Jules Romains surréaliste ?

Résumé 0

1.“Jules Romains surréaliste?” [“Is Jules Romains Surrealist?”], Francofonia, No. 86, Alessandra Marangoni (Ed.): “Jules Romains”, submitted, to be published in 2024Jules Romains did not like the Surrealists, because he felt that they had become accomplices in the moral crisis that Europe had been going through since 1914. Thus, in Les Hommes de bonne volonté, the portrait of Vorge (who bears a strong resemblance to André Breton and Louis Aragon) is not flattering: his criminal promiscuity with the serial killer Quinette reveals much about his moral degradation; his lyrical meditations on Parisian shop windows make him seem like a paranoid; and his poems are strikingly incongruous. But didn’t Romains himself know Landru? How can we not note, moreover, that Vorge’s supernatural intuitions resemble those of Romains experiencing epiphanies in the midst of an ephemeral crowd? Finally, it must be said that Vorge’s poems are very good pastiches, which also pervert the poetics of the novel in which they are inserted.