From Sorcery to Silence: The Objects of Gherasim Luca Krzysztof Fijalkowski The Modern Language Review, Vol.

88, No. 3. (Jul., 1993), pp. 625-638.

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F R O M SORCERY T O SILENCE: T H E OBJECTS O F GHERASIM LUCA

Most surrealists might be said to be interested in the status of the real and its transformations and latent meanings, but of these only a proportion venture as far as a profound questioning of the external object either in texts or with real forms; rarer still are those individuals who have tried to pursue this literal or figurative object to the very core of its contradictions. O n e such seeker is Gherasim Luca, a surrealist poet whose remarkable work is only now beginning to be more widely known in his adopted home and remains (partly owing to problems oftranslation) almost entirely unread elsewhere. From his participation in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s in the sometimes frenetic activities of the surrealist group in Romania, with its emphasis on material revolutionary means and a preponderant interest in real objects, to the poetry of the years since his decampment to Paris in 1952, secretive and hermetic, Luca's auure has both hunted down the objects ofdesire and been their prey. has forced the membrane between subject and object and seen itself swamped by the despairing realization of the object's evanescence; it represents one of surrealism's most authentic attempts to confront and surmount this opposition. T h e surrealist group in Romania was at its most active at a time when groups elsewhere were being dispersed or silenced, in the years during and immediately after the Second World War, but its relatively brief flowering left behind what one commentator has named 'le plus exubirant, le plus aventureux et mzme le plus dklirant d u surrkalisme international'.' Its best-known statement of intent (even if the text is no less scarce than its companions) is the message/manifesto Dialectique de la dialectique (Bucharest, 1945), in which the authors Luca and Trost urged surrealists throughout the world to beware the stagnation of their own past successes, dispose of old techniques and the temptations of aesthetic clichks, and embrace a revolt against nature and a d i p a l oppression, the critical attitude to the unconscious required for a genuinely revolutionary stance and the materialization of love's subversive power, along with the eroticization of the proletariat, as the first principles of such a r e ~ o l t . ~ This insistence on the material conditions of the surrealist revolution, also a feature of the work of the group in Prague, inevitably engendered a large degree of attention to the question of the object, both in written productions and in physical creations a n d the attitude to daily phenomena. T h e result was seen in publications such as Gellu Naum's Medium (1945) and Paul Paun's La Conspiration de la silence (1947), in which the authors engaged the problem of objects both as vibrant, indescribable, and masked realities and as bodies capable of active, magical, even offensive relations towards the subject (Vanci, p. 109).T h e role of the found object and its position in the force-fields of demoniac power or hasard objectifwould seem to have been a feature of individual activity: Gellu Naum, for example, describing his pursuit of a n 'archkologie mkdiumnique' in which ritual and fetishistic discovered
Sarane Alexandrian. Le Surre'alisme et le rlve (Paris: Gallimard, 1g74),p. 2 2 I . Alexandrian, pp. 223-24; Maria Vanci. '. . . 44'5 de latitude nord et 26" de longitude est . . .', Opus international, 19/20 (1970), 105-09 ( p p 105-06). A part of the text of Dialectique de la dialectique is also reproduced in the catalogue L a Planite affole'e (Paris and Marseille: Flammarion, 1986),p. 259.

Objects of Gherasim Luca

objects figured as the physical traces of magical forces and event^.^ On the other hand, the thrust of such personal enquiries was brought into the collective sphere by means of ritualistic group games designed both to arrive at what Salvador Dali had previously labelled the 'connaissance irrationelle de l'objet' (only this time using the actual forms themselves to trigger descriptions) and to exploit its potential role as a mediator in the conscious and unconscious relations between individuals. The first of these, the Jeu du sable nocturne, was a ritual exploration of the object through touch alone (as Dali's 'Objets psycho-atmosphtriques-anamorphiques' had also proposed some years before). Participants entered a darkened room and after feeling an object had to provide its 'description surautomatique'. Sixteen such descriptions (phrases which displaced any retinal objectivity and the forgotten original forms with new evocations of poetic matter ('Pli profond balance par le sang', 'Neige adhtsive, inutilement colorite par le vent') ) were accompanied by a poetic collective text in the catalogue for the 1947 Exposition internationale du surre'alisme. Through this attempt at knowing the object, buried from rationalizing sight, lay a path to desire:
Passant a travers l'objet, les bras nus, le dCsir se trouve augment6 d'un aveuglement de plus. Le bout des paumes, le bout des paupikres de la vision totale, mettent en contact d'une manikre suprCmement hystCrique le dCsir et ses possibilitts infimes de devenir. [ . . . ] La coqnaissance par la m6connaissance [ . . . ] A la recherche perpetuelle de la femme trouvie, p r t ~ e n t e . ~

The second game of which records remain was that of the Jeu de la de'coration riciproque. Players assembled absurd medals for each other, awarding these decorations with all due ceremony, accompanied by lengthy speeches to qualify each distinction; it was this game which was to provide the impetus for Luca's further investigations into the object and its position as an intermediary between one subject and another, between the individual and the world. The capital text issued by the Romanian surrealists in the domain of the object is Luca's L e v a m p i r e p a s s g it is also one ofthe most important and complete statements on the object in all surrealism's encounters with this theme, and it has remained one of the least known to those outside Romanian and French s u r r e a l i ~ m . ~ Completed at the end of 1941, the book describes events during the year or so before that date. This was the period immediately following Luca's return from a visit to Paris with Gellu Naum 11938-39) during which contacts were forged and a commitment to surrealism was clarified (Vanci, p. 108), a visit the book alludes to more than once. Luca's account seems visibly to be seeking a response to the key texts of the Parisian surrealism whose principles he was attempting to apply his own life during this period, in particular Andrt Breton's theoretical-autobiographical testimonies Les Vases communicants, L'Amour fou and Nadja (the latter specifically cited
Gellu Naum, letter quoted in Guy Malouvier, 'Gellu Naum et le surrtalisme roumain', Le Domaine poitique international du surrialisme, Le Puits de l'enite, special no. 2g/30/31 (March 1978), 158-61 (p. 160). Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Paul Paun, Virgil Teodorescou, Trost, 'Le Sable nocturne', in Le Surrialisme en 1947 (Paris: Maeqh, 1g47),pp. 56-58; Alexandrian, Surrialisme et rhe, p. 225. This and other games within the group, states Alexandrian, 'avaient pour but de purger le moi de ses rtsidus rtactionnaires, et d'exalter ses pouvoirs de surcompensation poktique'; similar games involving the sense of touch have also been pursued by the Czech surrealist group. Gherasim Luca, Le Vampirepassif(Bucharest: Editions de l'oubli, 1945)~ published in an edition of460 plus 41 de-luxe copies. Written in French like most texts by the Romanian surrealists, the book seems to have circulated with a degree of freedom in post-war Parisian circles, but its place, date, and size of publication have naturally made it relatively rare.

KRZYSZTOF FIJALKOWSKI

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in Le Vampire passif). But if the lyricism and honesty of Le Vampire passif's poetic readings of the events of hasard objectif and its ipaves evokes Breton, the account also recalls the other strand ofearly 1930s surrealist object experimentation, that of Dali. Like Dali's objets 2 fonctionnement gmbolique, large portions of Le Vampire passif are concerned with the fabrication and (largely erotic) interpretation ofsymbolic assemblages, while the provoked state of delirious excitation and paranoid interpretation (based again on Freud but pushing well beyond his cautious theories) to which its author admits, and hisinsistenceon the materializationofdesire and the absorptionof objects in aphysical act ofthe denial ofantinomies (conscious/unconscious, internal/ external, reality/desire) all recall the tone of Dali's most important writings; Le Vampirepassij'is hence particularly precious as a surrealist account oftheobject which overtly attempts to create a dialectic from surrealism's own potentially divergent (if not necessarily contradictory) views of this issue during the I930S, theories intcrrupted within the Parisian group by the advent ofwar and never to be recommenced with the same fervour thereafter. O n the other hand, the book pulls together strands of the physical surrealist object as well, for it explores creations which may be at the same time trouvailles and deliberately constructed artefacts, whose forebears are both the .~ Bretonian oneiric apparition and the Dalinian objet a fonctionnement s y m b ~ l i q u e Here, as for Dali, the passion for the object and the objectification of passion will brook no bounds; but here again, as for Breton, its means are those of poetry and chance, multiplying rather than systematizing their actions in the quest for love and illumination in a language constantly slipping from 'objective' account to poetic diriue. Although Le Vampire passif, like Nadja or L'Amourfou, describes real events, Luca has said that it is also in a sense a poem; its principal actors are the objects rather than individuals, but finally the 'object' in question is that of the book itself (in conversation, 2 2 November 1988). Le Vampire p a s s f i n fact consists of two roughly equal segments which are rather different in character, as ifthis 'book-object' were the dialectical synthesis of the first, broadly descriptive, section and its succeeding, more poetic, counterpart. The first half. an 'Introduction sur l'objet objectivement offert', is a discussion ofthe notion of the making and giving to others of objects which are the visible signs of a tissue of relationships between people and the real, followed by descriptions and analyses of a number of examples. The second section ('Le Yampire passif' proper) builds this evidence into an extended meditation on the self and the object, with its relations to chance, desire, and magic, which itselfculminates in one final exampleofan exchange of objects in which is discovered their power both to activate desires and to perform their own occulted sorcery. In the catalogue ofthe I gq jexhibition devoted to plastic works by Luca and Trost, Luca offered a definition of his objets objectiuement offerts: La confection des objets et leur offre a une personne rigoureusement dtterminte par la nature symbolique de ces objets ttablissent entre les hommes des relations fondtes sur un inconscient collectif actif quejusqu'aujourd'hui seul le rZve a Cti en t t a t de fixer dans un appareil pratique commun 2 tous. L'objet offert donne la possibilitt d'introduire cet inconscient collectif actif dans les relations diurnes et directes entre les hommes, relations qui au travail d'interprttation

Le Vampirepasszfmakes no formal distinction between found objects and the constructions made from them; unlike other surrealist texts which dealt with one branch or the other, for Luca at least they were clearly aspects of the same attitude.

Objects of Gherasim Luca

le plus ClCrnentaire se rnontreraient tout aussi subversives, Ctranges et rCvilatrices que celles du r C ~ e . ~ The origins of the objet objectivement offert ( 0 . 0 . 0 . ) lay in the Jeu de la dkoration re'ciproque, which itself already consisted of making and giving awards. Luca's interest in the 'manifestation symbolique contrastant avec une manie gtntrale de la perstcution' led him, however, to develop his own ideas on the giving of symbolic objects in tandem with this game; their offering to individuals could use the game as a pretext for the working out of desire, as well as any other accidental event or occasion (Vampire passif, pp. 9-1 0). These objects were nevertheless not to be equated with ordinary gifts; the social giving of presents, Luca observes, even in the context of intimate relationships, has been stripped of all its erotic and symbolic powers, neutralized by custom and habit (p. 12). These new objects Luca firmly situates beyond the law of economy and exchange, taking on the quality of oneiric forms where the real and habitual world is denied in favour of d e ~ i r e . ~ Indeed, the character of these objects, both their unexplained or absurd appearance when assembled together more or less automatically and their nature as bearers of latent desires (erotic or hostile) which could be discovered on careful analysis, suggested to Luca that such found and made objects were strictly comparable to dream images in the means both had to express hidden wishes (p. I I ) , now brought out into the open and confronted by the individuals concerned rather than confined to the dreamer alone.g IYhat these verifiable objects were also able to activate, he continued, was the web ofactive collective unconscious relations between individuals, fixing its manifestations and multiplying its phyiical occurrence in waking life (pp. I I , I 5). But as a crystallization of hasard objectif and an objectification of this collective unconscious, the objet o f f t might be able to intensify the instances and potential of chance. An ordinary found or made object, Luca observed, in other words one offered by the finder to himself, remains 'un objet de connaissance par masturbation'; its status as object of desire is fulfilled only by its being given to another individual (one determined by the object's innate symbolism). In this way, he proposed, the mediation of the object establishes erotic relations more directly, and desire forces hasard to place objects in the individual's path with greater frequency, so that 'la causalitt externe repond plus vite aux nkcessitts inttrieures'. The idea of rarity which had tended to accompany accounts of hasard objectif (for Breton at least, if not for others such as Louis Aragon, who was more prepared to see evidence of the merveilleux as an all-pervasive transformation capable of activating any object) might eventually dissipate altogether as desire continued to find its correspondents in the real world (pp. I 5-16).1The obsessive or
For a discussion of the surrealist object, surrealist economies, and gifts, see the final chapter of the study from which this article is taken, my 'The Surrealist Object: Proof, Pleasure and Reconciliation' (unpublished doctoral thesis. University of East Anglia, 1990). Those objects and individuals with no psychic resonance, meanwhile, could only be likened to the diurnal remnants of dreams j Vampirepassij p. 67). mere dislocated shadows of the unconscious discourse they had allegorized. lo Pierre Dhainaut analyses Luca's poetry as the attempt to find 'l'espace et le temps totalement limpides d'illumination. du satori; de I' "intense vacuitt" ' in the multiplication ofthe impossible. citing 1,uca: 'Les deux polgs de I'inadyissible 1 ce qui ne peut arriver se produit 1 ce qui ne peut arriver qo'yne seulc fois se rCptte' (Dhainaut, 'Eros lit mythe', in Domainepoitiquedusu7rialisme, I 53-57 (p. 157) ). .4s Edouard Jaguer has observed, thr rhythm ofhasurdobjectifand the encounters it engenders in Le thmpire passifare the same as that of the ritual language of the later poetry, breaking and regenerating the vocabulary of new meanings ['.4vatars de I'ob,jet', Cahzers du Musie depoche. 3 ( I 959), 75-8 j (p. 82) i.

' Gherasim Luca and Trost, Prisentation degraphies calories, de cubomanies et d'objets (Bucharest, I 945), n.p.

KRZYSZTOF FIJALKOWSKI

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delirious contact with objects whose discovery or fabrication was determined by chance was the means by which to arrive at a genuine resolution of the internal and the external worlds (p. 9). I n the objet offert lay a means to objectify desire, to accede to what Dialectique de la dialectique had described as 'cet amour dialectis6 et matCrialist' as a revolutionary counter-offensive whose pursuit offered a glimpse of 'les premiers aspects d e l'amour objectif' (reproduced in Planite affoli'e, p. 259). Objects, 'ces mysttrieuses armures sous lesquelles nous attend, nocturne et d6nud6, le dtsir, ces pikges de velours' (p. 5 7 ) , acted in Luca's eyes (just as they did for Breton) not only as the bearers of desire in their role as its lure but as the exponents of a n active search for love, unmasking erotic relationships in their discovery, assembly, and transmission, even controlling the action of these relations (as the final section of the book reveals), a confrontation of desired object and object of desire to which later poems were constantly to return: Ce caillou. c'est toi, ce feu, c'est encore toi, et ce dtpart aussi, alors que les oracles de ton approche sont des arbres, des iclipses ou des chats. A ce degrC d'attente, il n'est pas ttonnant que tout soit message et telle une feuille qu'on glisse sous enveloppe le monde entier se plie sous tes doigts. (Ce ChBteau pressenti (Paris: MCconnaissance, 1958),n.p.) And in a text of twenty years later, 'Je t'aime', this investment of the object as the fetishistic sign for the loved individual continues unabated, the objects once again acting both as the ecstatic harbingers ofdesire and its celebration which threatens at each moment to submerge the loved one beneath their flux: 'Quelques objets tendrement hCt6roclites tels que le bouton de corsage ou d e sonnette, une toile d'araignte entre les dents d u peigne, un savon A c6tt d'un inconnu ou d'une bague, et la mythologie de l'orgie s'avance', the text a single sentence enumerating the discovery of love's existence in the feeblest external signs. I n the secret life of these object-signs, the poet finds the keys to love, the reflection of his own image, and the infinite play of their own latent being, 'lorsqu'en regardant un objet j'y vois un miroir qui me regarde [ . . . ] tous les objets qui m'entourent sont des glaces qui renvoient A l'infini leurs images, parfois la mienne dont les os palpitent sous leur peau transparente'.ll Just as Breton had affirmed in Nadja that 'la vie demande 2 ttre dtchiffrke comme un cryptogramme'. a life in which desire incited the external world to provide its mediating objects could supply a universe full of signs to be appropriated, combined, and delivered into erotic social relations. I n this way Le Vampire passif acts not only as a n account of this multiplication of signs but as a n active process, in the manner of Les Vases communicants, of their decoding, so that objects perform as the transmitters of a magical communication^ even to the extension into the 0.0.0.0.- objects objectively offered to other objects, 'un prockdt magique

Gherasim Luca, 'Je t'aime', La Briche. 7 (December 1 9 6 4 ) 4 ~ 5 0 'un miroir qui reflkte non pas ; I'homme, le dkcevant, mais l'objet, I'inCspCrP' (p. 49); the relevance to Lacan's notions of the mirror, for example. hardly needs to be underlined. Another testimonv of the search for desire which is led by fetishistic objects constantly vacillating between the function of signals and that of objects loved in themselves can be found in Marco MCnegoz. 'Du Hasard B l'objet' (from the unpublished M i ci plume an revue L'Objet, reprinted in hfichel FaurC. Hlstoire du surrialisme sous /'occupation (Paris: Table Rondr, 1g82), PP. 3 9 ~ 9 2 ) .

"

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Objects of Gherasim Luca

de la communication entre le moi et le soi [qui] nous donne la possibilitt de nous mouvoir plus librement dans un monde d'apparitions, plus rapprocht de nousmgme, niant la rtalitt-obstacle par le simple proctdt de l'ttreinte d'une ombre' (pp. 62-63) .I2 As in Breton's descriptive texts, Le Vampire passif did not limit itself to theory alone; the proof (or rather, the initial evidence from which generalizations could be drawn) was to be the accounts of specific examples of objects whose incontestable reality already lent a critical weight to such arguments. O n the other hand, again following Breton's lead, the problem of the diffusion of such 'evidence' when it consisted of unique objects and the inadequacies of merely verbal descriptions was overcome by the inclusion of photographs as illustrations to the text, depicting the objets objectivement offerts and other items cited in the account in a clear, 'objective' manner (full-page reproductions of the assemblages on plain backgrounds). Luca's first detailed example is of an exchange ofdecorations with Htltne. Htltne had expressed a desire for one of the balls which Luca kept in his room, whose interpretation by him as testicles made the idea attractive but embarrassing in front of the other people also present at the time; a week later the Jeu de la de'coration gave a legitimate opportunity for the offer of a ball, now studded with nails and bearing the legend 'Objet d'amour'. The object's status as objet d'amour, however, had blinded the giver to its true symbolism, which subsequent interpretation revealed: that of the removal of a single testicle, of castration and rejection. The object received in return from Htltne confirmed this reading: a half-closed hand and a small light bulb on black velvet, Luca notes, presented a gesture of mutilation and repulsion, where 'la main, aprks avoir arracht le testicule, le laisse glisser sur un morceau de velours qui devient le plat castrant de Salomt et le mouchoir castrant de Vtronique' (pp. I 719). This account and its interpretation was typical, not only centring on objects as bearers or heralds of affective relations between Luca and another individual but investigating their precise context in the narrow time-span of the events surrounding their discovery, confection, donation, and response. The frequently sexualized reading of these objects, often ambiguous in its polarities both of attraction/repulsion and malelfemale relations, occurred in another example, that of the object made from a long glass tube, a number 7 and a flat spool, given to G. (a man). The choice of the first article Luca saw to be the result of the sympathy felt for G., who would appreciate a sexual object such as this. But its form as a glass tube proved to be double-edged: it was a phallic symbol, but one which could not make G. too attractive to women, one which was constantly threatened with breakage. This covert threat to G. was continued by the number 7, a 'mysterious' figure whose macabre overtones were nevertheless sufficiently insidious to avoid the censorship of the psyche (pp. 20-22). The flat spool, on the other hand, revealed a separate aspect of the relations between Luca and G., crystallizing the former's desire to have his books left in Paris just as G. had done (stronger than the wish to keep the spool for himself) in its migration from Luca's bookshelves in Paris to a drawer in Bucharest to G.'s bookshelves (pp. 22-26).
IZ I t is the seer who makes the object, Luca affirms, and communication is possible only when the other is seen as an object; objects, on the other hand, are the bearers of the invitation to respond to these signs. But this relation, it would seem, is not one of a simple intercessor of communication, for if the object is the concretization of the subject in the external world, it is also what he clings to in the flood, beyond all hope of contact or exchange (conversation with Luca, 22 November 1988).

KRZYSZTOF FIJALKOWSKI

63

Another example concerned a yet more complex tissue of connections, for this time an object was made (the reader is not told ifit was given) for an individual Luca knew onlivery slightly but wished to know more intimately, Andrt Breton. A doll seen several weeks before was suddenly purchased and covered in little cartoon riddles cut from old Hachette almanachs, a process which left Luca 'dans un Ctat d'excitation permanente'. The female doll was then transformed still further by the addition of another doll's head between its legs, forming an erect sex whose features Luca had wanted to cover with a mask of pen nibs. But when Luca's wife was asked to sew them on, an argument ensued; the-doll was consigned to a drawer and Luca moved out to stay with friends. A week later he returns to finish the work; this time the head-sex is decorated with razor blades inserted brutally into the plastic surface, but his wife is happy to see the doll completed and asks what they will call their new child. Unappreciative of this allusion, Luca replies that it cannot be their child for its name is Nadja, but the next day renames it La Lettre L (pp. 26-27). The doll when first seen remains a neutral object whilst the relationship was maintained comme celles qui vont d'un sujet qui cherche, i un objet qui demande a Ctre trouvk. [ . . . ] A l'instant oc I'objet me dtpasse en se servant de moi comme d'un mkdiateur spectateur-acteur entre lui et Breton, I'objet indtsirable se transforme et se qualifie. Qualitativementdiffkrent, il exerce une extraordinaire pression sur moi. [ . . . ] L'objet trouvk pour Ctre offert commence B murmurer entre moi et Breton une langue magique et noire, si prks du rEve et d'une langue fondamentale. (p. 28)
,

,Luca had met Breton in Paris but had felt too intimidated to further this relationship beyond written correspondence and mutual friendships; each piece ofpaper stuck to the surface of the doll became identified with the pleasure a conversation with Breton would have given, so that the desire to know Breton had found in this object its physical substitute (pp. 28-3r).13 The incident with Luca's wife, meanwhile, reveals to him a second set of relationships. Identifying herselfwith him, he notes, she is unable to complete the mask, to remove the impact ofits erection and place the relationship between herself and Breton on an intellectual plane. The object's fabrication is interrupted, Luca continues, because his wife 'en s'identifiant avec moi, a l'intention de transformer l'incube en succube, chose que je refuse avec une double jalousie'. The mutilation with razor blades blocks this infidelity, a temptation further arrested when he deliberately relates the doll to Nadja in response, a title 'qui tloigne totalement ma femme de mes relations avec B., mais en mEme temps moi aussi je suis Cloigni parce que entre Nadja et Breton je ne peux Etre que spectated (p. 32). The final title, La Lettre L evokes a passage from Nadja and one of Luca's own texts concerning Nadja and Breton (pp. 31-33); the single object has succeeded in inserting itself into not one but a whole series of real or imaginary relations (LucaIBreton, Lucalhis wife,

l 3 Luca was not to participate in group activities on his move to Paris after the war, remaining connected rather through individual friendships and pursuing a more solitary course of actions.

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Objects of Gherasim Luca

his wife/Breton, BretonINadja, LucaINadja), provoking discoveries and revealing connections hitherto masked until desire triggers the object's crystallization.14 The steel pen nibs, suppressed in the previous assemblage, became the principal element of an object made for Victor Brauner, Le Cripuscule. Seventy-five of these miniature phalli were attached to a red velvet cushion, a task which engendered unexplained physical discomfort in the woman who was asked to sew them on. This multiplication and enumeration of the objects of desire was to be elaborated in another of Luca's works, a 'publicat-n' in an edition of one, Quantitativement aimi, decorated with 944 nibs (Bucharest, Editions de l'oubli, 1944).The seamstress ofLe Cripuscule, meanwhile, resisted the request to add a celluloid hand to the cushion, refusing 'la masturbation des 75 p h i s en trection qui lui ferait manquer une orgie aussi formidable' (p. 34); she finally acceded, and another hand was added below the cushion, dangling between two legs and rendering the object's masturbatory work still more evident. Le Cr+uscule was a response to a gift from Brauner of two other decorative nibs; here, Luca infers, was an invitation to mutual masturbation accepted in the return object, in the' exchange of objects 'qui se masturbent rtciproquement' (p. 34). One of the arms turned out to bear the number 22, 'nombre mortuaire [ . . . ] dont la solution mathtmatique cache peut-Gtre la magie' and which heightened in Luca's eyes the status of this objet lifonctionnement hotique (p. 38). But when, during the object's completion, Luca learns of the death of Brauner's father, his conclusion is that the exchange ofmasturbatory objects based on an Gdipal urge has seen the sentiment of guilt passing from passive to active form: 'Le nombre 2 2 tcrit sur le Cripuscule est un poison morte17 (see also his discussion of the number situated on page 22). The final example from the first part of the book enlarges the claims for the power of the object still further. O n g November 1940, Luca recounts, he made three objects: Le Fant6me idial (for G.), Le Statue de la libido (for Htlkne), and Le 'Non' (for V.); feeling that they had to be made ofgold, he was nevertheless obliged to settle for bronze or gilt. Having finished them late at night, Luca retires to bed with the premonition that there will be an earthquake; three hours later a violent earthquake shakes the room, bringing down furniture and objects around him. When G. arrives shortly afterwards, Luca gives him Le Fant6me idlal and they go outside to walk through the streets of Bucharest, now transformed by the disaster, the vision of collapsed buildings and stunned inhabitants heightening the unconscious collective impulse, the author maintains, to react erotically to the earthquake by masturbating. The formerly ugly city has been convulsed: now 'c'est une ville d'une beautt vraiment unique que des femmes sommairement v h e s traversent comme des Freud's interpretation of ghosts in dreams was of 'les visiteurs fant6mes7.~ u as~ t nocturnes qui ont tveillt l'enfant pour le mettre sur le vase [ . . . ] ou qui ont soulevt
l4 Of Breton's principal texts, ~Vadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) is perhaps that most closely echoed by Le Vampire passif(a book which pays more attention to relations and events than to a meroeilleux urbain of Bucharest as privileged place, 'cette ville queje n'aijamais aimte' (p. 43) ). The passage in question from Nadja concerns a sheet of her drawings: 'Ce qui, pour Nadja, fait l'inttrit principal de la page, sans que j'arrive B lui faire dire pourquoi, est la forme calligraphique des L' (A'adja, p. 124).La Lettre L (L.L.L.) continues to resonate into other relationships too, for 'L' is also for 'Luca' ('l'octan du vertige de l'tclair du cheval calligraphique I de / mon / L / initial' ('Initiation spontanie', in Gherasim Luca, Hiros-limite (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1g70),p p 57-59 (p. 5 9 ) ) , as well as for its assonant partners. the two principal women in Le Vampire passi;f; Htlkne and DCline; Nadja too is identified both with the letter L (one of her lovers would call her 'comme en rivant: Lena, Lena' (Naadja, p. 85) ) and with the name Htlkne ('L.N'): Breton's unaccountable absorption with this name meets her reply 'Hklkne, c'est moi' (p. 93).

KRZYSZTOF FIJALKOWSKI

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les couvertures pour voir comment il tenait ses mains en dormant', so G.'s appearance a t Luca's door was to collect Le Fant$me idehl but also so that the two friends, 'tous les deux des fantBmes idtaux', could recognize each other's erotic activity (pp. 39-45).15As in the incident at a Parisian flea market recounted in Breton's L'Amour fou, where it was the presence of both Breton and Alberto Giacometti together which was necessary for the sequence of hasard objectifand its objects to unfold in all its subtlety, here again it was the crossing of two subjects mediated by objects which spun a web of relationships, 'cette communication mysttrieuse entre deux tCnkbres' (p. 46). Two years before, G. had been present at a discussion during which Luca had expressed 'dans un moment de violent pessimisme rtvolutionnaire' how a major catastrophe would respond to his desire for a revolutionary transformation of the world. Now it had transpired that: Le disir-panique de satisfaire dans la panique tous mes disirs, substitut a mon disir continue1 de changer le monde par la rtvolution, rencontre la causalitt externe du glissement de terrain dans le fond des montagnes et les objets, irrationnellement fabriquis quelques heures avant le trrmblement, prennent place dans ma conscience sous la forme de privision d'une catastrophe queje souhaite et B laquelleje participe. (p.qgj16 T h e objects, Luca continues, had to be of gold or bronze because it is only objects of these resistant materials which are recovered in the archaeology of ruined cities. They have become not only the intermediaries of physical relationships but the mediumistic messengers between time and space: Entre moi et les objets queje fabrique il y a une distance de quelques milliers d'annies, je les invente et les dtcouvre en m&metemps, je les enterre et les diterre simultantment, i l'ichelle dtlirante de l'espace et du temps du disir, nous sommes vivants et fossiles, comme une main sur la plaque du radiologue. (p. 49)17 I n changing the object, the individual makes manifest his desire to change the world, but as Luca's account attests, there are times when it mav be hard to decide. of object and subject, which is the passive and which is the active agent. As expressions of the desire for total transformation and convulsive destruction, it is the solid object, the physical symbol which alone can survive time, displacement and catastrophe, which carries the weight of meaning between the individual and the world. 'Nous sommes d'accord avec le rEve, la folie, l'amour et la rivolution', Trost and Luca wrote in 1945; 'NOUS rejetons sous tous leurs aspects l'art, la nature, l'utilitt [ . . . ] la mtmoire, les restes diurnes dans le fonctionnement onirique, la gtomttrie euclidienne, les chiffres dtfavorables et la mort' (Prisentatzon degraphies, n.p.). I n Le Vampzre pass$ Luca had written: 'Je refuse toutes les formes, toutcs les cattgories, toutes les idtes, tous les actes, toutes les lois, tous vos aromes castrants. Je mange, je respire, je bois, je pense. je nie, je m'habille, je me meus aphrodiszaquement' (p. 76). A path to this amour objectf (just as to hasard or humour objectif) was through the physical object, the means to reject the artificial separation of desire and reality, of
l5 This Freudian interpretation had also served to elucidate Breton's Objet-Jant$me in Les P'ases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 5 j ) , p p 66-69. l6 SeeJean Cazaux's discussion ofsurrealism's desire for revolt through the disturbance and destruction ofthe real, to 'briser lejoug de I'utilitt immediate, actualiser la tendance profonde de l'hornme a sortir de tout. pour mieux rentrer dans tout', in Cazaux, 'Rtvolte et docilitt dans l'invention pottique surrtaliste', Minotaure, I I (Spring 1938),27-28. Luca and Trost's Prismtation degraphies catalogue had described as well as the 0.0.0.the category of 'Objets ronstruits distance i I'aide d'un mtdiun~'.objects with a delirious and aphrodisiac quality 'obtenus griice i un procidi trotiquernent rnediumnique [qui] sont la projection de ma propre tendance aphrodisiaque transmise de loin h mon mtdium qui me la renvoie rnatirialiste'.

Objects o Gherasim Luca f

internal and external being (p. g).I8 Through the mutation of 'les objets, cette catalepsie, ce spasme fixe [ . . . ] ces pierres philosophales qui dicouvrent, transforment, hallucinent, communiquent notre hurlement' (p. 58) lay the possibility, once their true nature was accepted, of denying the false hypotheses of rationalism (p. 93). To this end the transformation of objects, imposed or discovered, could - -perform as a figure for the convulsion of the real world and its relationships, a setting-in-motion of matter or expression which was to remain the keynote for " Luca's work in no matter what medium: 'Aussi vite que la simultantitt, nous passons du solide au liquide, du liquide au gaz et du gaz au fant6me.'lg The second part of Le Vampire passif begins to increase still further the power discovered in the object as it becomes clearer that the finding or making of objects might be seen as merely the subject's acceptance to work in concert with the object as a fetishistic. magic. even demoniac source. While Breton had equated the trouvaille u , with enchantment (L'Amour fou, p. qg), Romanians such as Luca or Naum were even more explicit in the investigation of objects as magical agents, forms which Le Vampire passifcandidly placed in terms ofa satanic energy, of a pact between the poet and the devil (pp. 79-82) .20 The final episode of Le Vampire passif, the last example of the work of the 0 . 0 . O., is . an account or such power in objects to manipulate and interfere with relationships. Luca meets and falls violently in love with Dtline. During the brief relationship, Luca makes her an object; 'Elle me donne en Cchange une carte postale montrant 27 enfants. Une heure plus tard tout est fini' (p. I I 2 ) . The object, Fitiche-Diline, which appears to have taken control to precipitate the unwanted and needless rupture turns out to have also encouraged the initial desire for Dtline: formed from a doll's leg, a star, and a turbaned head on a stand, this last object had been intended for Luca's friend Jacques HCrold, but somehow could not be completed; in fact, Luca was to realize, it was the desire to know Dtline (Dtline Hhault) that was already being announced. In return Dtline's postcard (signifying her former lovers) was one taken by chance from a friend; it was signed 'Htrold': 'La m5me formule fondamentale avait servi B prtparer les deux poisons' (pp. I 16-19). While the trouvaille as annunciation and crystallization of love remained in Breton's eyes (in L'Amourfou, for example) a predominantly benevolent apparition, for Luca the object might also be found to have assumed control, the exchange of objects consummating events beyond the intervention ofeither party. 'Je ne sais pas
2

Is Just as words or objects might be enjoined to faire l'amour, so surrealism's task remained 'de conqutrir les moyens de faire l'amour avec le monde et [ . .. ] de [le] rendre permanent et collectif' (Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun, Trost, 'Une Question' ( 1 9 4 6 ) reproduced in La Planite affolk, p. 259). ~ l9 Luca, Ce Chiteau pressenti. Whilst the mutation of language with the aim of relocating its primal core became the keynote of Luca's later poetry, in the domain of the visible object this was effected not only through the mutation de rile of the 0.0.0, but also in the rearranging of images (engravings or photographs) that had been dissected into regular squares and assembled using chance to form disrupted and often eroticized patchwork pictures (see Gherasim Luca, Les Orgies de quanta (Bucharest: Editions de I'oubli, 1 9 4 6 ) ~ illustrating thirty-three 'cubomanies non-aedipiennes' accompanied by quotations from Hegel and Sade). Luca's note in the catalogue Prisentation de graphies had suggested how this process of fragmentation and rearrangement might be applied to real objects, to be extended into the spheres of love, sexuality, architecture, painting, dream, and magic, as an activity claimed as a liberation from Edipal constraint, rational scientific perception, and the alienation from one's own destiny. 20 Le Vampire pmsif reproduces an object through which Luca has signed a pact with the devil, L'Amour noir (the glass chamber of an oil lamp surrounded by dismembered arms (pp. 81-82,8g) ). I n enumerating the names of Satan Luca notes their meanings, amongst them 'Bilial= qui repousse le joug de l'utilitt' (p. 80).

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quelle en est la part d e l'amour et quelle en est la part d e la magie', wrote Luca (p. I 15),and the phenomena: qui se rattachent B cet objet [Fttiche-DCline] me semblent tellement obscurs et tpouvantables qu'il m'est impossible de ne pas penser B la magie. [ . . . ] J'ai toujours eu l'impression d'&tre pens6 comme Lautrtamont et Rimbaud, mais jamais il ne m'est arrivt que cet autre qui me pense sorte de moi-m&me paraisse devant moi d'une faqon concrtte et sensible comme tout et autre objet extirieur. (p. I I 7) T h e object, both the lure ofdesire and its exteriorization, plunges the individual into the realm of myth and ritual, where ancient and unknown rites are regenerated by the poet whose gestures are those of a n unsuspecting initiate, automatically repeating formulae beyond his knowledge or control (pp. I 19-20) .21 T h e once-certain view of the uncomplicated and deliberate use by the subject of his surrounding objects must suddenly be accepted as a half-truth, for these agents of hasard objectifare also manipulating and guiding the destiny of their seeker. For Luca, however, a reconciliation and a discovery of the real means to power can still be won through the acceptance of this realization: the symbiosis of the internal and external flux where the poet sucks u p the outside world and disgorges it again, letting its reality literally pass through him as events unfold. T h e nocturnal, black-magic ambience, that of the sable nocturne, propitious to a poetic assimilation of the object, is that where the vampire passifmay roam at will, solitary and ravenous, seductive and predatory: Je ferme les yeux, actif comme les vampires, je les ouvre en dedans, passif comme les vampires, et entre le sang qui arrive, celui qui part et celui qui se trouvait dkjg en moi, se produit un Cchange d'images comme un engagement de poignards. Maintenant, je peux manger un piano, je peux fusiller une table, je peux aspirer un escalier. Toutes les extrimitis de mon corps ont des orifices par oh sortent les squelettes du piano, de la table, de l'escalier et pour la premitre fois ces objets usuels, donc inexistants, existent. (p. 7 0 ) ~ ~ T h e relationship between consciousness and the real, Cl$ment Rosset proposes, is one of ignorance and exclusion (L'Objet singulier (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1g7g), pp. 22-23). Dali had once suggested a n attempted unity with the object through its comestible consumption; here a new myth, more powerful still, was being invoked. Only through the 'passive vampirism' of the world by the poet, and vice versa (for objects, like that illustrated on page 83, can be vampires too), its ingestion, inhalation, or parasitical attachment, can the world of the real object be known, can
Z1 Claude Ltvi-Strauss has noted how the bricolage of mythic formation, unlike art's discovery of structure through the use of objects and events, acts so that 'myths [ . . . ] use a structure to produce what is itself an object consisting of a set of events' (TheSavage Mind (London: WTeidenfeld& Nicolson, 1966), p. 26); in the surrealist object (a literal, concrete object) both processes are in operation at once: the discovery and the instrumental use ofstructure, the generation ofmyths and their deliberate reactivation in events such as those of Le Vampire passif: See also Pierre Mabille's discpssion of the use of objects as ritual, magical, and controlling forces, in Le ~Miroirdu merueilleux (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1962), for example pp. 203-05. The notion of the object of desire as trap or lure is discussed in 'The Surrealist Object', Chapter 2. 22 See also pages 62 and 79; Alexandrian, Surrialisme et rRe, p. 227. In Luca's prose poem 'La Voie lactie' (in Hiros-limite, pp. 33-38) there reappeared the vampire and his desire 'de vouloir ex ex exciter et exercer la succion sur un monde i excrtter [ . . . ] crive le r&vedu vampire et le sue, le suce en retour [ . . . ] c'est i qu'en expirant le corps secrkte, il secrkte le secret des mots et des mobiles, le secret de sa mobiliti'. The figure of the vampire is one that might seem 'overdetermined' for Romanian surrealists, forming a part of Romanian folklore (in the vampire legends of Transylvania) and of surrealism's fascination for works references to the vampire such as Lautrtamont's Maldomr (in Euvres complites (Paris: Gallimard, 1973)~ on pages 2 2 and 42) or the film versions ofiVosferatu (as evoked for instance in Breton, Vases communicants, pp. 48-51), The vampire, Luca has emphasized, is above all the seducer (conversation, 2 2 November
I 988).

Objects of Gherasim Luca

it be invested with the force of the subject, their unity be realized and their death be cheated. 'Je proposerais', wrote Luca in Le Vampire passiJ; 'de trouver un nouveau langage qui exprime vraiment le phtnomkne psychique semblable, mais non identique, au rgve. [ . . . ] Dans ce langage que je suis incapable de trouver, les anciennes antinomies [ . . . ] sont rtsolues 2 une tchelle, pour l'instant, individuelle' (p. 67). The years following Luca's installation in Paris have been a quest for this legendary langue des oiseaux in a hermetic, cabbalistic poetry that is a battle with language, disintegrating and reforming words and phrases, hoping to operate the revolution of the nigation de la nigation on the symbolic: that by a systematic emptying of the ineluctable void of language one might regain its fullness of meaning and pass to a latent superior order (see Alain Jouffroy, La Fin des alternances (Paris: Gallimard, 1g70), pp. 108-1 I ) . This process has above all been effected by means of the poet's second language, French, being rendered stranger still by the disruptions and reinterpretations endlessly tested on the word or the phrase, where the tendency to clicht finds itself thwarted at every turn by stammering short-circuits and deliberate misreadin~s.~~ It is within such an operation on language, moreover, that the literal analogy between the word and the object is once again encountered. If Luca's domain has become that ofthe verbalobject, this has only permitted him to play more freely with the mutations of the real. In this way, just as one word is the origin of another, so their denoted objects are found to be siblings:
u

Accouplt 2 la peur comme les larmes entre mon initiale et ses armes le cou engendre le couteau comme la vie dans la vide24

or an object can become the verb with which to make love: 'Je te flore / tu me faune 1 je te peau I je te porte I et te fengtre 1 tu m'os I tu m ' o ~ t a n . The words of this '~~ language, as Alain Jouffroy affirms, become the key to the universe where apparent chaos is in fact the birthplace of a fresh order, 'oh les atomes seraient remplacks par des mots, et l'knergie par leur sens' (Jouffroy, pp. I I I , I I 3). The trajectory of Luca's work seems to have been a gradual rarefication of the concrete object, to approach its virtual image liberated of physical constraint. The objects of the period of Le Vampire passif had been given away or left behind in the move to Paris (conversation with Luca, 2 2 November 1988);now his attention to the object is that for its deepest nature, almost its metaphysical essence. Particularly striking, for example, has been a form of livre-objet made in collaboration with the sculptor Piotr Kowalski, Sisyphegiomitre. Five primal solids (cone, cylinder, sphere, cube, and pyramid) stand on an apparatus generating an electromagnetic flux; each is in blown glass and contains a different inert gas. When the force-field is activated, each volume glows, and will continue to do so even when picked up, until it is beyond
23 See Pierre Dhainaut's analysis of Luca's poetry and its means of action (stammering, rhymes, and anagrams (likened to the use of the eroticized body by the surrealist artist Hans Bellmer) and the serial modification of whole phrases) to arrive at a 'langage psychotique' in which 'nous pouvons esptrer reconnaitre les pulsions et les fantasmes dont le langage a gardi ses secrets' ('Eros lit mythe', pp. 15 7). j-j 24 Gherasim Luca, 'A Gorge dCnoute', in Le Chant de la carpe (Paris: Corti, 1986),pp. q 7-104 (p. 103). 2 5 Gherasim Luca, 'Prendre corps', in Paralipornines (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1g77), pp. 109-13, 115-18 ( P '09).

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the field's reach. Luca's contribution is printed on clear perspex above each form, the geometrical definition of the shape which is interrupted by the angoisse of these barely physical bodies:
Corps angoissant tel que toutes les lignes angoissantes tiries par angoisse B la surface de l'angoisse sont igales en a n g o i s ~ e . ~ ~

Text and sculpture together have produced a model for the building-blocks of all knowledge, one where the object is distant, has been hardly touched, and yet glows with its own light when placed in the invisible flux, weightless and radiant to the eye but still heavywith the metaphysical anguish of ~ i s y ~ h u s ' s endless subservience to matter.27 The dialectic tension between visible and invisible, being and non-being, is thrown into even starker relief in another poem, 'Hkros-limite', a meditation on enumeration provided by objects but mos't especially on the final number, on nought: how can this 'nothing' be negated, be itself made into an object?
'La mort, la mort folle, la morphologie de la mtta, de la mitarnort, de la mttamorphose ou la vie, la vie vit, la vie-vice, la vivisection de la vie' ttonne, ttonne et et et est un nom, un nombre de chaises, un nombre de 16 aubes etjets, de 16 objets contre, contre la, contre la mort ou, pour mieux dire, pour la mort de la mort. ('Htros-limite', in Hiros-limite, pp. 13-24 (p. 15))

From this convulsion of language are conjured sixteen objects, made from 184 copper plates each pierced by 288 round holes, the membrane separating each so thin that the plates seem as much holes bounded by metal as metal pierced with holes.28From these 184 plates and 52,992 holes are made 16 objects, each bearing the name of the number of holes used to make it: 4320,4896,4608,4032,2880, I 152. I 728, 1440,2016,2304, 3168,2592,5184,3456,9216, (pages 21-23). o Each object, real or imaginary, has been made from holes, from nothing. But the true object of fascination, the one announced by its predecessors as the final construction, is the dialectical supreme object, made from no holes:
Le ztro, ce rond ztnith des chiffres, ttant le, le ztro ttant le chiffre du trou absolu, lu lu lubrifiant l'absolu, l'objet lubrifiant et absolu qui porte ce nom absolu n'a pas t t t construit comme les eaux, pas comme les autres [ . . . ] mais avec tous les trous du mon, du monde,

26 Gherasim Luca, 'Sisyphe gkomttre' ('Sphaira'), in Paralipomines, pp. 97-10 j (p. 101); from Luca and Kowalski, Sisyphe giomitre, limited edition linre-objet (Paris: Givaudan, 1966). Kowalski has also created sculptural emboitages for publications by Luca. 27 For Freud, Jacques Lacan notes, the object is linked not to the concept ofreality but to that ofanguish: 'l'objet masque B differente Ctapes I'angoisse du sujet' (Lacan, 'La Relation de l'objet et les structures freudiennes'; Bulletin depsychologie, I I (rg57), 4 2 S 3 0 (p. 4 2 7 ) ) . Pierre Mabille, on the other hand, with reference to the mathematical experiments of Lewis Carroll, noted both how pure geometry could be anything but a sterile exercise of rationalization and how it masked a trap: 'La valeur universelle de la giomitrie, sa signification, la fois inttrieure pour I'esprit et extkrieure dans la rtalitt. s'imposaient a moi. Toutes les possibilites de constructions mCtaphysiques sont dans ces figures simples; et la resident le danger et la tentation. Les tracks qui sont si utiles pour rtsoudre des problkmes pratiques sont des pi@. O n peut y interverrir a volonti l'objet riel et I'image virtuelle' (Mabille. .Wiroir du memeilleux, p. 29). It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the author ofa founding text on proportion in regular solids should be another Luca, Fra Luca Pacioli, whose treatise De divina proportzone of 1497 elevated the geometrical principles from Plato's Timeo to an almost mystical plane. Luca has affirmed in conversation that this was a set of copper plates (perhaps perforated in the manufacture ofbottle tops?) found in a packet on waste ground.

638

0 bjects of Gherasim Luca

rtunis dans un tout, dans un grand rien du tout. [ . . . ] rnalgrt son grand, son grand difaut d'&tregras, grand et rnttaphysique, malgrt son grand et gras dtfaut faux de ne pas &tredu tout, il reste l'objet pr?s, l'objet priftrt de ma collection. [ . . . ] L'objet nu nu numtro 16est un htros-limite. (pp. 23-14) This 'htros-limite', already the crossroads of a multiplying meaning,2g is the ultimate object, perfect and invisible, for the round hole, the figure zero is also '0' for object, one that (like Luca's language and its atomic contamination) can expand to engulf the whole universe (Jouffroy, pp. I I 0-1 I ) . The model for all subsequent objects will henceforth be this, the metaphysical rather than concrete object which is, finally, the business of poetry in its concretization and objectification ofthe not-yet-existent: as this poetry submits, it is not the metal ring which makes the object within real.30 Much of Luca's work since the era of Le Vampire pass$ has been concerned with such mental assemblages (whose prototype might be considered Lichtenberg's knife, 'un couteau sans lame, auquel manque le manche', itself evoked in Luca's 'Soupir-ii-trappe~')~~ the desperate and desire for the revolutionary dialectic of the void, to see the Lacanian breach impossibly bridged: le vide vide de son vide c'est le plein le vide rempli de son vide c'est le vide le vide rempli de son plein c'est le vide le plein vidt de son plein c'est le plein. ('Autres secrets du vide et du plein', in Hiros-limite, p. 49) In this way the work of questioning the real has run a course from the play with real bodies and their resonant meanings to the search for an incantatory dialogue between the subject and object whose deepest contradictions and separations might a t last be exposed, suspended, and finally dissolved. The direction ofsuch a negation of negation becomes not only one of endless mutation and repetition but one that strives to cheat the instincts of Thanatos with a new silence more eloquent than the language which always needs to be wrenched free of its own stasis or collapse, perhaps not the drift into silence of a Beckett but the embrace of a hope for limitless expression, the silence Luca uses to such effect in his conversation and the reading of his poetry: 'Le silence est, ensuite', writes Dhainaut, 'une langue aussi' ('Eros lit mythe', p. 157). I n Luca the surrealist object has met its absolute philosopher, its desolation and its utter liberation.

2 9 'Mot "atome" renverse / sans fin ni commencement / mot-valise i triple fond: / ztro (heros) tros, sans centre' (Gherasim Luca, 'Paralipomtnes', in Paralipomines, pp. 84-88 (p. 87) ). 30Conversation with Luca, 2 2 November 1988. Luca is understandably more interested in his explorations of recent years than the forty-year-old experiments of the time of Le Vampirepass3 but his discussion of the latter in conversation through the refraction of subsequent ideas lends the impression that this period of the making of objects, still bound to the concrete and observable, was no less a preparation for the developments to come. 31 I n Hiros-limite, pp. 45-46. For a discussion of Lichtenberg's aphorisms with reference to the surrealist object see 'The Surrealist Object', pp. 93-95.