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The Suspension Bridge

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Giorgio De Chirico, John W. Dunne, Luis Fernandez, Pierre Mabille, Guillaume Apollinaire, Victor Brauner, André Breton

Description

‘Le pont suspendu’ (The suspension bridge), a manuscript by André Breton written in 1953, was not published until 1954 in Médium (new series, n°4).

Breton returns here to the phenomena of premonition that have haunted him for a long time and which - in addition to his own encounter with Jacqueline commented upon in L'Amour fou (Mad Love) - Apollinaire and others, such as De Chirico or Fernandez, have also experienced, sometimes to their cost.

2 pages in-4° handwritten in ink by Breton on the back of Médium letterheaded-paper, one of which is signed by Breton.

Of the four extracts, three constitute, with some variants, the beginning and the last part of a text relating to premonition:

"I once testified, from my own experience, that a poem written as a product of automatic or inspired writing, removed from any conscious desire for meaning, could suddenly become loaded with meaning on the basis of an episode experienced subsequently and which, in its unfolding and in the smallest details, this poem would tend to prefigure. I commented on such a poem, ‘Tournesol’ (Sunflower), in L'Amour fou (Mad Love). Whatever great resonance was intended by the objective observation made by de Chirico, in painting Apollinaire’s portrait long before the latter’s injury, encircling the place on the poet’s temple that he would conceal under a leather disc following his trepanning, we know what importance divinatory preoccupations were to assume for de Chirico from then on."

Published in Médium, n° 4, January 1955.

Bibliography

André Breton, « Le Pont suspendu », Médium n° 4, janvier 1955