Arcanum 17 - André Breton
Arcanum 17 - André Breton
Publication date: 1944 (revised 1947)
Edition: Arcanum 17 with Apertures (translation by Zack Rogow)
Publisher: Green Integer
Pages: 148
Source: Amazon, after failing to find it in a book shop.
Summary/Back of the book:
André Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Percé Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism, and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. In the 17th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, a naked woman beneath a sky of stars pours water from two urns into water and onto land. This card represents hope, renewal and resurrection - the themes that permeate Arcanum 17. Considered radical at the time, Breton's ideas today seem almost prescient, yet still breathtaking in their passionate uunderlyingbelief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit.
My review:
I think this is a work that would benefit from several readings, if you are into the kind of book it is. I found it fairly difficult to get stuck into, there isn't exactly a plot to follow, just a lot of metaphors and philosophising in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way. When I read the introduction and found that André Breton started the practice of automatic writing I was not surprised in the least. I first tried to take it in in small doses, but that didn't really work as I didn't really remember where I had got to, and it's not the sort of thing that makes me want to rush to read the next bit. I finally resorted to settling down to read it all in one go, if I'm honest a bit to get it over with, but also because the stream of consciousness style doesn't lend itself well to finding a natural stopping point and I was worried that if I put it down again I'd never pick it up again.
This probably sounds like I didn't like it, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I think it would benefit from several goes, because although it's quite a small book being only 148 pages in A6 size there is a lot of imagery around the pertinent thoughts and ideas and I don't think I took everything I could have out of it this time around. It was interesting to see that some of the thoughts Breton had about the future have come to pass.
Actually, I would have preferred a larger page size, more spread out, I find it an uncomfortable size to hold, and the typeface was a bit small and it seemed cramped, which exacerbated the problems of there being no natural stopping places, which rather led me to read very fast and possibly miss some of the detail, so if you feel like trying it another edition might be a good idea.
I'm afraid I have a rather unpoetical soul, so I perhaps didn't make all the connections I was meant to make with all the metaphors but I just about grasped that the crumbling big rock was about the impermanence of life. I liked the "Apertures" bit at the end the best, because it was written in a more (though not by any means entirely) straightforward manner and seemed to have some progression, where the main part seemed like you could chop one bit out and stick it in somewhere else and it'd be difficult to notice that it'd been moved. It almost made me feel as though I was under the influence of a mind altering substance, which was possibly the point. I certainly wouldn't be able to describe much of what goes on in it.
I think I'd try something else by André Breton, but not to the extent I'm going to rush out and buy all his works. If you like philosophising and poetical prose you will probably think it is great, I am more of a plot person but I can appreciate the experience of something that makes me think a bit differently and that makes me actually do some work while reading instead of just absorbing me into a story.
My rating: 3/5