Chiara Nifosi Paul Éluard’s dangerous landscapes

The present contribution centers Paul Éluard’s poetry for broader conversations on the reconceptualization of landscape at the turn of the 20th century, as well as its recontextualization within Surrealist poetics. In fact, while we are certainly familiar with the dreamlike landscapes of Surrealist paintings by Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and many others, the treatment of landscape in Surrealist poetry still constitutes a relatively overlooked topic, especially in its ties to the perceptual and theoretical shift that considers landscape “as a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing and symbolizing surroundings” (Cosgrove & Daniels 1988), irretrievably distant from notions of objectivity and naturalness inherited from the past.

In the prodigious stock of strange landscapes characterizing Surrealist works, Éluard’s images certainly occupy a unique position, due to his partial rejection of automatic writing, to which he opposes a more traditional vision of poetry as an intentional act. Building on this peculiar status within the Surrealist group, I argue that Éluard systematically problematizes landscape by treating it as a complex cultural object, and not as a mere surface of projection for unsettling psychic content. This aspect of Éluard’s poetry is particularly visible in his dialogue with coeval painters in Capitale de la douleur (1926), where such poems as “Max Ernst [I],” “Giorgio de Chirico,” and “Paul Klee” display indeterminate, deserted, or liminal spaces, animated by intricate webs of significance that overpower the actual elements of landscape evoked in the text. Furthermore, I will show that spatial organization in Éluard’s poems often aims to destabilize the harmony of landscape composition through irregular metrics, shifting enunciation, and rhetorical displacement. The poet’s intention to undermine the stability of this spatial object also appears in his later writings, namely in his considerations on the limits of landscape painting in Donner à voir (1939), and in his engagement with Magritte’s art, based on the systematic disruption of the most elementary syntax of reality. While scholars have already described Magritte’s work as “an epistemological bomb” dropped on “the actual landscape” (Olwig 2004), at once monolithic and eternal, I contend that Éluard’s contribution to a modern theory of landscape still needs to be reassessed in light of the renewal of the lyrical form conducted in his poetry.

Chiara Nifosi is Assistant Professor of French Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, and a member of the research group LOCUS in the Center for Comparative Studies (FLUL). She is currently working on her first monograph, entitled L’Écrivain cartographe. Pour une nouvelle rhétorique de l’espace chez Proust. Her articles appeared in several international journals, such as Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Dix-Neuf, Revue italienne d’études françaises, and Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine. Her interests range from comparative European modernisms to nineteenth-century and Avant-Garde French poetry to the intersection between philosophy, social sciences, and literature.