Poetry
Sens-Plastique
Malcolm de Chazal · 1945
Synopsis
The book gathers more than two thousand thoughts and metaphors, from one to forty lines long, between the aphorism and the prose poem. The author holds man and nature to be continuous and discovers human traits in plants, animals and even minerals, nature having been made, in his view, in the image of man. He says he reached these views through a thought arising from the unconscious rather than through reasoning.
Context
The text first appeared in Mauritius, in 1945 and then in a second volume in 1947, from General Printing & Stationery, before Jean Paulhan had it taken up by Gallimard in 1948, with a preface in which he distinguishes vague sensations from plastic sensations, and sees in it “an art that deserves, I think, the name of genius”. The book sold poorly, but Marcel Duhamel, Jean Dubuffet and Breton hailed it. Irving Weiss gave a selection in English in 1971, with a preface by W. H. Auden, then the complete version in 2008.
Who it is for
For discovering the Mauritian writer whom the surrealists admired, in a book of sensations beyond any genre.
Prizes and reception
Breton compared him to Lautréamont, and Auden held him to be the most original French writer to have appeared since the war.