Morpheus Ascending: Vítězslav Nezval's Decalcomania

Russian Literature LV (2004) 569-581 www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit Elsevier

M O R P H E U S A S C E N D I N G : VITI~ZSLAV N E Z V A L ' S D E C A L C O M A N I A

M A L Y N N E M. S T E R N S T E I N

The Surrealist belief in the creative powers of the subconscious spawned a great deal of writing on the principles of automatism; this "writing without preconceived object" was seen as the poetic simulation of insanity (Matthews 1982: 71-82). Automatism is said to test "the theory that, freed of reason's control, language is at liberty to explore the realm of creative imagination and, when doing so, to establish contact between men on a new plane" (81). But are these "irrational" products of the unconscious wholly immune to the strictures of language? In order to forward the argument that even the most nominally "surreal" of works can have organizing principles and structures and support a creative telos - that there is a system to the setting down of the irrationally conceived ± the present essay will take as a case study Vit6zslav Nezval's "decalcomanic" or decalque poems. These poems, from Nezval's Surrealist phase of the mid-thirties, found their creative inception in the chance design of decal layering. The images that resulted from the layering of decals (a technique described in more detail below) became the inspiration for verbal ekphrases by the Czech poet. The uniquely surrealist teclwdque of decalcomania has not only been overlooked by most Bohemists studying Ne- zval (even more striking as he later called decalcomania the "methodology" behind all of his poetic production), but also by literary critics and scholars of Surrealism in general.

These issues of automatic writing and the expression of delirium through an ostensibly liberated coda have inspired the title of this paper. The motivation behind my invocation of the god Morpheus is twofold: first, as a

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570 Malynne M. Sternstein

reaction against the Orphic myth, with its theoretical baggage which so prevails in the critical study of poetry and poetic language; second, and more to the point, because the patronage of Morpheus in Surrealist poetry is a rarely acknowledged but latent fact. The God of transfiguration in dreams is naturally evoked for Surrealism with its religion of the dream-state, drug- induced deliria, hallucinations experienced in mania, and abnormal psychic experience. But even more than this superficial coincidence of imagery, the Morpheus myth, as most famously described by Ovid, also answers to problems of "truth in representation". In Ovid's version of the tale, Morpheus deceives Alcyone in dream so as to reveal to her the waking troth. 1 In order to achieve this revelation, Morpheus changes form, taking on the appearance, voice and manner of Alcyone's husband Ceyx. The son of Somnus, the God of sleep, Morpheus is able to induce dreams and to take on any form at will, becoming any individual he so desires in the mental life of the dreamer. His myth seems to echo the very essence of the sur-real: that the apparent deceit of dream-states reveals a greater truth of reality.

The Czech Surrealist movement of the 1930's grew out of the avant- garde movement of Poetism, the dominant Czech literary forefront movement of the 1920's. The Czech avant-garde of the 1920's stood in competition with foreign movements, continental Surrealism foremost among them; thus the choice to pursue "Poetism" independently, though not exclusive to influences from movements such as dada, Futurism, Cubism, Purism and, yes, Sur- realism, was a political, nationalistic and artistically and theoretically inform- ed choice (French 1969: 100-102). Although Karel Teige, the chief theore- tician and champion of Poetism, had expressed doubts about the ability of Surrealism to deal with the demands of modem life, calling it merely another version of Romanticism (Teige 1928/1972: 597), his rhetoric was quite changed by the thirties. In fact, the most outspoken proponents of the Czech Poetist movement, Teige and the poets Vit~zslav Nezval and Konstantin Biebl, inaugurated the Czech Surrealist movement even as Breton's Sur- realism was being proclaimed dead in its own birthplace (Teige 1934: n. 7). For these writers the step to Surrealism was natural - in their hands the Poetist movement, once an independent artistic hold-out, was increasingly consumed by a zeal for the irrational, or better put, super-rational, in poetic expression, both in its genesis and its reception. Teige pronounced Sur- realismus the heir to Poetismus:

Cesk~ surrealismus je prvnim pohledem nov6 tvfif'e 6esk6 poesie, znamenim, ~e vstupujeme na novou etapu testy a do nov3)ch bfis- nicl@ch dobrodru~stvi, ~e jaro poetismu se dovr~uje a promrfiuje se v surrealismus, ~.e jsme to o krok bli~e k ~.ivotu objektivni i subjektivni, zevnl i vnitf'ni, sociologick6 i psychologick6 reality. (Teige 1934: 8)

Morpheus Ascending. V#dzslav Nezval's Decalcomania 571

(Czech surrealism is a first glimpse of the new face of Czech poetry, meaning that we are ascending to a new plateau of the path and to new poetic adventures, that the swing ofpoetism is being consummated and is changing to surrealism, that we are one step closer to a life of objective and subjective, external and internal, sociological and

• , 2

psychological reahty.)

The soil was prepared: already Poetist manifestoes had ordained a poetics of carnival, festooned rides, acrobats, dancers and clowns. Poetist visions of a Luna Park - a sort of amusement park right in the pulsating heart of the city, a locus of irreverence and flings where the average work-a-day man and woman could escape the tedium of modern life, release their pent-up tensions safely and revel in the cathartic ludic joys, principal among these being humor (Toman 1995: 32); all these ambitions definitively presaged the Surrealist faith in the super-mental and the elemental in human expression. The Poetists' early and enduring conviction that "v~ichni budou d~lat poezii a nikoliv jen jeden" (Teige 1934: 56; "everyone and never just one will make poetry") - a motto culled from Lautr6amont, the acknowledged godfather of Surrealism - also echoes the sentiment expressed by so many of their international Surrealist contemporaries. These leanings towards the irrational side of man and the democracy of poetic production foretell a love affair with the Surrealist word and ethos. Add to these Teige and Nezval's increasing interest in Freudian theories of psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, their radical leftist tableau- extant as early as the years of Dev~tsil (1921-1924) - and their courtship of Francophone culture (also characteristic of Poetist works) and it becomes inevitable that the Czech avant-garde movement in Prague should find itself hosting the likes of Andr6 Breton, Paul l~luard and Philippe Soupault.

For his part, Nezval's surrealist activity occupied the better portion of the 1930's. According to Thomas Winner and others (e.g. Kr/tl), the full- fledged Czech Surrealist movement cannot be said to have taken flight until 1934 (Winner 1989/1992:1597). Winner maintains that Surrealism remains the country's dominant artistic trend (Slavi~kovfi as cited in Winner 1989/1992: 1597). While I would be hard pressed to go so far as to say that Surrealism continues to dominate Czech post-Soviet and post-modern artistic activity, the endurance of Surrealism is striking. Latter-day Surrealists such as the animator Jan Svankmajer and the artist Eva Svankrnajerovfi have been adamant in their insistence that Surrealism is more than an artistic choice. For them it is a modus vivendi, a way of life, rather than a mere "school" of production or cluster of devices (Svankmaj er in Marsh 1991).

In this paper I hope to implicitly explore the resilience of Surrealism as a modus vivendi by explicitly reporting on the generative semiotics of


Surrealist poetics, in particular as manifested in the poetry of Vit~zslav Nezval.

As the techniques and values of Surrealism are of common knowledge, I will skirt a typology here. More useful for our discussion of Nezval's sur- poetics will be a brief review of the Surrealist principle of automatism and the implications of automatic writing for poetic language. This accounting should lead in turn to the crux of the issue at hand; namely, can we find a structure, a motivated significance, to poetic works expressed "spontaneous- ly", "sur-really", "maniacally"? 3

Surrealist poets have consistently had faith in language as a reliable expression for the experiences collected in these interstitial and uncensored realms of mind. And therein lies a paradox. For the poets and painters of the surreal, the cherished fruit of direct manic experiences is the culmination (validation?) of artistic expression: "What fascinated us was the possibility [trance-like states] offered of escaping the constraints that weigh on supervised thought" (Breton 1993: 62). As poetic products, these trans- missions of the super-real rely on verbal expression, on (poetic) language - a cognitive faculty of mind. But how can we depend on waking language, itself delimited by syntactic, phonological and even moral constraints, to ade- quately capture narcotic truths? The surrealists enjoined the techniques of automatism, automatic writing and so called "spoken thoughts" to resolve the problem of the systematized structures of expression in language.

According to the Surrealists, automatic writing frees the poet from the rational censorship of conventional linguistic structures, especially those of literary vanity. Breton claims that:

The written page is increasingly disfigured by detestable revisions - rusty strokes obliterating life itself [...] to correct, to correct oneself, to polish, rewrite, fault rather than blindly mine the subjective treasure for the sole enchantment of throwing a handful of foamy algae and emeralds here and there on the sand: such is the order which a misunderstood rigorousness and slavish carefulness have obliged us to respect in art as elsewhere for centuries. (Breton 1933/1990: 157)

It is believed that the activity of writing down what is experienced in alterity as it is experienced or, sometimes, immediately after (as with dreams), more "purely" represents in language the super-real thoughts thought in all forms of mania. Automatic writing, because it is done rapidly and furiously, is presumed to avoid the grammatical and syntactical conventions and literary vanities of conventional language by effectively outrunning them. 4 Poetic works inspired by such un-preconceived subjects and jotted down quickly, so that the rational mind cannot regain control over production, are also sanctioned as "automatic" and therefore patently more "pure" (i.e. non-lite-

Morpheus Ascending: VitYzslav Nezval's Decalcomania 573

rary) expressions of mind. As Roger Shattuck puts it, "automatic writing strove to divulge the subconscious by grasping everything that approaches its surface" (1968: 350). Such automatic writing includes poems proceeding from games of chance, like the ingenious "exquisite corpse", the unmitigated confessions produced on the analyst's couch, the poems and stories of chil- dren, hypnotically induced past-life regressions and prophetic visions, sand the glossolalia of madmen and shamans.

The fixing of these manic states - dreams, intoxications, illusions, hallucinations, etc. - in written form betrays the fact that such states in their very expression take on internal autogenic systems. After all, language, spoken or mental, is a structure (for Lacan, the unconscious also is structural as a language). This notion is borne out in Freud's conviction that apparently disjointed images can be grouped into diagnostic taxonomies so as to disclose the obscured pathology of the individual. Similarly, the Surrealists' organiza- tion of manic thoughts or images into poetic, i.e. linguistic, material may also reveal a method to the madness. It is noteworthy that the products of automatic writing are, with few exceptions, "perfectly" formed sentences with the features of a deep obedience to grammar. In Aspley's 1992 survey of Surrealism, the author presents an automatic fragment from Breton and Soupault 's Les champs magnOtiques, "Raide tige de Suzanne inutilit6 surtout village de saveurs avec une 6glise de homard" ("Suzanne's stiff stalk uselessness especially village of flavours with a lobster church", in Aspley's translation) as one that "raise[s], in an extreme manner, the questions of sense, nonsense, and the relationships between words" (1992: 224). But note the considerable degree to which linguistic structures (prepositions, posses- sives, etc.) are respected even in this sentence, called by Aspley one of Surrealism's most radical "assaults on meaning" (224). Riffaterre speaks to this issue directly, pointing out that "the syntax of an automatic text is in no way different from that of a non-automatic text" (Riffaterre 1974: 223). The "semantic incompatibilities" called by Riffaterre the hallmark of the automatic text are advanced in ordinary language (though subject to the operation of poetic license). 5

Where does this lead us, then? What can we say about automatic language when we are confronted with a paradox of maniacal system or systematic mania? Does this paradox of "the prison-house of language" (to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson) render mute the possibilities of surrealist exploration? Do "those who 'liberate language' in automatism thereby liberate themselves, or become instead the prisoners of the language" (Higgins 1986)? One of Nezval's most daring surrealist collections, the 1937 Absolutnl hroba( (The Absolute Gravedigger), puts into practice these values of the surrealist activity while calling up the same questions.

At this point, a definition of the decalque or decalcomanic poem, and the activity engendering such forms known as decalcomania, is surely in


order. My 1966 Webster's offers a rather prosaic definition: decalcomania is "the art or process of transferring pictures and designs typically from specially prepared paper to china, glass or marble and permanently fixing them thereto, [...] [or] a paper on which designs are printed for transfer printing" (Webster's 1966). In lieu of a definition, the more abstruse Illus- trated Dictionary of Surrealism provides Andr6 Breton's instructions for the making of decals, the whole of which is worth repeating here:

With broad brush, spread black gouache, diluted in certain parts, over a sheet of white, hot pressed paper; cover this with a similar sheet on which you exert light pressure with the back of your hand. Slowly peel off this second sheet by its upper edge as in the normal transfer process, re-applying it and raising it again until the colour is more or less dry. What confironts you at this point may be nothing more or less than Leonardo da Vinci's famous paranoiac wall, but it is this wall "per- fected". According to what you discover there, you can now find a title for the image obtained, delaying for a while until you have made sure you have expressed yourself in the most individual and valid manner. (Breton in Pierre 1979: 50)

Besides Breton, other surrealist practitioners of decalcomania were Max Ernst, who dabbled with decalques in his collages, and Oscar Dominguez, who was perhaps the greatest sponsor of the activity. Dominguez actually proposed the expansion of decalcomania to involve not only visual poly- morphism but also temporal colligation in what he termed lithochronical surfaces (Pierre 1979: 58). But we should pause to consider the last sentence of Breton's quoted instructions, which deserves special emphasis. It seems that not only is the linguistic act relevant in the process of decalcomania but almost mandated as its finishing touch: "According to what you discover there, you can now find a title for the image obtained." Thus language is a necessary feature for the culmination of the work, otherwise why give it a name at all? Moreover, unlike other forms of automatic writing - writing without a preconceived object - the title is to be decided upon after careful deliberation, not chosen until you have "delay[ed] for a while until you have made sure you have expressed yourself in the most individual and valid manner". The fact that the apparently unmotivated visual product motivates a cognitive mediation of language (the title) shows the indispensability of the structured linguistic act in the Surrealist poetics of the unconscious.

Nezval takes Breton's instructions even further. He not only concocts a "title" for what he finds in the decalque obtained, but composes entire poems for the palimpsest image(s). Nezval uses the decal image as a propadeuctic to describe the image obtained. In essence, he effects a surrealist ekphrasis: the decalcomania without preconceived object is "illuminated" by the poem it engenders. His ekphrastic rendition of the visual image offers a secondary

Morpheus Ascending." Vitdzslav Nezval's Decalcomania 575

correlate to the "unmediated" decalque creation. Yet is his "interpretation" also without "preconceived object"? Or does the first automatic painting become the conventional conceived object of the poem? And what does this essential structure bode for surrealist poetics of irrational automatic language? In the post-script to his decalcomanic poems, Nezval hints at an ans- wer. He invokes his previous collection Most (Bridge) and the current Abso- lutnl hrobaf (Absolute Gravedigger), bringing both into the fold of his forays into automatic language as "usili o spontanni a systematickou objektivaci a konkretisaci iracionfiln6 subjektivnich, z asociativniho automatismu, pr)%ti- cich obrazfi" (Nezval 1937:199; "attempts at the spontaneous and systematic objectification and concretization of irrationally subjective images, sprung from associative automatism").

These poems deserve special attention, as they concentrate all the "surrealist" qualities and conditions described above: they are made with no preconceived object, subject, or aim, thus free from the prejudice of the con- scious mind; they are "pure" outflowings of immediate sensations, compelled by non-objective images, thus they are free from the tendentiousness of literary expression; and they are unfettered by the conventions of literary language, thus free from the tyranny of grammar, syntax and logic. Or are they? Of the six decalcomanic poems Nezval includes in Absolutnl hrobat, let us look at two, 'Opi~i mu~' ('Monkey Man') and 'Vlny ~ ('Waves'), to flesh out the force of Nezval's proposed "concretized automatism" and the validity of our argument for the systematization of mania through language.

The first of our subject poems, reproduced here with accompanying decalque, is 'Opi6i mu~' ('Monkey Man'). It should serve us as a fine example of what I am calling the surrealist ekphrasis:

Opi6i mu~ S t61em tlust6ho orangutana


Zabo~en# Do bl~ttiv6ho Piskem a prav6k~mi lekniny pokryt6ho ter6nu Vytrh~tv/t ze zem~ Du~inat~ kef" A zachycen levou rukou o vzdalens) b~eh SnaN se vydr~ipati Z t6to pfldy Kterfi Wofila patm~ kdysi mo[sk6 dno

(Monkey man / With the body of a fat orangutan / Dilapidated / Into the muddiness / Through the sand and primeval water lilies of the hidden terrain / He pulls from out of the earth / A pulpy bush / And caught by his left arm against the distant shore / He tries to clamber up / From this soil / Which apparently once created the sea bottom)

The poem is clearly a description of the decalque of the same title, not only because it can be determined empirically that certain lines correspond to images produced in the painterly text (following Nezval's interpretation, of course), but because the poem's language occupies structures typical of descriptions of ongoing events or manifest objects: for example, present tense verbal forms ("vytrhfivg', "zachycen", "sna~i se", etc.), the syntax of cata- logues, etc. The status of these poems as ekphrastic verbal representations is also, more obviously, illustrated by Nezval's own preface and post-script to the six decalque poems: these are concretizations, by dint of language, o f the "irrational tendencies in [his] soul", which interpret the deliria systematically and objectively (Nezval 1937).

The observation that the decal poems are descriptive is hardly a controversial one. In his brief treatment of this poem, Grygar describes Nezval's method and correctly points out that "the poems, originating from the poet 's decalcomania, were nothing other than detailed verbal descriptions o f this decoding process" (1985: 218-229). By making the descriptive nature of these works explicit, however, we are able to establish that the poetics involved are definitively not automatic. Descriptive language may in fact be the dialectical opposite of automatic language. The poet has translated the delirium of decalcomania to produce an organized construct meant to facili- tate cognition by the rational mind. The decalques serve as nothing less than Nezval's poetic methodology: "tyto dekalky ovlivnily, ani~ jsem si toho byl v~dom, mou obrazotvornost tak, ~e si zvolila cestu jejim~ v~sledkem je Absolutni hrobaF' (Nezval 1937: 184; "Without my being aware of it, these decals influenced my imagination in such a way as to select a path whose result was The Absolute Gravedigger").

The descriptive structure of 'Opi~ mu~' does corroborate the visual decalque, but it also shows signs of autonomous artistic creation, of literary

Morpheus Ascending. Vit~zslav Nezval's Decalcomania 577

art (or, if you prefer, literary artifice). Apart from sonic texture ("S trlem tlustdho orangutana") there is an indisputable rhyttma to the poem; lines are fairly evenly posited long to short, poetic period is fairly regularly placed, e.g. "Vytrhfivfi ze zero6 / Du~inat~ keN" ("He pulls from out of the earth / A pulpy bush") and "Sna~i se vydrfipati / Z trto pfidy" ("He tries to clamber up / From this soil"). In fact, eight of the eleven lines display an enjambment of this sort. There are poetic principles involved in 'Opiri mu£' which betray an internal logic; the crafting of words and lines, the sonic synergy, all evinces a debt to the organizational qualities of Language.

Whereas there does seem to be a measure of sober poetic construction to the poem, there does not seem to be much of the surreal. The poems very sensibly explicate this "maniacal" construction - more "sensibly" by far, in fact, than the delirious prose preface to the six decalcomanic poems. The poems seem to fly in the face of surrealist principles: not only is there a clear structural poetics in 'Opi~i mu~' but there is clearly a pre-conceived object (it is, after all, a description, an ekphrasis), and Nezval seems to shunt our own ability to enjoy the ambiguities of the decal by giving us his own "autho- ritative" reading. This all begs the question: why? Why not just leave the visual decalque to "speak for itself ' or exclude the visual altogether and have the poem stand on its own as an "objectless" expression? 1 would suggest that it is the very system (as opposed to "logic" or "reflex") of poetic language that Nezval is interested in exploring through Surrealist means, specifically through the methodology of decalcomania (Nezval 1937:184). As suggested already by Breton in his instructions, the decalques are not consummated until language is brought to bear on the images obtained.

Our poet believes in the system of poetic language and his primary aim is to fix in the system or even institution of Poetry - to communicate in poetic language - the results of chance and the fruits of mania. Nezval indeed likens the "hybrid beings" spawned from decalcomania to the verbal products of his poetic "hallucinations": "Ty hybridrli bytosti, kter6 jsem s u~asem vid~l vy- stupovati na papi~e pod imperativnim z~isahem m6 svobodn~ se rozvijejici imaginace, jsou ty t~ , jako hybridni bytost Absolutniho hrobaf'e, Feti~isty, [...] jsouce jejich pf-edobrazem" (Nezval 1937: 200; "'These hybrid beings which I saw with awe appear on the paper upon the imperative intrusion of my freely developing imagination are the same as the hybrid being of the Absolute Gravedigger, the Fetishist [...] being their prefiguration"). The mania is a model of the poetic process, a sort of thrashing out of the form which interprets the delirium: a hybrid being of irrationality and objectivity. The comprehensibility of the decalque poems, their poetic structures and strictures, then, does not exclude them from the surrealist corpus. Further- more, contained here in this surrealist game is a gesture common to Nezval's craft - common enough to be called one of his semantic gestures - namely,


the celebration and objectification of personal experience. Nezval is reveling in his own interpretation of the image obtained.

An even more revealing illustration of Nezval's reliance on language as a mediating force is the decalcomanic poem 'Vlny' ('Waves'):

Vlny Sldfidajici ohrorrm6 delfiny Ale t6~ podivn6 plachetnice Plujici k obzoru Roz~ehuji sv6telka Nad sv~mi vlastnlmi lesy A nad swjmi vlastnimi zrnffajMmi se horstvy Z ~em~rch Terasovit~ navrstven~ch vod (Nezval 1937: 193)

(Waves / Composing [lit. stacking] huge dolphins / But these same strange sailing boats / Swimming toward the horizon / Light up the phantoms [will o' the wisps] / Above their own forests / And above their own turbulent mountain ranges / From the black / Waters stacked up as if in a terrace)

Like 'OpiN mu~', the poem 'Vlny', when compared to its partner decalque, is illustrative of a mind attempting to grasp a visual situation with linguistic ordering. The poem upon inspection reveals another sub-system of language

- the metapoetic. Nezval makes references to the technique of decal layering itself, in effect baring the device of decalcomania: "Sklfidajici ohromn6

Morpheus Ascending: V#dzslav Nezval's Decalcomania 579

delfiny" (lit. "stacking into huge dolphins") and "Terasovit6 navrstvenpch vod" ("Waters stacked up as if in a terrace"). The references to the obscurity of the vision: "Ale t6£ podivn6 plachetnice" ("But these same strange sailing boats") also reinforce this metapoiesis. Clearly, in 'Vlny', Nezval's injunc- tions resound. The method of decalcomania is not only inspirational for the poem but, strikingly, is interpreted concretely in the poetic product.

The decalcomanic poems show a considerable uniformity of style and composition - all six of them are similar in line length and line length variation, all are to some degree dominated by substantives, many lines begin with participles, they are all relatively syntactically simple, and so on. This uniformity provides a recognizable system and a predictable form for the decalcomanic poem. The existence of a system, I reiterate, is not a capitu- lation of Surrealism's ardor for delirium but rather a realization of the order that is language.

Do these so-called "automatic expressions" then truly represent a liberated coda, or do they once again trap us in the "prison-house of language"? This is a complex question which may deserve more attention. But the argument I forward does suggest that automatism, at least as it is embodied in Nezval's decalcomania as "associative automatism", does not represent a thorough liberation from the body and system of language, and more importantly, does not wish to. Automatic language of any sort remains soundly within the system of language.

This conviction does not exclude another type of autonomy for forms of poetic language, however, and I would like to conclude this paper with one possibility. Surrealist language, automatic writing, may exploit another type of semiotic possibility outside the realm of symbolic language: that is, the iconic aspect of language. It could be said that the European avant-garde movements of the first third of this century are characterized by a rejection of the symbolic aspects of language and a tendency to recapture its iconic and indexical aspects. It may be possible to read the automatist gesture in Surrealist works as an attempt to renew the natural (as opposed to "arbitrary" in any Saussurean sense) relationship between signifier and signified, to explore the myriad extra-symbolic possibilities of language by searching, in the manner of Nezval's monkey man, for something primeval, organic, "Real".

So while Nezval's decalcomanic poems still prove that surrealist poetic language is systematized - that laws of syntax and grammar still prevail - this is not to say that arbitrarily designated symbolic modeling systems of language prevail. The language of automatism may be an iconic modeling or mimesis of a more real reality - that grasped by the complex of mind. In this regard, it can be said that Surrealist experiments in automatism do indeed provide a release from the prison-house of language - even if only into the prison-house's recreation area. 6


NOTES

See, for example, Hamilton (1940: 106-108). Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. This problem of the real and irreal is central to medieval poetics as well; Alfred Thomas has called our attention to its relevance for Komensl@'s Labyrint svdta a r~j srdce. "[T]o guard against an undeniable monotony, we soon began to vary the speed of capturing that message, from an almost calm writing to one that was so fast we could hardly read it. This latter, by far, seemed to be richest in dis- coveries..." (Breton 1993: 65). Incidentally, Nezval hints at such a reading of the "super-real" text via its semantic incompatibilities as early as 1928: "Logic is that which makes phrases from luminous words. Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. For this reason we do not see them. It is necessary to put the star on the table, the glass in close proximity to the piano and angels, the door next to the ocean. Thus to reveal reality is to show its luminous face as if it were the first day. If I have done this at the price of logic, it was an attempt towards reality beyond measure" (Nezval 1928: 550- 551). Nezval's coeval dedication to Surrealism and Socialism cum Communism found a tragic end. He fought in the late thirties for the acceptance of surrealist art into the canon of the socialist "cultural" agenda, but few recognize the Nezval who died in 1958 under a cloud of "collaboration" with the regime as a poet who once sacrificed his reputation and career for the sake of artistic freedom of expression.

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Morpheus Ascending: Vítězslav Nezval's Decalcomania

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