Papers of Surrealism Issue 7, 2007: The Use-Value of Documents

Surrealism and its Discontents 
Denis Hollier 
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 A second-generation surrealist, recruited by André Breton in the early 1930s when still at high-school, Roger Caillois participated in the movement’s activities during the period of Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, before becoming, with Georges Bataille, one of the founders of the Collège de Sociologie. 2 At the turn of 1955, Caillois published a particularly bitter attack on ethnography in the Nouvelle Nouvelle revue française, under the title ‘Illusions Against the Grain.’ 3 Responding to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race and History, 4 a booklet released under the aegis of UNESCO, Caillois denounced the ethnologist’s refusal to rank cultures hierarchically, according to their supposed positions on a single, continuous scale of development. According to Caillois, LéviStrauss (who published Tristes tropiques only a few weeks later) 5 was merely the most recent and visible representative of a profession – ethnography – which, while claiming to criticise ethnocentrism, was in fact practising an undercover reverse-Eurocentrism, since for ethnographers their native culture (that of the West) remained the polarizing axis, even though they were committed to qualifying it negatively as often as they could. Most surprisingly, Caillois’s conclusion traced the source of ethnography’s crime against Western civilisation to surrealism, claiming that the latter was imbued with a cultural resentment that led it systematically to ridicule everything the West complacently prided itself on. Having denounced the ethnologist as a traitor, Caillois stripped away his mask and exposed... a surrealist!

Papers of Surrealism, Issue 10, Summer 2013
Sea of Dreams: André Breton and the Great Barrier Reef Ann Elias
 ‘The Treasure Bridge of the Australian “Great Barrier”’ is an underwater photograph in Mad Love (1937). André Breton’s caption tells us the source was the New York Times but not who the photographer was. The research informing this article reveals the coral reef is not Great Barrier in the Pacific but the Bahamas in the Caribbean. The photographer is J.E. Williamson. I establish the provenance of this photograph and argue for its centrality to surrealist aesthetics. I discuss the image’s many possible symbolisms but also argue that Breton’s desire was to construct Great Barrier Reef as the uncanny Pacific of his imagination.