Arcanum 17 (Green Integer) by André Breton

Arcanum 17 (Green Integer) Reviews

• 
  John Dishwasher John Dishwasher

  The most striking thing about this book to me was the sense of personal crisis that you sense from Breton. You really get the feeling that he has been traumatized by the events he is struggling through and that they have broken open something in him which has allowed great insight, but also which has unchained him from compositional guidelines. Suggesting this to me is his obvious mastery of language coupled with the way he lets his metaphors digress and interweave dissonantly, sometimes almost illogically. Also there are places of great density and opaqueness where he doesn’t seem to care that we won’t understand. Breton has something urgent to say. It is so urgent and painful that he has loosened control of how he will say it. He writes with the impulses of a pre-teen gushing a romantic rhapsody, but as a middle age littérateur who is obsessed with society and justice instead of a spurning lover. I mean these observations as a compliment. There are plenty of folks in Ukraine right now suffering a like trauma, and sensing here how it ravaged Breton’s soul has heightened my sympathy for them. In letting his inner disturbance be manifest in form as much as message, he left posterity a gift.
  
  Among his diagnoses of what ails society: Humans prefer illusions to facts and truth, and society gives us what we prefer, even though without entertaining facts and truth we will never cease to torment one another. Secondly, the male gender is to blame. Only the ascendance of women to power is the cure. “Her temperament disarms all severity,” he says. Other points were lost to me in his erudition.
  
  After I wrote this review I learned that Breton was a founder of Surrealism. This does much to contextualize his style for me. Here is a representative metaphor cluster: “The star reclaims its dominant position among the seven planets in the window whose fires grow dim to proclaim it the pure crystallization of night.”
• 
  Joel Ortiz-Quintanilla

  i read this years ago, when i was really knee deep in surrealism, i said to hell with american lit, it is all crap, i wanted something different, something that would make me think, and it lead me to dada and surrealism, i read mad love first, this has to be about 1995-1996, but i found a copy of this book, after i read mad love,and i liked it, i saw a common element, that each of his books were about different women and how much he loved them, a different book on a different woman, but arcanum 17 was a great book, it went a little deeper unconciously than his other books, but all the drugs i've done have made me forget what this book was about, but if you like breton, becuase you either love him or hate him, and i've met more people who hate him more than anything else, but this faggot loves him, so i read a good amount of his books
• 
  Etienne Mahieux

  « Arcane 17 » s’inscrit dans la continuité des grands récits de prose poétique d’André Breton, comme « Nadja » ou « L’Amour fou », et atteint un point d’intensité propre qui le rend inoubliable. L’élément narratif est ici réduit au minimum. Dépassant toujours la séparation entre genres littéraires, l’écriture de Breton fait le grand écart entre essai, narration et poésie.
  « Arcane 17 » est aussi un livre de circonstances. Je ne veux pas dire que son intérêt serait anecdotique et éphémère. Mais Breton y prend le pouls de la civilisation occidentale lors d’un moment de crise : la Seconde guerre mondiale. Il écrit en 1944, alors qu’il se trouve en Amérique du nord où il a rencontré puis épousé Élisa Bindhoff. L’exil lui fait voir les événements d’Europe avec un recul que certains ont pris, sur le moment, pour de l’indifférence. C’est en partie pour leur répondre qu’il a augmenté le volume, en 1947, de la section « Ajours » , qui apporte des précisions en tous genres sur lesquelles je reviendrai.
  De plus Breton écrit inspiré par un paysage tout à fait particulier : celui, parcouru avec Élisa, de l’île Bonaventure et du Rocher Percé, au large de la côte canadienne. Dans sa grandeur minérale, le Rocher Percé lui apparaît comme une sorte de voile (d’Isis ?) derrière lequel on devine une autre réalité, une surréalité, comme on voudra. Ce paysage séminal remplace de façon originale le Paris dont Breton est l’un des grands arpenteurs et qui hante nombre de ses autres livres (on retrouvera sa chère tour Saint-Jacques dans « Ajours »).
  C’est une poésie lyrique et visionnaire qui domine « Arcane 17 ». Si régulièrement Breton reprend appui sur une réalité immédiatement partageable par tous, le jeu des images surréalistes et obsédantes nous fait décoller régulièrement. L’image surréaliste ne joue pas le jeu de la métaphore ; indécodable, elle se substitue au réel et au paysage du Rocher Percé se superpose petit à petit une vision quasi mystique, influencée notamment par l’arcane numéro 17 du tarot de Marseille (« L’Etoile »), dont la figure féminine est assimilée par Breton à la fée Mélusine des légendes médiévales. Le livre impressionne par l’ampleur et la cohérence de cette vision. La tension toute particulière qui parcourt le texte est la lutte intérieure, chez Breton, entre l’adhésion à une vision magique et mystique, proprement spirituelle même si cette spiritualité se vit par l’intermédiaire du corps (et du désir du corps de l’autre), et une intelligence rationaliste dont il ne s’est jamais complètement détaché. De façon tout à fait caractéristique il pose les précautions d’usage vis-à-vis de la pensée occultiste, mais ces réserves posées, il y abreuve abondamment sa poésie. Autre problème : si l’on voulait taquiner Breton, chantre de l’amour fou et absolu, on pourrait l’accuser de célébrer une nouvelle femme dans chaque livre ; il a prévu l’objection et y pare : l’erreur, le malentendu, une réciprocité inégale du sentiment sont possibles ; ce qui est incontestable, c’est la quête. Dans ce livre de son âge mûr, il dessine d’ailleurs une symétrie étrange entre lui, dont la relation précédente s’est détruite mais en laissant comme trace indélébile sa fille Aube, et Élisa, qui venait de perdre tragiquement sa propre fille au moment de leur rencontre.
  « Arcane 17 » appelle ainsi, par le biais de ses images mystérieuses, à une refondation de l’humanité dans l’amour, et dans un éternel féminin qui paraît quelque peu désuet à notre époque — tant c’est de façon très évidente un idéal droit sorti d’une cervelle masculine — mais qui a tout de même le mérite de proposer la féminité comme valeur dans une époque qui célèbre par conviction ou nécessité les vertus guerrières.
  Entre l’Etoile et la fée, « Arcane 17 », dans son énergie visionnaire, apparaît d’ailleurs comme une réécriture et une amplification, pratiquement assumée à la fin d’ « Ajours » (alors qu’il pourrait plaider les influences communes), du sonnet de Nerval « El Desdichado ». C’est là une autre tension de la poésie de Breton : radicalement moderne dans son principe, elle dialogue avec une tradition littéraire et artistique au sein de laquelle Breton choisit certes avec autorité, mais qu’il embrasse tout de même largement, au point par exemple de citer favorablement à plusieurs reprises Victor Hugo, dont il s’enchante de découvrir la mystique à la fois toute personnelle et nourrie par des lectures hermétiques qui sont aussi les siennes.
• 
  Monty Milne

  This is my second Breton. I wasn’t much impressed with Nadja, but this is in a whole new league of dire awfulness. I found all of it both boring and baffling, and extremely hard to read, yielding nothing of value for the effort. I note that Eliphas Levi is considered to be an influence on this. I read Levi’s “Transcendental Magic” some years ago and thought it utter tosh which no-one with any functioning brain cells could possibly take seriously (and I don’t for one minute think that Levi took it seriously himself – I think he was enjoying a huge joke at the reader’s expense). I laughed along with Levi and his absurdity, but I couldn’t find anything amusing about Breton. Anyone who is lauded as a “great thinker”, but who is incapable of stringing together a coherent sentence, is either a fool or a charlatan. Or possibly both. At least the book is mercifully short. The whole thing reads to me like an exercise in flatulent, pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. But maybe I’m just to dim too appreciate Breton’s Gallic greatness.
• 
  Bob

  This a fluidly (un)structured hundred pages written in 1944 when the world looked pretty grim and Breton had exiled himself to North America. Combining philosophical musings on education, liberty and a rather essentialist view (repackaged by some contemporary commentators as feminist) of what women's role should be in society, with a series of poetic images, based on the tarot card of the title, the bird-covered Percé Rock, off coastal Quebec, various themes of loss and redemption, the work is a whole is kind of slog to get through. Breton-scholar Anna Balakian's introduction is quite helpful in suggesting how to read it and finding some unity in the many pieces.
• 
  Steven Godin

  
  'Geologists and paleontologists reach new peaks of pleasure all over the Gaspé Peninsula where they calculate the immemorial landslides, of which a pebble dressed as a harlequin, uniformly polished by the sea, sometimes gives solitary testimony. Superb fragments, passed from hand to hand, are found in the area of Grand Gréve, fragments on which winged towers of trilobites crisscross in every direction, suggesting the most heavily worked tablets of Benin even while dissociating themselves as far as possible with the play of their beige, silver, and lilac lights. In everything one treads on, there is something that comes from so much farther back than mankind and which is also going so much farther. Naturally, this is true anywhere, but is more palpable in a place where every footstep brings a properly detailed reminder.'
• 
  Rosemary

  A series of linked passages or essays written while Breton was staying on the coast of Canada during the Second World War. Some of it deals with war, some with personal loss, some is a paean to nature and to womanhood in the shape of the new partner he had recently met.
  
  I found it a struggle to read this in French because the language is so complicated. There were words not in the online dictionary I used and sentences I couldn't puzzle out even when I understood all the individual words. It was a big help to read some background about Breton and this book - for example, to know that he was a leading light in the surrealism movement, that he had met his third wife Elisa in the year that he wrote this, and that she had lost her daughter in a boating accident that same year. I took it slowly, reading aloud to myself, never more than 10 pages a day, and before the end I was looking forward to the next block.
• 
  Pip

  I found this a strange book, in part sublimely written, in part too dense and philosophical for my limited understanding. Breton was writing about the catastrophe of the war in Europe while safely living in Canada. Maybe his distance made his ideas more universal! I cannot pretend to know much about the messages he was trying to convey about mysticism, which I find an offputting ideology. But I applauded his idea that women have been underutilised in world affairs. I do not class it as a novel and therefore question its place in the 1001 canon, but I found it much easier to read (but not to understand) than I had anticipated. I regret all the time I fell down rabbit holes trying to understand his allusions!
  
• 
  Christina Packard

  Reminds me of James Joyce writings. Lots of pages of mostly single thoughts etc. Not to be read for entertainment.
• 
  Pauline

  Une (non) structure. Une écriture automatique peu évidente pour moi, heureusement cela va mieux dans la seconde partie : Des concepts ésotériques, l’étoile et toujours le surréalisme.
• 
  Vivian Gironella

  Muy bonito aunque entendí la mitad
• 
  Francesca M

  What to say? I love surrealism and André Breton in particular, so my judgement could be a bit biased. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, this was a great piece of work.
  
  In particular Breton description of the natural landscape of Percé Rock and his reflections on the meaning of liberty, education, the role of women in the society and the absurdity of war are so modern, beautifully written and revealing that I couldn't help reading some of the pages two of three times. Wonderful!!!
• 
  Jen

  3 stars (2 for enjoyment and a bump for intelligence and wonderfully lyrical prose).
  
  Breton's Arcanum 17 is essentially a long essay in which he muses about love, loss, war, feminism, and a number of other things. Inspired by the image of the Perce Rock in Quebec, he uses this vision as a metaphor for a range of topics. The book itself was barely larger than my cellphone and only 133 pages (with additional pages for an intro and other material) but it took me over two weeks to read. This is one of those books that I couldn't read in bed for fear of falling asleep. In fact I fell asleep reading this on my couch, in my car (with my husband driving), and multiple times in bed.
  
  It's well written and there is no question that he is an intellectual powerhouse. I did enjoy some parts of the book but it required such intensity of focus and concentration, that it felt like a chore. He has some interesting thoughts about the rights and roles women that are quite advanced for the period in which they were written. The writing is poetic and I liked how he blended imagery form nature into his philosophical musings.
  
  I am at a loss for why it is on the 1001 list. It is certainly not a novel but rather reads like an academic essay. I could really only read two pages at a time because I found it fairly boring albeit beautifully written.
• 
  Mike

  An odd, rambling account of political liberty, womanhood, and natural beauty. Beautifully written at times, but also obscure and personal. Some sections read like a string of Joycean epiphanies loosely connected to the book's themes, while other sections read like a political manifesto. I feel as if I may have had a stronger connection to the work if I had been reading it at a certain time in my life--or perhaps if I had lived through that moment in history between the wars upon which Breton was reflecting.
• 
  Eadie Burke

  Andre Breton is one of those deep thinkers and his writing is such that it is not easily understandable. You have to take every sentence and break it down in order to get the exact meaning of what he is trying to communicate. The only way I found out what this book was about is by reading the translator's introduction. For that reason, I am giving this book 2 stars and I doubt that I would read anything else that he has written.
• 
  Andrew

  a marvelous work!
• 
  D Carter

  A tough read that did not age as well as it could've. Still moments of greatness and pure surrealist diss/association
• 
  Dave

  musing about a rock?