REVIEWS

them through his use of macabre and hideously deformed images, scatology, in-
terruptions, venomous remarks, and more. He continues this procedure in
Rigodon. But here, Matthews asserts, Celine seems to have gained their confi-
dence and enters into complicity with them. A rapport exists between author and
reader.
A brilliant analysis of Entretiens avec le Professeur Y (1955), in which Celine
forwards his aesthetic and literary views, concludes The Inner Dream. In sum-
ming up, Matthews writes that Celine "aimed at sharing his sense of the mystery
and irony of human existence in a grotesque period. It is this, and not the im-
pulse to deceive or distort, that deprives objective fact of the power to command
and hold his respect and attention as a writer of fiction" (p. 229). To go against
the grain, to reject the climate of the times, to downgrade accepted conventions,
is to demand scorn, to encourage hate, to lust for antagonistic responses. What
must be recalled and studied-and Matthews makes this point most overtly-is
that "Celine's emphasis on style directly affected his treatment of the subject
matter of his novels by relaxing narrative structure" (p. 230).
Objectivity, depth, and sensitivity mark Matthews' method in his quest to
discover and then offer new and innovative answers to old and nagging ques-
tions. The Inner Dream, Matthews' finest work to date, demonstrates the
maturity and reflective quality of his own thought. It also reveals his talents as
a writer. Whereas many critics today fill their pages with meaningless jargon,
attempting in this way to prove their erudition and imaginative prowess, Mat-
thews' prose, like a Giacometti statue, is bone hard. Words are used for their
meaning; ideas for their breadth. Matthews need not prove the powerful hold
he has over his subject or his vast knowledge of literature and related subjects.
These are already his. That is why The Inner Dream is a literary achievement.
BETTINA L. KNAPP
Hunter College and the Graduate Center of CUNY

ANDRE-G. BOURASSA: Surrealisme et litterature quebecoise. Montreal: Editions

l'Etincelle, 1977. 375 pp.

By HISTORICAL ACCIDENT, surrealism went mainly to New York during the Second
World War. The result has been a somewhat exaggerated concentration on its
impact in the United States. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the real action
may have been elsewhere, notably in South America but also, to an extent that
might surprise many people, in French Canada. In the 1940'S there was a
Montreal group called the Automatistes, certainly influenced by surrealism, who
made contact with Andre Breton while he was in New York and supplied at least
one signature for a surrealist tract (Jean-Paul Riopelle's to Rupture inaugurale).
Riopelle also appears in Breton's Le Surrealisme et La peinture. Canadian-born
artists Mimi Parent and Jean Benoit have been living in Paris for years and have
been major contributors to surrealist activities since 1950. Artist and poet Roland
Giguere has stayed in Canada but has maintained continued contact with the
Phasesgroup.
 Spring 1979 SYMPOSIUM

All of this and more is the subject of Andre-G. Bourassa's Surrealism» et lit-
terature qusbecoise, which is the first well-documented, broad, and interdisci-
plinary study of some major avant-garde artistic movements in Quebec. This book
is especially informative about the interaction of such "cellules" as the Auto-
matistes, the Prisme d'yeux group around Pellan and the Erta group of Giguere
during the war years and after. Its extensive notes and sixty-page bibiography may
appear intimidating to a reader first approaching the subject, but they are a
fascinating lode of detail on events and people still virtually unknown even in
Canada. Bourassa's is a work of indefatigable documentation, as useful in its own
way, and as irritating, as Michel Sanouillet's Dada Ii Paris.
Bourassa's main interest is in the Automatiste movement and the poet Claude
Gauvreau. His central chapters II, III and IV are concerned essentially with that
group and its contemporaries. This is the heart of the study, Bourassa's really
valuable contribution. The first chapter, Presages, sketches a history of "sur-
reality" in early Quebec literature and the last, Le Surrealisme en question et en
jeu, brings us quickly from the fifties to the near present. My main quarrel with
the book, once I have expressed by admiration and expected indebtedness,
centres on the question of definition. In his introduction, Bourassa announces:
"le lecteur voudra bien noter qu' "automatisme" et "surrealisme" sont des termes
employes ici pour designer un etat d'esprit, comme Ie voulait Andre Breton, et
non pour designer simplement un mouvement de peinture mod erne et encore
moins un style d'ecriture, comme plusieurs personnes sont portees a le faire.
a
Automatisme et surrealisme ne furent d'ailleurs jamais Iimites la seule activite
artistique" (p. II). SO far so good. But this "etat d'esprit" is never clearly
defined and in the course of the discussion the author's good intentions are soon
forgotten. We are told it is a "surrealite" in the work of Phillippe Aubert de
Gaspe (1814-1841), Octave Cremazie (1827-1879), and Emile Nelligan (1879-
1941) that gives their work its "dimension fantastique." But evidence of this
surreality is based entirely on "activite artistique," and skimpy evidence it is: one
novel of Aubert de Gaspe, a poem by Cremazie, some qualities of Nelligan's late
poetry. Saint-Denys-Garneau's "surrealism" supposedly rests on his fascination
with games (p. 42) and Jacques Ferron's on his taste for folk tales (p. 221)-
this in spite of the fact that Ferron has more than once written about his dislike
for Andre Breton and surrealism. Faced with sentences like, "II ne s'agit pas de
contes surrealistes, mais la fin de certains de ces contes nous plonge cependant en
pleine surrealite" (p. 77) or, "Cette danse astrale dans Ie ciel est toute surprise et
surrealite," we finally come to realize that the words "surreel," "surrealite," and
"surrealisme" are used so indiscriminately in this book that they lose all virtue.
It should not have been such a surprise, then, to see Yvan Goll appear as an
authority for a definition of surrealism (p. 21). Goll, in fact, comes to have
quite an important part in this book as a representative of surrealism, apparently
through the offices of the critic Louis-Marcel Raymond, on whose word Bourassa
seems to base many of his presuppositions. And yet Goll's role in the history of
surrealism is hardly exemplary. He is not even mentioned in Nadeau's Histoire
du surrealisme, or in Breton's Entretiens, or in Bedouin's Vingt ans de surrealisme,
What surrealism are we dealing with, then? And since we are concerned with
definitions, it may he appropriate to mention that Goll actually published a
counter-manifesto in a magazine called Surrealisme (October, 1924), which lasted
REVIEWS 91
one number. This was an attempt to discredit Breton and his group, particularly
their use of Apollinaire's coinage. Goll's own counter-definition in that article is
notable mainly for its penury of imagination. Bourassa shows that Goll eventually
visited the Gaspe on the instigation of Louis-Marcel Raymond. Breton had been
there two years earlier, on a trip that has a certain notoriety in Canada because of
the Roche Perce passage in Arcane 17 and because of Breton's importance for the
Automatistes (whom he did not visit). Bourassa speculates that Breton might
also have come to Canada at the invitation of Raymond. Although I have no
concrete evidence to the contrary, I do have notes from a conversation with
Elisa Breton on June 7, 1974, when I asked her specifically about the trip to
the Gaspe: "We had been looking at a book on minerology and noticed a state-
ment that the area of la Roche Perce was rich in agates. Andre said why don't we
go there to pick stones and on that spur of the moment we made our plans. We
had thought of going to British Columbia but that cost too much. So we went
to the Gaspe and didn't stop to talk to anyone in Montreal or on the way because
we had gone in search of agates, not people." They spent hours on the beach,
often early in the morning. The only Canadian Mme Breton could recall meeting
was the painter Pellan, who had the same obsession.
All of this may seem picayune, but Surrealisme et littlrature quebecoise elicits
that kind of response precisely because it gives such importance to flimsy "evi-
dence" of "surrealism." The result is a distraction, a dissipation of effect that
threatens to deny their own integrity to both surrealism and the literature in
question. Bourassa often asks, as he does on p. 270, "Faut-il parler du sur-

realisme?" My answer would be, "Not so much, please, or at least with a little
more rigor." It is one thing to say "here is Quebecois literature and here is how it
has certain connections with surrealism" and quite another to say "here is how
surrealism manifests itself in Quebecois literature." The first approach places
more emphasis on the integrity of the indigenous literature and allows for some
subtle comparisons; the second (which is closest to Bourassa's approach) shifts
the main focus and leads to sticky problems of definition. One senses a certain
fear that nobody will be interested unless the word SURREALISME appears in
bold face. It is the same mentality that caused Matthew Josephson to entitle his
autobiography Life Among the Surrealists, even though he did not spend much
time with them and did not like them anyway. Josephson may have needed a
boost, but Quebecois literature does not.

RAy ELLENWOOD

York University

VERNON A. CHAMBERUN: Gald6s and Beethoven: Fortunata y Jacinta, a sym-

phonic novel. London: Tamesis Books, 1977. 123 pp.

AMONG the ever-increasing number of studies on Fortunata y Jacinta there have

been many in recent years devoted to its structural aspects, a belated but just