Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions

By Joann Wypijewski and Dawn Ades

Are women's orgasms more intense than men's? What did Andr Breton think of homosexuality? Can love be separated from physical desire?
In 1928 a group of surrealist writers and artists held twelve round table discussions to address these questions. Calling them "researches into sexuality," their bizarre and humorous conversations are now made available in this new edition in all their surreal and salacious detail. Their research spanned the most critical period for surrealism, a time of bitter political disputes, echoed in the intensity of these meetings and in the range of participants, including Andr Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin P ret and Pierre Naville.
Well before the so-called sexual revolution, their erotic exchanges broke sexual taboos and encouraged surrealists to openly share the libidinal themes they explored in their writing and art. In doing so, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in the new introduction, they are revealed as "lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh-flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Apr 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781689547

Joann Wypijewski

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer and editor based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at the Nation magazine. She has written for the magazine, as well as for Harper's, CounterPunch, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and other publications. She is on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. She was the co-editor with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.

Book preview

This book has been published with the financial assistance of the French Ministry of Culture

This translation first published by Verso 1992

This updated paperback edition published by Verso 2011

Translation © Malcolm Imrie 1992, 2011

Introduction © JoAnn Wypijewski 2011

First published as Recherches sur la sexualité, janvier 1928–août 1932

by Gallimard, Paris 1990

© Gallimard 1990

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Verso

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www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-712-2

eISBN (US): 978-1-84467-810-5

eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-954-7

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by JoAnn Wypijewski

Translator’s Note

FIRST SESSION

SECOND SESSION

THIRD SESSION

FOURTH SESSION

FIFTH SESSION

SIXTH SESSION

SEVENTH SESSION

EIGHTH SESSION

NINTH SESSION

TENTH SESSION

ELEVENTH SESSION

TWELFTH SESSION

APPENDICES

I General Observations

II Inquiry (1929)

III Inquiry (1933)

IV An Inquiry into Striptease (1958-59)

V An Inquiry into Erotic Representations (1964-65)

VI Introduction to the International Surrealist Exhibition (1959)

NOTES ON PARTICIPANTS by Malcolm Imrie

AFTERWORD by Dawn Ades

NOTES

Introduction

‘Recherches sur la sexualité’ is the name André Breton attached to the discussions that unwind across these pages. Research: the word was precisely chosen, for in those years between the wars the surrealist project aimed for a synthesis of the conscious and unconscious, the material and the marvellous, Marx and Freud and Arthur Eddington stirred into one heady but somehow definitive cocktail.

Eddington is the forgotten man. A British astrophysicist, an old bachelor, something of a poet and eccentric, he gave Einstein’s theory of relativity the kiss of corroboration from the observable world, sailing to the African coast in 1919 to measure the refraction of starlight during a solar eclipse. Breton, who introduced the concept of automatism that same year, later called Eddington one of surrealism’s precursors, and it is the latter’s métier – scientific inquiry, expressed in terms that were also literary, mystical, at times comic – that seems to have most influenced the formation of these discussions.

For the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s, the laws of physics, the mechanics of things and of thought, the realm of human experience full to its outer limits, were active preoccupations. They named their meeting center the Bureau of Surrealist Research. They modelled their journal, La Révolution surréaliste, whose inaugural issue carried the first of the twelve sessions translated here, after a scientific review, La Nature. While deeply interested in psychoanalysis, they did not follow its approach in these discussions. Questions are asked with the expectation of concise, even correct, answers. Repeatedly throughout these sessions, Breton tries to snap the discussants to order; their purpose, he insists, is to establish ‘objective’ facts, ‘the concrete facts of love’, the specific ‘part [in love that] belongs to sexuality’.

His judgement, of course, is entirely subjective. ‘Love’ trips him up. ‘Facts’ trip him up, as, from the first, they are as different from person to person as the dreams of two sleepers. Every line of questioning disintegrates. There is no method. The artists are not scientists, least of all Breton. They are lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh – flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings. Because they are sexual, there can be no unity of desire among them, even on the small matters.

ANDRÉ BRETON What does Noll think about the hero of one of Boccaccio’s stories, who fell asleep while the woman he’d just made love with was holding his sex? Could he do that?

MARCEL NOLL Certainly.

BRETON Aragon?

LOUIS ARAGON As M. Paul Valery said, one can go to sleep on any idea.

BRETON Morise?

MAX MORISE That strikes me as true.

BRETON Péret?

BENJAMIN PÉRET I don’t see how it would be possible to sleep in such circumstances.

BRETON Very good. Exactly. Does Morise let a woman touch his sex when he is not erect?

MORISE Why not?

BRETON Péret?

PÉRET In no circumstances. I would feel diminished.

BRETON That’s exactly the right word. Noll?

NOLL I hate it.

BRETON Aragon?

ARAGON If a woman touched my sex only when it was erect, it wouldn’t get that way very often.

Throughout, what some in the group find desirable or unobjectionable others find ‘disgusting’ (homosexuality), ‘absolutely disgusting’ (a pregnant woman), ‘violently disgusting’ (sex with a menstruating woman), ‘repugnant’ (sex with a ‘negress’), ‘odious’ (fatherhood, children), ‘repulsive’ (sexuality in itself), a ‘scandal’ (a woman’s unshaven sex). Breton regards some behaviour as ‘pathological’. Aragon objects, ‘That seems to suggest that some of us believe in the idea of the normal man’, and the others fall out on either side of the question. Avowedly revolutionary, the artists at times moralize like churchmen. Self-consciously modern, they talk seriously of succubi. (Or seem to; Dawn Ades offers a provocative interpretation of that oddity in her afterword.) Keen for measurable facts, they make measurement meaningless by their own calculations. ‘A man and a woman make love. To what extent and how often can they reach orgasm simultaneously?’ Man Ray takes a stab: 75 per cent of the time, he declares. No, the others counter: 85 per cent … 10, 15, 50, 8, 12, 2, 25 to 45, ‘probably never’, 0 to 1.

‘No’ is the effective constant in these conversations. Only onanism receives general affirmation, but that is a tenuous agreement, qualified by differences over whether self-abuse is sad or merely compensatory, over the proper circumstances and accompanying fantasies. By the final session, in August of 1932, the roster of participants is down to four. The women, who joined the discussions for the eighth session two years earlier, are gone; the men are no clearer about female sexuality than they were at the start. Exhaustion has replaced the liveliness of early days, and the investigation expires in a series of Nos. Full stop. Nothing more to say.

How like the end of an affair.

It is good, by the way, that the ‘Recherches’ fail as science.

What the pages that follow reproduce is vivid, unruly. Most, and best of all, it is embarrassing. Science is not embarrassing. In his surveys of human sexuality, the idea for which began to germinate in Indiana shortly after the surrealist discussions ended in Paris, Alfred Kinsey took exquisite pains to minimize his subjects’ discomfort. Interviewers were trained to maintain an even tone and neutral mien. They provided cigarettes and avoided judgment. The sequence of questions was carefully structured, the least intimate inquiries first. (Frequency of a woman’s orgasm, for instance, was Question No. 305, barely ahead of the subject’s age at time of first intercourse with an animal; love was not up for discussion.) Questions were to be posed frankly, and, Kinsey insisted, ‘euphemism is to be avoided like the plague.’ Answers were precisely noted on prepared sheets, divided into blocks, which by the end would be filled with symbols, their position within the blocks representing a simple yet highly systematized code. Those privy to the code could comprehend a person’s entire sexual history quickly in a few pages and translate the results into statistics. Most important, as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction offers by way of reassurance more than a half-century later,

No names were ever affixed to individual data sheets; instead, each was coded and the key to that code has been locked away and is permanently secure from access by unauthorized individuals. Even the coded data sheets are available to only a limited number of Institute employees with special permission.

Whether or not the high-security precautions insured honesty, they at least created a context of credibility. The results of Kinsey’s studies were revolutionary not because they reported sexual behaviour few had ever fathomed but because the scientific approach classified those myriad behaviours, validated them as human sexual variations, took what was hot, hidden – the life-stuff of many thousands of people – and stripped it down, made it cool, accessible, normal, a word that suddenly acquired new meaning.

Considered any other way, in the full colour of their inflections and identities, those many thousands of informants, along with their jangling desires, would not be cool at all. They would be complicated, untidy, more like the surrealists, in fact. Were the latter still among us, we might pose the question, ‘Which is true – the sexual history recollected in anonymous tranquillity, or the same history told openly without buffers against shame or fear?’

In the fourth session here, Antonin Artaud begins by noting his preference for privacy and objecting that ‘in investigations like this one, for most people a degree of ostentation inevitably intrudes’. How, he wonders, does one distinguish between those who are sincere and those who are not? Kinsey had protocols for that, but the distinction necessarily blurs when the subject is sex.

All the fire-play of fantasy, the rehearsals of desire, the little gestures of seduction, the timing and pressure of a touch, the arc of a neck, the parting of lips … the cigarette, or the lies one tells oneself, sincerely, in the afterglow: there is no honest language for such things that is not in some manner ostentatious. In its taxonomic syntax and privileged code, even Kinsey’s symbolism had the flamboyance of a mystery.

Artaud’s problem – he did not present it as a question for the group, from which he had already broken artistically – is useful in approaching the ‘Recherches’. For if this surrealist investigation fails as scientific inquiry but is too serious to be called a diversion; if it avoids the analysis associated with psychological self-examination and bears no sign of having altered the discussants’ behaviour or destabilized their prejudices; if its pretensions to objectivity make the contemporary reader (accustomed to a starved sexual language of rebuke, therapy or titillation) occasionally wish to hurl an imaginary flowerpot against some perceived wall of the artists’ construction, then what are we to make of it? ‘Ostentation’ is an interesting word, weighty with the suggestion of performance.

Kinsey is useful here, too. A biologist, he understood the role of performance in animal mating. An avid collector of sexual material from all cultures and all historical periods, he also did not confine the study of human sexuality to his runic data sheets or even to the temple of science. The Kinsey Institute today is a treasure-house of drawings and photographs; scrolls, prints and paintings; carvings and manuscripts by known and nameless persons. They might be called beautiful or disgusting; it doesn’t matter. They are human displays of the variety of sexual practice and thought. They say, Before science, there was art.

Before Victorian doctors discovered the ‘hysterical paroxysm’ and began manipulating female genitalia as a way to achieve it, there were Pompeiian bath frescoes and Japanese shunga depicting clitoral stimulation. Before there was the word ‘homosexuality’, there was the image, from Greek pottery and Zimbabwean caves and, however allegorical, Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede. Before Kinsey’s extensive inquiries into bestiality (taking up more squares on his data sheets than dreams, fantasies, enjoyment or female orgasm), there were the Lakshmana Temple reliefs and Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and the seventh session of the surrealist dialogues. And before the surrealists’ unprecedented experiment in self-exposure, there was Courbet’s ultimate act of exposure, ‘the last word in realism’, as one disparaging critic described Origin of the World, which had to be hidden behind a veil, then a landscape panel, then silence and a coyly prophylactic cabinet in Lacan’s study before it could be viewed publicly, more than a century after it was painted.

In a sense, Kinsey was using science to prove what art had revealed all along. And the surrealists were striving to make a living art, extending their own metier’s search to answer the question Who are we?

That is, perhaps, obvious, except that the artists’ medium here, language, can cause a world of confusion. It is not so useful, I think, to approach what follows with the standard form of critical comprehension that a reader would bring to, say, the surrealist manifestos. This is a different kind of ‘text’. As an exposition of sexual thought, the recorded performance of the sexual mind, the ‘Recherches’ just is. It doesn’t matter whether the words are all or always sincere, whether the speakers might lie, whether they are coherent or contradictory, whether they are misogynists or egalitarians, prigs or liberationists, lovers or louts or somewhere in between. Better to regard the words as brushstrokes or the cutouts from newsprint and rotogravure illustrations, and the whole as a kind of surrealist collage, stuttering to express, once again, the staggering possibilities of humanity’s most natural and most vexing preoccupation.

JoAnn Wypijewski

Translator’s Note

Several people helped me with the translation, the biographical notes and the picture research: Alastair Brotchie, Liz Heron, Pierre Naville, Donald Nicholson-Smith (who also copy-edited the manuscript), José Pierre, Michael Richardson, Martina Dervis and, above all, Paul Hammond, a one-man compendium of surrealist knowledge.

Thanks a lot.

M.I.

Benjamin Péret and his son Geyser in Paris, 1932. Photograph by André Thirion. (Collection André Thirion)

First Session*

27 JANUARY 1928

André Breton

Max Morise

Pierre Naville

Benjamin Péret

Jacques Prévert

Raymond Queneau

Yves Tanguy

Pierre Unik

ANDRÉ BRETON A man and a woman make love. To what extent is the man aware of the woman’s orgasm? Tanguy?

YVES TANGUY Hardly at all.¹

ANDRÉ BRETON Do you have any objective ways of telling?

YVES TANGUY Yes.

We are not told what these are.

ANDRÉ BRETON What does Queneau think?

RAYMOND QUENEAU There are no ways.

ANDRÉ BRETON Prévert?

JACQUES PRÉVERT It depends on the woman.

ANDRÉ BRETON Do you have objective ways of telling?

JACQUES PRÉVERT Yes, yes, yes, yes.

ANDRÉ BRETON Which?

JACQUES PRÉVERT (Does not reply.)

ANDRÉ BRETON Péret?

BENJAMIN PÉRET No way. And Breton?

ANDRÉ BRETON There are only subjective ways, which one can trust to the extent that one can trust the woman in question.

BENJAMIN PÉRET I agree with Breton.

RAYMOND QUENEAU To what extent does Breton trust a woman?

ANDRÉ BRETON To the extent that I love her. Naville, to what extent, etc.?

PIERRE NAVILLE That depends on the woman.

ANDRÉ BRETON In a given case, can you be sure whether she has an orgasm?

PIERRE NAVILLE Yes, certainly.

ANDRÉ BRETON How?

PIERRE NAVILLE Thanks to various illusions of a mental nature.

MAX MORISE If they are recognised to be illusions, they are not objective signs.

PIERRE NAVILLE I do not believe in objective signs.

ANDRÉ BRETON A man and woman make love. To what extent is the woman aware of the man’s orgasm? Morise?

MAX MORISE I have absolutely no idea.

ANDRÉ BRETON How can that be?

MAX MORISE Because I have no way of telling.

PIERRE NAVILLE What ways of telling do you think one could have in such a case?

MAX MORISE There is only the woman’s testimony.

ANDRÉ BRETON Does Unik share this opinion?

PIERRE UNIK I think not in some cases. I think the woman can be aware of it.

BENJAMIN PÉRET When?

PIERRE UNIK When the woman can perceive a change in the man’s demeanour.

ANDRÉ BRETON That is entirely subjective and worthless. Is there nothing else?

PIERRE UNIK Why do you think that it is worthless because it is subjective?

ANDRÉ BRETON Because an objective answer can be substituted for that one.

PIERRE UNIK Which one?

ANDRÉ BRETON In most cases the woman can ascertain that the man’s orgasm has taken place. She can find out for herself. It is a matter of a more or less conclusive local examination after the man has finished.

BENJAMIN PÉRET That is indeed the only way of telling.

PIERRE UNIK Why do you think that is the only conclusive test for a woman?

ANDRÉ BRETON Because it is the only rational means she can use.

RAYMOND QUENEAU I agree with Breton. She can only tell in this way.

BENJAMIN PÉRET Tanguy?

YVES TANGUY I agree.

ANDRÉ BRETON Prévert?

JACQUES PRÉVERT I agree.

ANDRÉ BRETON Naville?

PIERRE NAVILLE The woman can only tell in this way, and even then she cannot always tell.

ANDRÉ BRETON Why not always?

PIERRE NAVILLE Physiological circumstances sometimes prevent her, due to the very fact of her own orgasm.

ANDRÉ BRETON Is that the only time?

PIERRE NAVILLE I cannot see any others at present.

RAYMOND QUENEAU Explain the phrase ‘due to the fact of her own orgasm’.

PIERRE NAVILLE It is self-explanatory.

ANDRÉ BRETON […]² So Naville believes that, materially, the woman’s orgasm and the man’s, if they are simultaneous, could be indicated by the emission of seminal fluids which are mixed and indistinguishable?

PIERRE NAVILLE Yes.

BENJAMIN PÉRET Have you yourself noticed such mixing?

PIERRE NAVILLE Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it.

ANDRÉ

Reviews for Investigating Sex

[paperloverevolution · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As this book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Andre Breton is a huge prude. It's clear to the other surrealists, too, who spend most of their time trying to fuck with him, telling ever more gross and improbable stories. It's a delightful read.