The legacy of Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca is his singular style: ferocious in desire, elaborate in theory, and fraught with the contradictions and impossibilities of translating human emotion into language. In the following essay, Jared Fagen situates Luca in his rightful place within the Surrealist canon in a comprehensive and discerning study of his love poem, La Fin du monde: Prendre corps.
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
—Pascal
Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde: Prendre corps (The End of the World: To Embody) deserves a place within any discussion of the surrealist love poem. Indeed, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy’s contradictory conjoining of objects (following Lautréamont’s “dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”), the chance amorous encounters of André Breton’s Nadja, and the startling, ambiguous juxtapositions of Robert Desnos’s Liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!), a resemblance between the French treatment of love and Luca’s own handling can be undoubtedly determined. But for all the impassioned intensity, violent eroticism, and revolutionary fervor it shares in common with the works of such surrealist masters, Luca’s poem can also rightfully be situated—like the poet himself—just outside this conversation, on the fringes, or raised perhaps after its conclusion, in the exhaustion and wake of interpretation.
A founder and member of the short-lived Romanian circle (1940–1947), with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, Luca and his contributions to surrealist aesthetics are distinct precisely because of the tradition from which they spring (and disrupt) and the origins they seek to restore. This subtle yet significant variation of love between Luca and the French surrealists relies primarily upon a deviation of linguistic usage: despite the spirit, a rift (or departure) can be discerned on the surface—the body—of La Fin du monde; one in which love is performed by a peculiar operation of language that is as native as it is natal, as in place as it is apart. “If I am speaking only the language I have been taught,” writes Breton in L’amour fou (Mad Love), “what will ever serve as a signal that we should listen to the voice of unreason, claiming that tomorrow will be other, that it is entirely and mysteriously separated from yesterday?” For Luca, the question is fundamental to his own poetic project, yet is itself futile: “Putting aside the precariousness of man’s existence, his rudimentary biology leaning towards the reactionary, the funereal, with the vague and progress-inducing hope that everything will be solved tomorrow, when I know that this very tomorrow will always be late in arriving, because any tendency to surpass and shatter our own limits is prohibited because of our good sense, because of our modesty and rationalism.”
These two quotes reveal an interesting disparity between an amorous poetic language in service to stifling the world of reason in order to eclipse and transform it, and an amorous poetic language whose endeavor to seek respite or refuge from the progressive world results in its anguished expression. This latter point is critical to our experience of Luca’s poem. For Breton, surrealist love offers possibility, optimism, hope: the perpetual pursuit, possession, and renewal of love’s meeting as if—like the penultimate poem in his L’air de l’eau professes—“Toujours pour la première fois” (“Always for the first time”). For Luca, love is a construct already narrativized, or “ready-made,” always despairing of the revolutionary freedom it purports yet ultimately fails to fully achieve. Like Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, the “I” of Luca’s La Fin du monde is suicided by society, discharging its lascivious behaviors within “the myth of reality itself,” a reality that is “terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.”
Within what address does this hopeless revolutionary love reside? In his essay Inventatorul iubirii (The Inventor of Love), this “myth of reality” is manifested in Oedipus, “the castration-complex man, the man of the natal trauma.” For Luca, the figure of Oedipus represents a fatal timeline in which the present is conditioned by the past and birth is the inevitable fate of death, as well as the sterilization—therefore limitation—implied in a fixed biological identity. Yet this is not Freud’s “Oedipus complex.” Arising from the Oedipal world appears an “unborn woman,” the lover whom Luca invents in order to take up resistance, his “non-Oedipal position of existence,” but who is unable to “detach herself from humanity’s putrid heart.” Contained in the non-Oedipal world is the “magic circle,” where Luca’s “I” can, with the aid of a “medium-lover,” perform its surgeries, roam reality nameless without a visa, and refuse the future bestowed on it as if “flared up into the world for the first time,” a world “without a past, without points of reference, without knowns,” although—as Luca is aware—simultaneously dwelling within the circumstances of the Oedipal myth makes a poetics of despair possible. Whereas the “first time” for Breton is always life granting, the “first time” for the Romanian surrealist is always the last; the first and final termination of a life that is nothing but ruinous.
This is not to say that despair does not play a vital function in Breton’s poetry or French surrealism in general, only that, from it, hope gains “the strength to inspire confidence in the outcome of future struggles” and “lives on despite everything,” as he declares in his Political Position of Surrealism. Human despair for Breton is the site of action that must come after desperation, but for Luca is the primary pronunciation, subject, and sinew of the poem stifled by the outer garment of hope’s complacent aftermath. Breton already exceeds reason and despair in the very deed of composition, and therefore forfeits (or surrenders) to the logic of the “only language [he] has been taught”—as demonstrated by the linguistic integrity maintained in “Toujours,” for example, in which a “Maison tout imaginaire” (“A wholly imaginary house”), while conjured through chance, is nonetheless kept intact by grammatical comprehension. Luca dismantles the Oedipal genetics of language almost as if reason did not exist and despair took residence in its vacancy. Thusly, the clear communication of an image, no matter how unreal, maintains its service to semblance, to intelligible completion; the imaginary house draws its curtains over language’s primal truth, its impetus, its gesture. Luca, as an heir of Romanian melancholy, lays claim to Tristan Tzara’s “stammering,” approximation, “half-language,” and “primitive art,” in which the poetic impulse is antithetical to intelligence.
This last point in particular is familiar to Romanian aphorist and essayist Emil Cioran, whose “On Not Wanting to Live” left a permanent impression on a young Luca. The author of De l’inconvénient d’être né (The Trouble with Being Born), who wrote that “[f]ear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life,” Cioran presents his “troglodyte” trembling with fear in a skyscraper against the disgust of Tzara’s “turbulent man” of Prometheus, both figures that symbolize a freedom from language’s “utility”—which always implies usefulness, thus benefit, thus value, thus oppression—and bring language back into contact with a base need (the primitive, the sexual, and the erotic, which oppose the fictitious grand narrative of love and progress that become Oedipal heritage). If, as Cioran believes, “abstract man” thinks only “for the pleasure of thinking,” that is, arrives at an order of knowledge that has already been masterfully charted and codified, or, in other words, already confirmed for him, then “organic man,” or, better yet, uncorrupted man, is “beyond science and art” and “thinks because of a vital imbalance.”
Luca inherits this “imbalance,” this disharmony, this inherent tension between self (non-Oedipus) and world (Oedipus), which can be seen in his abuse of language-as-sign—the mapped, stable line of communication—on behalf of a language-as-sense—the sonorous rhythm and sensuality of unexplored, unstable ecstasies. Luca’s La Fin du monde is, among other things, utilitarian language in a constant state of duress by a phonetic onslaught. It is the production of writing itself, the unfolding “nefarious acts of [Luca’s] thought processes,” which takes pleasure in words as if they are heard for the first time but vanish before they’re perceived, as if—free from the bondage of implied meaning—their being only partially (or “approximately”) known rehabilitates the feeling that fixed language appropriates/asphyxiates. For example:
je buste ta poitrine puis te visage / je tu corsage
(I breast your bust then visage you / I corsage you)tu me couvres / je te découvre je t’invente
(you cover me / I discover you I invent you)je te délivre et je te délire / tu me délires et passionnes
(I deliver you and I delirious you / you delirious me and passionate me)je te haleine / je t’aine
(I breath you / I groin you)tu t’iris / je t’écris
(you iris you / I write you)
Not only does the poem contain a cascading of mono and polysyllabic stressed words that are born from one another by associative verbal patterns, but the use of nouns/adjectives employed as verbs replaces syntactical unity for a succession of partially formed images. The poem, however, is all the more rich for this poverty, this near-silence, and defiance of authorial grammar. Luca’s word usage and aspects of speech are like that of a child whose curiosity for the world—just vaguely familiar—can still be, though primitively, expressed as an immediacy, mere gesticulations, urgent utterances, that respond to a desirous love anterior to language and a fully fleshed semantic identification.
In order to gain a better sense of La Fin du monde’s retreat, it’s important to return briefly to Breton’s viewpoint on the lyricism of love. It is worth mentioning—at the risk of placing far too great an emphasis on a chasm between the two—the role Breton’s “lyric behavior” plays in his transformation of the world, in which the “real” and “imaginary” are intimately linked rather than distinct. Here the conflict between Breton’s positivism and Luca’s despair returns. In the former, the marvelousness of love takes shape not in the “depreciation of reality in place of its exaltation,” but, quoting Eugène Soldi, in the “attachment to the real.” The nouns “attachment” and “depreciation” give the respectively positive and negative visions of surrealism gravity; whereas in Breton the imaginary optimistically attaches itself to the real, or object of reality (as the adjective “mad” fastens itself to the noun “love”), in Luca, love is a persistent disembodying, a relentless dismembering. Body parts—hip, breast, thigh, neck, leg, shoulder blade, eyelash, mouth, vulva, groin, calf, vein, hand, tongue, nape, retina, iris—are not only misused grammatically, but their organic functions are entirely dismantled. In the line “je te hanche” (“I hip you”), for example, the noun/verb is both isolated and left behind (in French) and imprisoned by the pronouns (in English). In the former, the only discernible characteristic of the “te” is the feminine noun ending; in the latter, any indication and action of “you” is utterly absent. The majority of La Fin du monde is a constant repetition of this “je te”/“tu me” (“I [noun/verb] you”/“you [noun/verb] me”) structure of infliction/suffocation, with only minor moderations.
Additionally, the poem’s continual invention of itself makes it a stationary thing; its movement is like a static pacing to and fro between an immobile “you” and “I”/“me,” which mark the beginning and ending of nearly every line. The poem, conceived this way, always remains nearest to birth, to its inception: the formulaic resemblance of each line is simultaneous and timeless death and rebirth. “I do not comprehend the allure of existence beyond these unique revelations pertaining to each instant,” writes Luca. Every moment in the poem is its first and last.
This savage love contests and concedes a savage world. In Luca, the lover is no longer an object of pursuit, but—like the noun/verbs that run throughout the poem—a prisoner in the prison of language itself. The love object, in other words, is a verbally hallucinated extension of the lover: the love object inhabits the lover, and vice versa. In “Toujours,” Breton experiences an impossible “fusion” of his lover’s “presence and absence” that is determinedly left irreconcilable to achieve the “secret” of loving. Luca’s love, however, is a more tenacious, barbarous, lascivious, “aphrodisiacal” display: nothing is hidden. Throughout La Fin du monde, the (horizontal) anaphoric hypnotism of the “I” and “you” that initiate and terminate each line are seemingly interchangeable:
je te tremblante / tu me séduis tu m’absorbes
(I trembling you / you seduce me you absorb me)tu m’insupportable / je t’amazone
(you unbearable me / I amazon you)je te risqué je te grimpe / tu me frôles
(I risk you I climb you / you brush by me)
Again, Luca’s lover anticipates, thinks, and communicates with him “in advance of [his] own thought processes.” Consequently, the lover and beloved, engaged in a game of absorption and—just as soon—rejection, refuse a permanent biological standard and do not conform to any intact body but, rather, variations of disposable and replaceable appendages. But just as the two lovers undergo concomitant transfigurations, in which the fusion of “I” and “you” means both a simultaneous loss of the one and augmentation of the other, Luca sees “the liberation of man inexorably connected to the simultaneity of all solutions,” in which “the tiny eternal desires, the dear eternal subversive ideas, the modest incestuous dreams, eternal immoral dreams, mingle and mix with the idiotic and impudent obstacles of the external world, ludicrously eternalized and whose function is to conciliate this suffocated life, fruitlessly wasted.”
For while it is at “la fin du monde” that Luca and his lover may “prendre corps” (“to take shape,” or “come into being”), the world nevertheless remains a remnant, and love’s shape surrounded by the devastation only partially fulfilled. “Prendre corps,” then, takes on another meaning: “to capture a body,” or, more appropriately, “to embody,” or “to contain.” Sheltered within the “circumference of this circle” is Luca’s medium-lover whispering to him his own yearned-after, textually erected lusts, and a marvelous love that can only survive in a somatic pleasure which is illusory dreamt but subsequently felt. Yet always on the horizon, or periphery, of Luca’s “magic circle” is the staging of love’s mythological drama whose performance bewilders the sacred and sacrificial for the sake of both maintaining and producing morally complicit progeny. The non-Oedipal is despairingly realized by its confinement and collapse within the reality of its mythological framework that harbors and informs Luca’s desire to shelter and strip, and it is this “horrific vicious circle projected across the purview of the entire existence” in which the act of love is seized and the lover desperately clutched to—“je te corsage” (“I corsage you”); “je te jupe” (“I skirt you”).
Lastly, the use of reflexive verbs is crucial to an appreciation of Luca’s poem. As previously mentioned, “I”/“me” and “you” act, in addition to ornamenting the sexual body parts, as a sort of penitentiary to the noun/verb. The reflexive verb is also a function of La Fin du monde’s more urgent inner workings. The pronouns “I”/“me” and “you” are, first and foremost, a substitution of the individual; the annihilation and removal of one’s identity. The reflexive verb is also, essentially, a verb whose direct object refers back to, and is the same as, its subject: hence the synthesis of Luca’s lover and beloved and their ambiguity, which calls to mind Rimbaud’s “je est un autre” (“I is another”). Secondly, the reflexive verb as an action—je me lave (I wash myself), for example—is etymologically and metonymically significant. A “reflex,” or its synonyms/associations—instinct, impulse, involuntary, automatic, spontaneous, etc.—is defined as an action (or reaction) of unconscious thought. This pre- (ante-) or anti-meaning is at the heart of Luca’s poetic enterprise: a language laid bare and a direct assault on the objectivity—a universal consciousness brought to its utmost logical conclusion—of language itself.
Unlike Breton, love for Luca is not an ideal, but a configuration under constant scrutiny and forever reinvented (or misconfigured). As Luca recognized, intrinsic in the pursuit of an ideal love is its implicit failure, a dialectical and hopeless “negation of negation” whose activity presupposes a negative realm and stasis of futility. “There is no act that claims the last word,” writes Luca, “but in each act, even the most elementary, I risk my life.” The ultimate problem of Nadja for Breton, as we know, was that perhaps he didn’t take “mad love” literally enough. Luca’s poem, on the other hand, revels in madness of expression. Indeed, as Luca demonstrates, its very frenzy, its innate rebelliousness, is precisely its loveliness.
Jared Daniel Fagen is a Korean-American writer living in Brooklyn and the northern Catskills of New York. His essays have appeared in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics (Contra Mundum Press) and Big Other, amongst other venues, and his prose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lana Turner, Prelude, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rupture, and elsewhere. He is editor of Black Sun Lit and tweets @_godsacres.
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