My attraction to surrealism relies not only to the fact that it reinstates the dream into the everyday realm, beyond the Freudian paradigm, but it also exposes the limits of theory. One needs every scrap of oniric rememberance to explain and survive the reality. Dreams are not an escape, but the gnoseologic complementary of life.
Gherasim Luca belongs to a generation of Eastern European/Romanian/Jewish surrealism of French orientation that communicated with their French/Western counterparts as full partners of literary dialogues. The avant-garde creativity of Tzara, the complex visualisations of dreams by Victor Brauner - one of my favorite painters ever - or by Jules Perahim were in sync, trendsetting not trendfollowing - as in the case of many other intellectuals genres that were copied and pasted in the local context - the big movements of ideas. Unfortunately, even nowadays, this intellectual bubble is less known and studied in Romania.
Gherasim Luca was born Salman Locker and signed under a couple of alias such as Petru Malcoci or Costea Sar. He experienced pogroms and mounting local antisemitism, but also the trauma of the 1940 earthquake. Between 1940-1947 he was member of the Romanian Surrealist Group. He left Romania in 1952 and moved to France where he was until the end of the 1980s an apatride. For his visual and literary collages he collaborated with Max Ernst, Jean Arp or Paul Celan.
The Passive Vampire - Le Vampire Passif - is his first text wrote directly in French, and was published in Romania in 1941 at Editions de L´Oubli, a local edition house. It is a relatively short text, which includes 18 photographs.
Critically reviewing a surrealist book is like trying to theoretically evaluate a dream. When one says a dream is good or bad it is not the aesthetics that matters but the feelings we wake up with in the morning. The surrealist writing is shocking and waking up, because it may take place within some recognizable parameters twisted to challenge mental habits.
In the case of The...Vampire, the logic and theoretical reasons are magnified until their grotesque nullifies any kind of logic. Theory is a delirium that only the surrealist voodoo games can ransom. Reading is an exercise of accepting to lose control only to return back from the dream with a fresh free mind(set).
Actually, I don´t need selfhelp books any longer; please give me more and more surrealist imaginations.
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