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Interview with _Jeunes Antilles_

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov, dit Lénine, Karl Marx, Jules Monnerot, Blaise Pascal, Arthur Rimbaud, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Jean ou Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Maurice Nadeau

Description

Manuscript of an interview given by André Breton to the newspaper Jeunes Antilles in Fort-de-France on 2 March 1946.

By mid-February 1946 the deteriorating political climate in Haiti forced Breton hurriedly to leave Port-au-Prince earlier than planned. He went back to Martinique, where he had been five years earlier. There he gave three lectures (thus completing the programme he had set for himself on two islands instead of one); the interview for the newspaper Jeunes Antillesalso survives from this trip. Although the questions and answers are quite brief, the poet kept a record of them. The manuscript reveals that the version published in the periodical (and reprinted in Alentours I of the third volume of the Œuvres complètes) has been cut down by four questions that André Breton deleted, but to which he still responded. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten manuscript, Fort-de-France, 2 March 1946
2 pages in-4∞, handwritten text of this interview with Jeunes Antilles, dated and signed by Breton in ink, Fort-de-France, 1946:
‘Which of your works do you prefer?’
‘My response is rather banal: Arcane 17, the most recent.’
‘How did you come to discover automatic writing?
‘From those quickly delivered and uncontrolled monologues that psychoanalysis tries to induce patients to express, as well as from sentences given in half-sleep, and from certain verbal formations perceived in a waking state as if they were being given to no one in particular.’ [sale catalogue, 2003]

*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson.

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition établie par Marguerite Bonnet et éditée par Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la contribution de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas et de José Pierre), « Interview de Jeunes Antilles (Fort-de-France) », Alentours I, Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 169-171, notes p. 1220-1221.