“Des surréalistes à la NRF. Des livres, des rêves et des querelles”

The exhibition “Surrealists at the NRF. Books, Dreams and Quarrels”, on offer from September 5 to October 12, 2024, is part of the centenary of the publication of the Manifeste du surréalisme by André Breton.

Designed by the historical department of Éditions Gallimard, it presents unpublished archives from the publishing house, as well as a selection of rare books and documents (manuscripts, drawings), from private and public collections, relating to the works of Breton, Aragon, Crevel, Reverdy, Eluard, Desnos, Char... and the reactions they provoked.

"André Gide is with us!" The young André Breton was proud to announce it in the spring of 1919 to Tristan Tzara, a Dada master, at the very moment when the journal Littérature was being launched, which would become the official support of the surrealist movement in France. This happy sponsorship, supported by that of Paul Valéry, made La Nouvelle Revue française, already a high place of literary recognition and creation in France, a point of attachment for this new generation of writers emerging from the war and involved in one of the most radical paths that belles-lettres had taken until then.

Available to the avant-garde, and especially attached to understanding its modern genealogy (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, etc.), the NRF will seek to integrate Dada into a critical history of literature – without any complacency – while working to attract the young Dadas, and soon surrealists, that are Breton and Aragon in its columns; then, with the enthusiastic support of Gaston Gallimard, in the catalogue of Éditions de la NRF – which will give rise to the publication during the interwar period of several masterpieces (Nadja, L'Amour fou, Le Paysan de Paris, Capitale de la douleur, etc.).

This manner of enthronement, which was played out from 1920, would make some elders grind their teeth; and although they found solid internal support with Jean Paulhan, the surrealists would not fail to dynamite this knighting from within, fearing more than anything the normalization of their seditious enterprise. Provocations and quarrels followed one another until the improbable publication, by Gallimard, of this Traité du style d'Aragon where the poet abandoned all restraint with regard to his elders. But it was on the political terrain, and not only aesthetic, that the fracture line would become deeper, even irreconcilable for some. Insults flew, people challenged each other to duels; the primacy given to dreams, poetry and love did not exclude social struggle, beyond words.

For the NRF, literature cannot put itself at the service of the Revolution, which the surrealists, rallying to the communist project, will claim to do, in accordance with their project to change life, to change the world. And in their own way, to be beyond literature without ever leaving it.