<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Too good not to have a reader's review
Review: This historical view of the relationship between popular culture and surrealism is a welcome contribution to debates on the avant-garde and mass culture. Walz presents four case studies - tourist guidebooks, popular novels, sensational journalism, and suicide - which impacted on the surrealist imagination. Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris is the motivating subject of the first chapter. Through a history gleaned from contemporary French and American tourist guides and newspaper reports of its planned destruction, Walz examines Aragon's creative play with the people and spaces of the Opera Passageway (part of Walter Benjamin's beloved Parisian arcades). Following this, Walz exhumes a mass popular figure embodying crimes unmentionable, tortures and brutalities ever unpunished, Fantomas. As an arch-criminal who appeared in 32 novels between 1911-13, Fantomas's phantasmagoric mayhem and murder provides ample evidence as to why he should appear in an array of surrealist poetry and imagery. Turning to the apparently more mundane case of the serial killer Henri Landru, the Bluebeard of the Gambais. This utterly bourgeois and apparently vacuous murderer provided the blank screen for wild and melodramatic projections of journalist fancy in the popular press. Landru was highly placed on the Paris dada group's literary charts of March 1921. Finally, Walz's attention is focused upon the tabloid press's reportage of suicides and their afterlife that are subsequently reprinted in the first issue of La Revolution Surrealiste (1924).Rich in research and theory, Pulp Surrealism is accessible, literate, illuminating, often very funny and is everything Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the Tate Modern (2001) is not. The latter is an example of the curator's bent to reduce the avant-garde to the re-presentation of readily identifiable artefacts with additional humourless commentary -- about as interesting, and as contemporaneously relevant, as the mystery posed by a John Doe toe-tag attached to a cadaver in a morgue in some re-run of a 'seventies American TV detective series broadcast on a satellite channel no one will ever watch. Mummified culture. As Walz writes at the conclusion of his study, 'With surrealism set firmly within official culture, the tasks of invoking the marvellous and the transformation of everyday life have returned to the realms of popular culture.' But not just any old popular culture can be enlisted in this project. Walz does not simply wish to fill in the gaps left by earlier scholars of surrealism with the dead weight of even more arcane facts and theories. Instead, his purpose is to enlist the service of the surrealists to direct him towards 'caches of mass culture that display affinities with surrealism'. It is 'precisely this connection that wrests a popular dynamism out of what is otherwise merely commercial mass culture.' Certainly, all of his case studies continue to find resonance in today's culture: the imaginative construction of urban spaces, sensational reportage of murder cases, the public exploitation of private misery, and the popular imaginary of arch-criminals/terrorists. It is impossible to read the chapter on Fantomas without thinking about the destruction of the World Trade towers and the identification of Bin Laden as the mastermind behind this act. How about this as an exchange of dialogue between Bush and Blair?
"Fantomas."
"What did you say?"
"I said . . . Fantomas."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing . . . and everything."
"Still, what is it?"
"Nobody . . . yet nevertheless somebody!"
"For the last time, what does this somebody do?"
"Spreads terror!!!" As such, 'pulp' more closely represents the 'real' than any analysis provided by media officials. Despite the title's anachronistic use and cultural misplacing of the Americanism 'pulp' to define low French culture (enabling, one presumes, the publisher's easy exploitation of the book over the internet through keyword searches), the potential to seduce readers like myself who first encountered the book while searching for studies of hard-boiled fiction, is promising. And, as Sean McCann in his brilliant study Gumshoe America (2000) reveals, avant-garde tendencies inscribed into a popular vernacular had long been part of the draw of American detective and mystery stories. But that is by-the-by, except, I expect this excellent volume to be a frequent entry in bibliographies that have nothing whatsoever to do with surrealism and everything to do with giving name and value to insolent popular cultures that have not yet been ossified by museum curators.
<< 1 >>
| 
