The Dialectics of the Human Being with Paul Eluard : A Reading of Knowledge Defense Cover Image

La dialectique de l’être chez Paul Éluard: une lecture de défense de savoir
The Dialectics of the Human Being with Paul Eluard : A Reading of Knowledge Defense

Author(s): Ana Coiug
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Universitatea »1 Decembrie 1918« Alba Iulia
Keywords: self journey; surrealistic; poetic reality; eyes; otherness

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes the poetry volume “Défense de savoir”, by the surrealist French author Paul Éluard. The reading scheme takes into consideration the transfiguration of the poetic being from the existential solitude to the meeting with the otherness. The volume appeared in 1928, a year of utmost Surrealist achievements. In our opinion, Éluard’s volume resumes not only the poetic and existential searches, but also the solutions the author found. The stages of this self journey are the inner exploration, the revelation caused by self-alienation, and the solving of the inner conflict through otherness. In the volume we have analyzed, we detected a story whose characters are the eyes looking to release themselves from the objective reality coercion. Some lines may be connected to scenes from the famous Surrealist short-movie “Un chien andalou”, produced in the same year by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. The Surrealist project to reach the primary truths of the being, stocked in the unconsciousness, is somehow paradoxical, since the withdrawal in a chaotic inner reality is then doubled by the fading away of contrary states. If the first part of the volume follows the failure of the self looking view, the second part stands for an hymn of the amative search and meeting that triggers a sense of calmness, and solves the multiplicity trial by cancelling it.

  • Issue Year: 13/2012
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 181-192
  • Page Count: 11
  • Language: French