence in a cannibalophile context that, in March and July of 1920, two
issues of a review entitled Cannibale appeared. Dadaist cannibalistic tenden-
cies were actually to be found as early as 1917. Tristan Tzara’s poetic evoca-
tion of “art nègre” indeed framed the mouth as the most powerful asset of cre-
ativity: “La bouche contient la puissance de l’obscur, substance invisible,

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 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

bonté, peur, sagesse, création et feu.”6 But Tzara was simply alluding to can-
nibalism while Francis Picabia directly reused, from the very title of Canni-
bale, the popular clichés of the time. Dawn Ades has shown that such a title
enabled Dada to kill aesthetically two birds with one stone. As used in this
avant-garde debate, the term allowed the dadaists both to mock the concept of
a new primitive sensibility praised by the futurists, and to make Picasso’s pre-
cubist paintings that imitated African Art laughable.7
This journal’s title could also be read as being linked to the everlasting
tension between art and life. Everything that fills the pages of these two issues
(from the collages of photographs and texts, via the recipe turned into a poem,
to the rewriting of tabloid articles or the copy of a directory page) is to be
found in the everyday world and not in the intellectual, philosophical, literary
or aesthetic sphere of the time. Behind the self-conscious parody, this dadaist
publication is hence to be understood as a form of cultural cannibalism of life.
Along with the first issue of Cannibale, a “Manifeste cannibale dada” was
read in the dark by André Breton—dressed in the famous target signed by
Picabia—during the third Dada evening, which took place at the Théâtre de la
Maison de l’Œuvre on March 27, 1920. Thus, in a very dadaist way, per-
formance and actions followed up what had been a written production. There
the cannibal trope seems to have been chosen to shock the bourgeois—and to
make the references to the digestive process more effective:

L’honneur s’achète et se vend comme le cul. Le cul, le cul représente la vie comme les pommes
frites, et vous tous qui êtes sérieux, vous sentirez plus mauvais que la merde de vache.
DADA lui ne sent rien, il n’est rien, rien, rien.
Il est comme vos espoirs: rien.
comme vos paradis: rien.8

The comparisons that punctuate Francis Picabia’s text help us understand that
cannibalism is not only an aesthetic matter of collages, but also a continuation
of the tangible violence of the Manifeste Dada 1918 read by Tzara in Zurich
on March 23, 1918. Devouring others would indeed permit the accomplish-
ment of a destructive and negative work, and would also enable participation
in the spectacle of disaster.9 The cannibalistic aspect of Dada is hence to be
understood as another way to shock, via chosen primal images, sounds, and
ideas that aimed at assaulting the public. Jean Arp’s memoirs stress that Dada
was rejecting any form of theory and wanted a return to the order of nature.10
And what could be more natural, wild, and spontaneous than a cannibal?
On May 13, 1921, during the purposely scandalous “Procès Barrès,” Dada
symbolically handed over the cannibalistic torch to the up-and-coming surre-

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alists. While the event was set as a Dadaist happening, this fictive trial of the
nationalist writer and politician Maurice Barrès was indeed presided over by
André Breton himself. There the split that Picabia had announced a few days
before was made obvious by Tristan Tzara’s reluctant involvement in the stag-
ing of a judicial trial.11 And Tzara concluded his testimony with a dadaist
song, whose chorus advised the public and the future surrealists to devour
some brains—possibly their own: “mangez de bons cerveaux / lavez votre
soldat / dada / dada / buvez de l’eau.”12 Even though it would take a few more
years for Dada to dissolve itself officially, the self-eating process was clearly
underway. As a matter of fact, Dada carried with it its own inevitable death,
since it relied on negativity as well as destruction: “Dada ist ephemär” (Tzara,
Œuvres complètes 1:726). The 1918 Manifeste Dada stressed that “il y a un
grand travail destructif, négatif à accomplir.”13 This destruction was visible
in dadaist writings and in their exhibits. Lewis Kachur reminds us for instance
that “the Cologne Dada show of April 1920 […] was only accessible by pass-
ing through a men’s bathroom, [and] presented certain work that the spectator
was enjoined to destroy.”14 Surrealists did not follow Dada’s path to the extent
that they still believed in creation and were willing to situate themselves in lit-
erary history. Openly claiming an “Après Dada,” André Breton went so far as
to put it on the same level as Cubism and Futurism:

Dada, fort heureusement, n’est plus en cause et ses funérailles, vers mai 1921, n’amenèrent
aucune bagarre. Le convoi, très peu nombreux, prit la suite de ceux du cubisme et du futurisme,
que les élèves des Beaux-arts allaient noyer en effigie dans la Seine.15

Here three avant-gardes are thrown into the Seine while a fourth, still offi-
cially un-named, writes their ironic eulogy. The minimization of the end of
Dada makes possible the future writing of the Manifeste du surréalisme. Dada
is presented as a kind of childish students’ prank that could be reduced to an
effigy, but with all its potential brutality eliminated. From the very start , then,
the surrealists cannibalized dadaist violence: while the dada-dummy quietly
sinks, the crowd is waiting for the illustrious surrealist revolver shot.

Surréalisme devours exquisite corpses

The 1924 Manifesto is itself a way for surrealists to appropriate a dadaist
practice. Dada is one of these heroic defeated enemies whose force would be
absorbed by the surrealists in a cannibal feast. Appropriating Dada’s admira-
tion of Lautréamont’s poetry, surrealists tend to focus on its cruelty. They also
borrow the “beau comme” that Jonathan P. Eburne has rightfully described as
a lens making it possible to see the world through the eyes of an assassin. Vio-

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lence is ultimately desired because it can be aestheticized. That is to say that

murder itself would be considered by the group as a cultural production, as a
way to generate bodies.16 Couldn’t these narrations of dreams, nearly written
automatically, be seen as oneiric physical remains? Let us not forget that the
surrealist act was defined by Breton as a shot in the crowd. In order to shock
the bourgeois, surrealists go so far as to present them as corpses. They also
like to celebrate murderers such as Gilles de Rais or Jack the Ripper, giving
an uncanny aura to the marvelous.17
However, these bodies generated by surrealist violence are not simply to
be seen, admired or read: they are produced to be devoured. It is indeed no
coincidence that a famous poetic surrealist game is named “jeu des
cadavres-exquis.” These exquisite corpses are dead bodies of words or
images that will be consumed by the gaze of the players, the readers, the vis-
itors or the spectators:

M. Qu’est-ce qu’un anthropophage?

S. C’est une mouche dans un bol de lait18

This surrealist humorous dialogue is presented as the result of “hasard objec-

tif,” and it reveals the poetic absurdity of automatic modes of communication,
of any social exchange where the speakers are disconnected from one another
and limited to ghostly letters. While textual, the dialogue can easily be seen
as figurative: there is a photographic contrast between the black fly and the
whiteness of the milk that mimics writing itself. As a matter of fact, milk and
fly distinguish themselves so strongly in their color and material that a spark
of this poetic creation that the surrealists called “image” is created. Such a
contrast makes it possible mentally to play with the very cliché of the canni-
bal. Whereas in the stories of the anthropological expeditions that delighted
the tabloids in the twenties, black tribes devoured white adventurers, the black
spot of the fly is here swallowed up by the white milk. Such an image pleases
and appears as humorous because it reverses—or rather flips upside down—
the usual notions of subject and object. And because there is a hesitation, the
image created possesses this “explosante-fixe” quality of Breton’s convulsive
beauty.19
It should be stressed that, while the cannibal was mostly used by dadaists
as a shocking cultural truism referred to during performances, surrealists tend
to produce texts where cannibalism is understood as a creative process. Under
the title “Sommeil,” for instance, René Crevel describes a cannibalistic dream
on January 15, 1925:

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Je rêve d’un goût de chair humaine (non caressée, ni mordue, mais mangée). Je me réveille avec
une surprise dans la bouche. Comment y vint-elle? Je crois que j’ai vu des guirlandes de peau
décortiquée. Ces guirlandes ornaient ma chambre, alourdies de fruits humains semblables à ces
lampions du 14 juillet. Je suppose que j’ai dû cueillir un de ces fruits, le manger. […] Je suis sûr
d’un goût de chair dans ma bouche. La langue est une île inconnue dans la géographie des rêves,
et pourtant quand j’ai cessé de dormir, ma langue, oui, ma langue pensait qu’il n’était guère
difficile de devenir anthropophage.20

The totemic meal described by Sigmund Freud in his 1913 Totem and Taboo
is surely on Crevel’s mind when he lets the “dictée de la pensée” automati-
cally present his reverie. This dream is a reflection on both language and the
interpretation of dreams. Becoming a cannibal is above all a linguistic and
poetic matter—and maybe dreaming itself is cannibalistic. Hidden elements,
such as the cruel Bastille Day lanterns21 or the colonization of some unknown
island, give a political dimension to the dream. And the violent linguistic
transformation into a cannibal seems to enable the imaging and the wording
of the unconscious’s ineffable. That is to say that Crevel’s surrealist take on
cannibalism is a poetic path towards a kind of universal violence named “la
langue.”22
If we stay in the surrealist linguistic sphere, it could be argued that
Crevel’s dream of a “cannibalistic becoming” has been metaphorically
achieved by Benjamin Péret. Well known for the fact that he always wanted,
even when surrounded by good friends, to be served first and to choose the
best morsels, Péret—who did not always eat his fill—was a hopeless “bon
vivant,” a kind of “logophage.”23 The food that fills his poems and punctu-
ates the titles of his writings recalls the close relationship between the tongue
named language and the one that enjoys victuals.24 Having integrated Dada’s
old sense of ephemeral performance, Péret turns it into a new poetics of Sur-
realism. To him, poetry is like a feast, a matter of kairos: poems are created
at a perfect opportune moment, as they are products of the objective luck
named “hasard objectif.” To the astonishment of his fellow surrealists, Péret
was actually not able to recognize his own verses when confronted with
them. Just like a celebratory banquet, poetic creation was for Péret a festive,
momentary, and political way to surpass individuality. And such poetry made
it possible for him to embody a real link between Surrealism and the Brazil-
ian avant-garde named Antropofagia at the end of the twenties. During the
three years he spent in Brazil, Péret, married to the soprano singer Remedios
Varo,25 indeed befriended the local revolutionary circles and officially
became a ‘cannibal’ since one of his poems was published in the Revista de
Antropofagia in 1929.26

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Antropofagia munches on a traditional Surrealism

A nationalist utopia opening onto the world between 1928 and 1929,
Antropofagia was an avant-garde movement with a Manifesto as well as a
journal (whose issues were ironically called “dentures”). It constructed itself
as a response to the cannibal colonizers as much as to the anthropologists, as
Leslie Barry explains:

In order to articulate a Brazilian culture that is original and authentic because it is the hybrid
product of a colonial process (and not in spite of this), the Manifesto Antropofago subversively
appropriates the colonialist designation of native peoples of the Americas as culture-less savages,
or “cannibals.” Referring to both the Carib Indians of the West Indies, the American natives first
encountered by Columbus and whose name gave the word cannibal its origin, and to the ritual
cannibalism of the Brazilian Tupi Indians, the manifesto proposes an active, “cannibalistic” con-
sumption of foreign culture. Brazil must neither ape nor reject European civilization, but
“devour” it, adapting its strengths and incorporating them into the native self.27

Situated between various cultures, histories, and languages, the Brazilian van-
guard aimed at re-appropriating colonial discourses, and it did so by choosing
the initial posture of the cannibal. Beyond the Manifesto and the journal,
paintings and drawings of “the cannibal” testify to this vivid fascination with
a figure historically distant, but chosen as a representation of the contempo-
rary self. It is also worth mentioning that while cannibalistic consumption was
preferred to mimicry or aping, European civilization was still presented as a
kind of model.
When one reads the 1928 Manifesto Antropofago, it seems obvious that
the proclamation of a surreal primitivism before Surrealism, as well as the
strong anticlericalism and the proposed inversion of moral values, would
please the true revolutionary that Benjamin Péret is. The surrealist poet who
gave lectures and interviews and who published articles in the local newspa-
pers was considered a peculiar non-Occidental symbol of strength and
courage: “L’Occident, qui nous a envoyé tant de mauvaises choses, cette fois
nous a envoyé une exception. Péret a apporté le magnifique courage de sa lib-
erté.”28 However, his political activities had possibly made Péret look suspect,
and he was expelled from Brazil in 1931. He came back to France with new
Brazilian contacts, but little is known about André Breton’s personal reaction
to the ephemeral Antropofagia movement that had vanished for good by the
summer of 1929.
Humorous and effective per se as well as essential for the understanding
of modernism in South America, the Manifesto Antropofago is of particular
interest when considering this cannibalistic consuming process of the avant-

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garde that we are seeking to pin down. First of all, the structure of the Mani-
festo, purposely playful and subversive, constructed in short sentences,
reminds the reader of Dada. Some critics argue that Oswald de Andrade
indeed took the aforementioned Manifeste cannibale dada as a model.
According to de Andrade himself, the title was a reference to Octave Mirbeau’s
Jardin des supplices, chronique de la Chine anthropophage (Fauchereau
520). Others contend that the sociopolitical contexts of these two cultural dis-
courses differ to such an extent that Picabia and Andrade’s texts cannot be
analyzed alongside each other.29 But by looking more closely at the Manifesto
Antropofago, we clearly see that Dada is not mentioned directly, as if its bone
structure, its simple skeleton, were enough. The real flesh of the Manifesto,
the part that is truly cannibalized, is surrealist, since Surrealism is directly
mentioned twice:

Heritage. Contact with the Carib side of Brazil. Où Villegaignon prit terre. Montaigne. Natural
man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the
Surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s technicized barbarian. We push onward [...] We already
had Communism. We already had Surrealist language. The Golden Age.30

In the first occurrence, while Surrealism is praised, it is always presented as a

heritage, as the remains of things past that can be surpassed. The second ref-
erence to Surrealism infers that the primitive language of Antropofagia was
surrealist in its roots. In other words, Surrealism was inscribed both as a tra-
dition to admire, but also as a lost golden naivety. Munched on, Surrealism
could not be seen anymore by the Brazilian Modernists as avant-garde: it was
rather a direction in which to orient their own creativity.

“Beauty will be eatable”: Surrealism is eaten from the inside

Having briefly considered the way Surrealism cannibalized Dada, before
getting ‘bitten’ by the teeth of Antropofagia, one might wonder why the sur-
realists did not disappear for good in 1928 similarly to the way the dadaists
had in 1923. This non-disappearance could simply be explained by the fact
that Antropofagia remained fairly unknown in Europe, lasted only two years,
and was a kind of marginal avant-garde compared with Surrealism. However,
it is worth noticing that, as early as 1928, Dada was briefly reenacted, if not
revived, by Antropofagia, which opted for a Dadaist form of Manifesto. At the
same time, the surrealists were seen as relevant artistic ancestors, gaining an
anti-modern aura. It is in this sense that Breton’s famous call for an occulta-
tion of the movement in the thirties could be understood.

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If cannibalism remains our main thread, its situation within Surrealism

was evolving. While early surrealists played mainly with the poetic metaphor-
ical aspect of cannibalism, and while writers and poets set the mouth in the
center of their textual creations, it seems that images ended up becoming more
important than literature. Salvador Dalí, the ‘Anti-Benjamin Péret,’ is a perfect
representative of this surrealist progressive autophagia. In his 1936 painting
Cannibalisme d’automne, created when the Spanish civil war broke out, Dalí
used a couple hugging and eating each other to symbolize the conflict. The
reference to autumn in the title probably comes from the choice of brownish
colors. It gives cannibalism a natural appeal, insofar as it links it to the season.
As Descharnes remarks about the painting, “[t]hese Iberian beings mutually
devouring each other correspond to the pathos of civil war considered as a
pure phenomenon of natural history.”31 The ambivalence of death and sexual-
ity can indeed be seen in the hand of the man both erotically pinching the
woman’s sagging breast and trying to eat its flesh with a spoon. Here, canni-
balism is reciprocal and melts together love, eating, and death. The masculine
and the feminine figures are dressed in a very bourgeois way, and the kitchen
table with its shiny and very civilized flatware gives an impression of inti-
macy. This feeling might allude to the fact that the war was a civil one, hap-
pening between people sharing the same land. The melting of the rocks and
the dark Catalan-like landscape forever binds these people to their country.
Anticipating the horrors of the imminent war, Dalí also underlined what
he called “the colossal nutritive and cultural responsibility of Surrealism”32 in
his tract “The Conquest of the Irrational.” There, he described culture as an
indispensable meal for a society more and more seduced by irrationality:

C’est pourquoi Salvador Dalí […] a depuis longtemps proposé que l’on veuille essayer de manger
aussi les surréalistes, car nous, surréalistes nous sommes la sorte de nourriture de bonne qualité,
décadente, stimulante, extravagante et ambivalente qui, avec le plus de tact et de la façon la plus
intelligente de ce monde, convient à l’état faisandé, paradoxal et succulentement [sic] truculent,
qui est propre et caractéristique du climat de confusion idéologique et morale où nous avons
l’honneur et le plaisir de vivre en ce moment.33

Being eaten by society is a metaphor for the influence that artists can have on
people: the cannibalism perpetrated on the surrealists would be an ingestion
of the main concepts of the movement. Dalí’s longing to be eaten ultimately
has to do with the fact that being swallowed into culture induces fame and
success. But he is also criticizing a society that consumes its artists: paradox-
ically, it is because the social order is morally corrupt that Surrealism needs
to be eaten up. This way, the food for thought that Surrealism could be

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becomes a concrete form of nourishment. In this long sentence full of adjec-

tives, Dalí appears as his voluble self, so carried away by his own metaphor
that everything becomes eatable: the state of “confusion” is itself given a
“gamey” taste. Yet the image of cannibalism does not lose its strength, as
paradoxes and ambivalences are said to be products of the time. Art Nouveau
architecture, whose “cannibal imperialism” was suddenly emerging, was also
named “Edible Beauty,” as if according to Dalí all products of his epoch were
made either to be eaten by the public or to consume some other artistic
forms.34 In fact, as Renée Riese Hubert has shown, Dalí voluntarily borrowed
Breton’s most famous saying to turn it into his own, stating that “Beauty will
be eatable, or will not be.”35 While for Breton beauty had to be convulsive,
Dalí plays with words to argue that being eatable is the outcome of beauty.
The French “convulsive” and “comestible” both begin the same way, but iron-
ically a kind of mental upheaval occurs when one adjective replaces the other:
Dalí places taste where Breton was invoking sight and touch. And he does so
by cannibalizing one of the most well-known surrealist maxims.
Because Dalí followed his “paranoia-critique” method and was well
versed in psychoanalysis, he described the matter of cannibalism in a very
straightforward way. Scared by the strong figure of his father, whom he often
portrayed as William Tell, the painter wished to digest his paternal force:

J’avais réussi à m’approprier et à dépasser sa force. Ce qu’il ne savait pas, c’est qu’en le digé-
rant, j’avais aussi amené sa résurrection, et qu’il revivait à travers moi. […] Héros freudien par
excellence, je me suis libéré de sa tutelle, en me nourrissant de chaque cellule de son moi, et il
est devenu un des moteurs de mon génie.36

The myth the artist is creating around himself is clearly cannibalistic: this
digestion of the paternal to build up the self mimics the way eating his enemy
could help the cannibal steal his forces. Dalí’s problematic relationship with
his father actually repeats the one he had with the father of Surrealism. Breton
was indeed shocked both by Dalí’s scatology and by his tendency to admire
tyrants like Napoleon and Hitler. The derogatory anagram of Avida Dollars
that Breton gave Dalí shows that the painter’s quest for financial success did
not please surrealists. As a matter of fact, Dalí’s official belonging to the
movement ended around 1937 when he flew to the USA with Gala. However,
despite Breton’s rejection, Dalí declared in one of the discussions he had with
André Parinaud in the late sixties, “Je ne suis pas surréaliste, je suis le sur-
réalisme même.”37 At a time when Surrealism had ended for good (Breton was
dead), Dalí still claimed his belonging and melted the identity of the move-

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ment into his own identity. Surrealism had finally been swallowed by Dalí,
who could fully embody it.

The final cannibal feast of Surrealism

Before its recuperation by Dalí, Surrealism appeared to have nonetheless
kept its avant-garde status, at least throughout the war. During the 1947 exhi-
bition at the Galerie Maeght, the “mythe nouveau du surréalisme” praised by
Breton in the introduction to the catalog was, however, not as new as he had
wished: most of the altars designed re-used objects prepared for previous
events or focused on literary aspects that could not truly be exhibited.38 More-
over, Duchamp’s thread that ran through the gallery was itself a reproduction
of the “Mile of Strings” created for the “First Papers of Surrealism” 1942 New
York exhibit. In other words, everything surrealist was old by then, including
the manifesto-like genealogy purposely recreated via a collection of books
and paintings on the first floor of the gallery.39 Surrealism was on the verge of
becoming what Roland Barthes would have called an “arrière-garde.”40
It was only via the ultimate resurgence of cannibalism in a surrealist man-
ifestation that the movement would have its avant-garde status consumed for
good. As part of the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme dedicated to
eroticism, which opened on December 15, 1959, at the Galerie Daniel
Cordier, Breton invited Meret Oppenheim to exhibit her Festin cannibale.
The pope of Surrealism had actually changed the name of Oppenheim’s cre-
ation, which was simply called Le Festin at a Spring Celebration given in the
city of Bern. Could it be that the metaphorical eating of Dada was purposely
reenacted? What is certain is that, at first, the event may have seemed similar
to the performances of the twenties, where pranks and puns were common.
But the parallelism stopped there. Turned into a dish to showcase food, the
woman’s body was sometimes replaced by a plastic mannequin, and it was
never truly an exquisite corpse to be consumed. Moreover, the feast was one
for the happy few. Photographs of the event indeed reveal that only the sur-
realists and a few fashion models and stars were invited to the meal, while the
spectators remained behind a sort of window to observe them enjoying a
meal. A glimpse of a hopeless individualist fantasy, Festin cannibale repre-
sents at the same time Surrealism’s consumption and the end of cannibalism’s
effectiveness as poetic concept—and this is perhaps why its image was
quickly cannibalized itself by the consumer society.41

Pomona College

88 FALL 2013
 VIRGINIE POUZET-DUZER

Notes

1. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991), 11.
2. In the book he dedicated in 1994 to the figure of the cannibal, Frank Lestringant has shown
that the admittedly “Carribean” etymology of the word, suggesting that the cannibal inhab-
ited the Antilles, has been corrupted with the fantastical projections from Christopher
Columbus. The latter, having mistaken the islands for India, took the indigenous islanders
for the envoys of King Khan. And the root of the word also suggests the idea of monstrous
and cruel tribes, engendered by dogs. But whatever the original meaning of the word might
be, it refers to a practice considered most horrifying, one for which we always blame the
other, the unknown, the geographically or historically distant. Hesitation about the original
meaning of the term amplifies its uncanniness. See Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale, gran-
deur et décadence (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1994).
3. The short-lived Antropofagia literary and artistic movement that was founded by the Brazil-
ian Modernist Oswald de Andrade in 1928 focused mostly on folklore and native themes in
order to question the cultural heritage of Brazil. It is sometimes also called “Cannibalist
Movement.” See the online Brazilian Encyclopedia of visual arts, http://z.umn.edu/e1o
(accessed February 10, 2013), as well as Serge Fauchereau, “Le Mouvement anthro-
pophagiste,” Avant-Gardes du XX e siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 517-26.
4. Alfred Jarry, “Anthropophagie” (1902), Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1987),
344-46.
5. Remy de Gourmont, “Apologie du cannibalisme,” Promenades philosophiques III (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1925), 64-69.
6. Tristan Tzara, “Note 6 sur l’art nègre,” Sic, 21-22 (September-October 1917).
7. Dawn Ades, “The Anthropophagic Dimensions of Dada and Surrealism,” Bienal de São
Paulo: núcleo histórico e historias de canibalismos (Sao Paulo: Fundaçao Bienal de São
Paulo, 1998), 241-45.
8. Dada n°7—DADAphone (Paris, March 1920).
9. The text mentions a “grand travail destructif, négatif” as well as a “grand spectacle du
désastre.” See Tristan Tzara, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 1:366.
10. Jean Arp mentions directly this “ordre de la nature” and argues that Dada wanted to avoid
“tout ce qui était copie ou description pour laisser l’Elémentaire et le Spontané réagir en
pleine liberté.” See Jean Arp, Jours effeuillés (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 307.
11. On May 11, Picabia wrote in Comœdia, “Maintenant Dada a un tribunal, des avocats,
bientôt probablement des gendarmes et un préposé à la guillotine!” quoted in Pierre Daix,
La Vie quotidienne des surréalistes (1917-1932) (Paris: Éditions Hachette, 1993), 126.
12. Tristan Tzara, De nos oiseaux (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1929), 35.
13. Tristan Tzara, Dada, no. 3 (Zurich, December 1918), 3.
14. Lewis Kachur, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations
(London: MIT Press, 2001), 6.
15. André Breton, “Les Pas perdus,” Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 1:260.
16. Jonathan P. Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2008), 49-51.
17. This is what Eburne argues, focusing on Desnos’ writings: “What may be most disturbing
about Desnos’s poetic language is that it reminds its readership that Jack the Ripper’s
crimes, like the poetic marvelous, were alarming for their intrusion throughout everyday
experience” (Eburne, 132).
18. “Le Dialogue en 1928,” La Révolution surréaliste, 11 (15 March 1928): 7.
19. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 15.
20. René Crevel, “Sommeil,” La Révolution surréaliste, 2 (15 January 1925), 26.
21. The “lampions du 14 juillet” are normally celebratory: they give joyful colors and light to
the street in order to commemorate Bastille Day, on July 14. But in Crevel’s dream, these
lanterns get a cruel and bloody connotation. They are indeed made out of human flesh, as
if they were embodying the very revolutionary act of “mettre à la lanterne.” Does the
dreamer re-enact mentally the hangings of the years 1789-1793? Does he remember the
post-revolution terror days, or does this image have to do with the fact that many people

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were also killed on Bastille Day? What matters is that the surrealist concept of revolution is
reenacted as a violent one.
22. The ambiguity of a word meaning both “tongue” and “language” is purposely chosen by
Crevel in order to poeticize the very mouth of the cannibal.
23. For more about the substitution of “to eat” and “to read,” see Jean-Jacques Thomas, La
Langue, la poésie: essais sur la poésie française contemporaine (Lille: Presses Universi-
taires de Lille, 1989), 83.
24. An analysis of Péret’s poetry of cannibalism can be found in Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, “Du
cannibalisme surréaliste à la poétique anthropophage de Benjamin Péret,” in Poésie et poli-
tique au XX e siècle, Henri Béhar and Pierre Taminiaux, eds. (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 103-18.
25. Péret and his wife shared a fascination with the then nearly-unknown Brazilian traditions,
and as a result they carefully assembled songs and folk myths. Péret, who loved proverbs,
slang, and popular children’s songs, and often included them in his poetry, was fascinated
by local fables, and he approached them with a nearly ethnographic eye. In 1930, the singer
published her Chants populaires du Brésil, in French and under the name Houston-Péret.
The poet’s collection of myths entitled Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires
d’Amérique would be published only posthumously in 1960, after more than thirty years of
further research by Péret.
26. See M. Elizabeth Ginway, “Surrealist Benjamin Péret and Brazilian Modernism,” Hispania,
75:3 (1992): 543-53.
27. Leslie Bary, “The Tropical Modernist as Literary Cannibal: Cultural Identity in Oswald de
Andrade,” Chasqui: revista de literatura lationoamericana, 20:2 (1991): 13.
28. “A conferência de Péret,” Revista de Antropofagia, 2:2 (Diário de São Paulo (March 24,
1929), translated in Robert Ponge, “Lorsque le surréalisme paraît au Brésil: contribution à
l’étude des dialogues culturels entre l’Europe et l’Amérique latine dans les années vingt,”
Revue de littérature comparée, 4:316 (2005): 440.
29. See Carlos Basualdo and Vincent Martin, “The 24th São Paulo Biennial,” Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art, 10 (1999): 60.
30. Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” Leslie Bary, trans, Latin American Literary
Review, 19:38 (1991): 39-40.
31. Robert Descharnes, The World of Salvador Dalí (New York: Harper and Row Publishers,
1962), 169.
32. Salvador Dalí, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (New York: Cambridge U P, 1998), 263.
33. Salvador Dalí, La Conquête de l’irrationnel (Paris: Éditions surréalistes, 1935), 4.
34. Dalí, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 193-94.
35. “Le Nouvel âge Surréaliste du ‘Cannibalisme des objets’ justifie également cette conclu-
sion: ‘La beauté sera comestible ou ne sera pas,’” Salvador Dalí, “Pour une Révolution
paranoia-critique,” Oui (Paris, 1971), 165. English translation by Renée Riese Hubert, “Art
and Perversity: Barlach’s and Dalí’s Views of Walpurgisnacht,” Journal of European Stud-
ies, 13:1-2 (1983): 93.
36. André Parinaud, Comment on devient Dalí: les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dalí (Paris:
R. Laffont, 1973), 34.
37. Parinaud, Comment on devient Dalí, 231.
38. André Breton, “Projet Initial,” Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Paris: Éditions Pierre à feu, Maeght
Éditeur, 1947), 135.
39. About the 1947 exhibit, see Virginie Pouzet-Duzer, “Le Surréalisme en 1947: Scénogra-
phie,” Figures de l’art, 18, L’Œuvre en scène, ou ce que l’art doit à la scénographie (Pau:
Publications de l’Université de Pau, 2010), 61-75.
40. As noted by Jan Baetens and Éric Trudel in their introduction to this issue of L’Esprit Créa-
teur, Roland Barthes actually liked to situate himself “à l’arrière-garde de l’avant-garde”
and explained that “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est mort; être d’arrière-garde,
c’est l’aimer encore.” Roland Barthes, “Réponses” (1971), Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris:
Seuil, 2002), 1038.
41. See the 1964 movie Vous aimez les femmes? directed by Jean Léon with a screenplay by
Roman Polanski, where naked women are similarly used as dish (but where they are also
possibly consumed as meal).

90 FALL 2013
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permission.