Description

First sleeping fit of Robert Desnos, questioned by André Breton and his friends on 7 October 1922. "What country? - No country." The dialogues between the sleeping Desnos and his friends, who attend his "plunges into the unknown" every evening, as Breton writes in explicitly Baudelairian terms, vacillate between failure and genius, between oracle and scribble. Among the barrage of words during this session, there are strange alexandrines, such as this one: "the tribes, I tell you, are attacking the vapours" – or, who knows, the "war on the fleet" evoked in a ‘sleeping fit’ of the same period is being played out again? Perhaps this session is also the origin of the most famous of surrealist images. Desnos is asked about what he sees: "someone blue". Who? “The earth". The earth, which is not yet as blue as an orange, but which is seen from the outside, as if from space - with the difference that in 1922 we do not know that it has this colour... Similarly, the figure of Lautréamont, whom Desnos ‘sees’ here - even though the poet no longer has a face, the only surviving portrait of him being apocryphal... The invisible becomes visible: such is the ‘clairvoyance’ of the dreamer, who ends up envisioning with terrifying precision - but fortunately erroneous - the date of his own death, 8th April 1928. First period of hypnotic sleeping fits. 7 October 1922. - 37 pages in-4° on Congrès de Paris letterheaded paper, folioed 1 to 37, with handwritten responses in black pencil; the whole is enclosed in an identical sheet folded in two and titled by Breton: "Saturday, 7 October, Desnos, 1st sleeping fit." "What are you dying of? - Daily meningitis - Explain yourself. - Propellers that determine the date of my death... - What is that date? – 8 April, 1928 at 8 o'clock... - What is he thinking about? - He's thinking about laughter.”

Creation date	07-oct.-22
Date of publication	1922
Languages	French
Physical description	Ds et Ms - crayon noir
Library	Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris : BRT 161
Method of acquisition and collection	Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, don Aube et Oona Elléouët
Reference	40000
Breton Auction, 2003	Lot 2026
Keywords	Dream, Automatic Writing
Categories	Manuscripts, Surrealists Manuscripts
Set	[Manuscripts] Sommeils
Permanent link	https://cms.andrebreton.fr/en/work/56600100073090