The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

Book #9 for 2024. John Coulthart’s been revisiting surrealism somewhat on his blog in recent weeks, which has in turn kind of led me to investigate it a bit further myself, which I’ve never really done much before. This may or may not have been a good book with which to start building on my existing knowledge. I’ll quote the “about the author” page first:

Patrick Lepetit has written several books in French on esoteric traditions and surrealism. He is a member of the Grand Orient de France and of the Mélusine Network of scholars interested in surrealism. He lives in Mons en Baroeul, France.

I must say the book does give me the impression that Lepetit has spent years immersed in his subject and that it’s a real labout of love from someone who Knows His Stuff (capitals used advisedly). Being French, Lepetit obviously has access to vast numbers of French-language resources of which probably hardly any (apart from a couple of bigger titles like Seligmann’s Mirror of Magic or Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvellous, both of which I’ve got and should finally get around to reading now) has ever been available in English, which does make it a useful resource for the non-Francophone.

And therein, somewhat, lies the problem with the book. Lepetit just throws so fucking much information at you, with quotes from the surrealists themselves (particularly Andre Breton, obviously), fellow travellers like the Grand Jeu mob, critics and commentators and whoever else he can cite. The book opens by observing the surrealists’ fairly unbridled loathing for conventional religion, then spends most of the rest of the book going into their fascination with decidedly non-conventional stuff before ending by asking just how seriously they actually took this sort of thing. I’m not sure how well he answers that question really, but it is intriguing to see just how deep the hole goes. (I for one had no idea Arthuriana was something the surrealists were into. H.P. Lovecraft puts in an appearance, too, cos the surrealists had a long-standing fondness for him. I don’t think he reciprocated it, though. And even Colin Wilson gets a look in, and I think he would’ve been even less sympathetic…)

So there’s a lot of information in this book… and, as I say, that’s part of its problem, there’s just so much of it and Lepetit also seems to assume a lot of prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Like I said, he has access to a lot of material by people who are for the most part probably best known outside of France by specialists, insofar as they’re known at all, and one of the things Lepetit seems to assume is that you do in fact know who they are. I don’t blame him for this; he’s clearly writing for a French readership that presumably knows these people a lot better, and I don’t suppose he was expecting the book to go any further than that.

It’s just some of the other stuff he assumes you already know, particularly the visual art he describes; the book has some illustrations but nowhere near as much as it needs (I would particularly have liked some pictures of Victor Brauner’s work, which Lepetit writes about at some length). And there’s smaller things like glancing allusions to Breton’s “Great Transparents” that Lepetit never elucidates, and which would’ve baffled me had John Coulthart, again, not posted about them a few months ago. Lepetit’s presentation of all this business is, of course, the other part of the book’s problem; he has a rather thick writing style, full of subordinate clauses and other things that make his text a lot more convoluted than it needed to be. I don’t know if that’s an issue with Lepetit or his translator, but it’s an issue in any case, and the longer I persisted with the book the more of an issue it became.

So, awfully interesting subject matter kind of hindered by how it’s actually transmitted, which is a bit of a shame, though if you’re interested in the subject it’s still worth reading. Just not as a beginner’s book or anything like that. It’s got me interested in reading more on the subject, anyway.