Le seuil, matrice du surréel chez André Breton
The threshold, matrix of the surreal in the work of André Breton

Author(s): Jean-Yves Michel
Subject(s): Cultural history, French Literature, Cultural Essay, Philology
Published by: Editura Junimea
Keywords: threshold; André Breton; surrealist; Nadja; quest; writing;
Summary/Abstract: The notion of threshold appears as a fundamental key notion in André Breton’s stories, where everything takes on the face of an initiatory quest, where the revelation is a process of knowledge, where reality at a given moment topples into another revealing dimension, properly ‘surrealist’. The structure of the sentence and the text gives flesh to this quasi-mystical approach. The trilogy “Nadja - L’amour fou - Arcane 17” illustrates this notion, the eponymous character Nadja being the incarnation of it. Breton is a poet who explores the human universe in all its dimensions, through various approaches. With him emerges a holistic vision. The stories are as many initiatory quests, where are explored various universes which enter in contact, interpenetrate, to build a properly surrealist vision of the world. Both the man and the poet André Breton successively cross all the thresholds, the writing joined to the experimentation ‘in vivo’ being the place where the surreal vision can be elaborated, to build and realize a true alchemical work...

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