Putting My Foot in It - Hardcover

Crevel, Rene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780023 ISBN 13: 9781564780027

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992

Synopsis

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the Marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters ands slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel’s 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the “Prince of Journalists.” This bizarre family―the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback―is matched by Crevel’s bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels―literary, semantic, psychological, ideological―until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel’s characters appear in a dirty movie entitled “The Geography Lesson,” a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound’s well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who knew Crevel in the 1930s. (Mr. Roditi died in May of 1992 while this book was in production.)

About this title

About the Authors

Crevel, RenA[a¬A (1900-35). French Surrealist who initiated experiments with hypnotic sleep. His greatest contribution to the movement, however, was to demonstrate that Surrealism and the novel could be reconciled. Whether texts such as DA[a¬Atours (1924), La Mort difficile (1926), Babylone (1927), Etes-vous fous? (1929), and Les Pieds dans le plat (1933) are called romans' or fictions', the role of language itself in their elaboration is arguably the key element. Mon corps et moi (1925) is a confessional monologue and L'Esprit contre la raison (1927) is his Surrealist manifesto. For him, suicide, an obsessive theme in a number of his works, was the ultimate solution.

Thomas Buckley is an independent scholar and writer living in Maine. He previously taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and coedited "Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation "(California, 1988).

Reviews

Despite Andre Breton's railing against the novel, it remained Crevel's favored form--which is no doubt why Crevel remains one of the most readable surrealists. Not that this last work, first published in 1935, is a tightly constructed logical whole. Rather, it is a description of the decadent baker's dozen invited to a lunch party, among them the hypocritical homosexual Prince of Journalists; his one-time beard; her son, known as RubDubDub for his slaughtered English and onanistic proclivities; and an internationally meddlesome Hapsburg archduchess. Unlike other novelists of his period, Crevel is motivated more by polities and linguistics than by a simple desire to epater le bourgeois, and he is a beautiful writer, beautifully translated. His liquid language tumbles along, powered by his strong descriptions, by his love of Freudian wordplay--rarely is a cigar just a cigar--and by his strong Communist beliefs, oddly interpreted by Pound as a condemnation of vitiated Third Republic mores and a call for Pound's own Fascist ones. Roditi is more helpful, putting the writer in the context of his pneumonic suffering, his father's suicide following his implication in a homosexual affair, his own homosexuality in a hostile circle and his eventual suicide.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

First published in France in 1933, and published here for the first time, this classic surrealistic novel satirizes capitalism, the Catholic Church, and fascism, using risque language and vivid, dreamlike imagery. The story takes for background the stories of the family of the "Prince of Journalists" and his 13 luncheon guests. Crevel creates absurd little scenes that degenerate wittily but grotesquely into sexual vignettes. Ezra Pound's foreword mistakes Crevel's message but provides a contemporary perspective, while Edouard Roditi's introduction provides more background on Crevel's life. Recommended for academic libraries.
-Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564780023
• ISBN 13: 9781564780027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 173