Draft:Arcanum 17

Arcanum 17

Author	André Breton
Original title	Arcane 17
Translator	Zack Rogow
Illustrator	Roberto Matta
Language	French
Genre	Poetic essay
Publisher	Brentano's
Publication date	March 1945
Publication place	France
Published in English	1994
Preceded by	Fata Morgana (1940)
Followed by	Martinique charmeuse de serpents (1948)

Arcanum 17 (French: Arcane 17) is a poetic work by the French writer and theorist André Breton, written between 20 August and 20 October 1944 during a journey through the Gaspé Peninsula and the Laurentides in Quebec, Canada, with Elisa Claro. It was first published in French by Brentano's in New York in March 1945. An expanded version, Arcane 17 enté d'Ajours, appeared in 1947.

The work combines autobiography, prose poetry, travel writing, political and social reflection, mythology, Tarot, and esoteric symbolism. Its principal images include Percé Rock, the seventeenth Tarot trump The Star, the fairy Melusine, and the myth of Isis and Osiris. Through them Breton develops interrelated themes of love and loss, war and political liberty, revolt, the role of women in social regeneration, natural and historical transformation, and rebirth. Michel Beaujour interprets the work as the culmination of Breton's development as a "mythographer", while Suzanne Lamy emphasizes its discontinuous, analogical structure and dense hermetic intertextuality, and Pascaline Mourier-Casile describes it as a literary and mythological "palimpsest".

The first English-language edition, translated by Zack Rogow and with an introduction by Anna Balakian, was published by Sun & Moon Press in 1994 as Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End.

Title and publication

The title refers principally to the seventeenth trump of the Major Arcana, The Star. Breton also associates the number seventeen with the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which he interprets symbolically as resembling the tongue within the mouth and as related to speech or the word. Through these correspondences he places the feminine figure represented on the Tarot card at the centre of a network of analogies involving love, renewal, and the source of life.

The first edition appeared from Brentano's in New York in March 1945. It was issued in 325 copies and illustrated with four brightly coloured drawings by Roberto Matta, freely based on the Tarot cards The Lovers, The Moon, The Chariot, and The Star. Although the publication is conventionally dated March 1945, the printing of the original edition was completed on 30 November 1944.

To accompany the publication, Marcel Duchamp conceived a window display at the Gotham Book Mart in New York, including a mannequin; the accompanying poster was designed by Matta. On 15 April Brentano's issued a smaller unillustrated edition with a foreword by Robert Tenger.

In June 1947, Éditions du Sagittaire published the enlarged Arcane 17 enté d'Ajours. Its literary director, Léon Pierre-Quint, intended the publication to coincide with the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947, organized at the Galerie Maeght. The success of the exhibition largely overshadowed the book, which received relatively little critical attention.

The unusual combination of a noun and an Arabic numeral in the title was itself remarked upon for what was considered its unexpectedly modern appearance.

The first English-language edition was published in Los Angeles by Sun & Moon Press in 1994. Its title page gives the full title as Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End, with a translation by Zack Rogow and an introduction by Anna Balakian; the copyright page identifies it as the first English-language edition.

Circumstances of composition

Breton had lived in New York as a refugee since July 1941. There he helped reconstitute a Surrealist circle with Marcel Duchamp and founded the magazine VVV, edited by the American artist David Hare. Because Breton spoke relatively little English, his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, frequently acted as his translator. Lamba subsequently began a relationship with Hare and separated from Breton; their daughter, Aube, remained with her mother.

The separation contributed to a period of severe personal isolation for Breton. He later described both the external world and his own emotional life in the language of ruins. When Charles Duits, then a student at Harvard University, met him in September 1942, he remembered Breton as profoundly weary, bitter, and solitary.

On 9 or 10 December 1943, Breton met the Chilean-born Elisa Claro in a French restaurant on 56th Street in New York. The dates are recorded in Breton's dedication to Elisa in the manuscript. Breton introduced himself as a French writer and asked to speak with her. He later transformed the memory of their first encounter into one of the central images of the book, associating Elisa's eyes after grief with the emergence of a pale rainbow after a storm.

Elisa had herself recently experienced a major loss. In August 1943 her daughter Ximena, her only child, had drowned during a sea excursion off Massachusetts. The conjunction of her bereavement with Breton's own personal crisis became one of the biographical foundations for the work's repeated movement from destruction and loss toward renewal.

In a letter to Patrick Waldberg dated 8 March 1944, Breton stated that he was contemplating a book organized around the seventeenth arcanum—The Star, eternal youth, Isis, and the myth of resurrection—and that the woman he loved would serve as its model.

During the summer of 1944 Breton and Elisa travelled through the Gaspé Peninsula, around Chaleur Bay, and later through the Laurentides to Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. From 20 August to 21 September they stayed at Percé, with Percé Rock visible from their windows. Breton speculated that the relation among the rock's dimensions might embody the golden ratio.

Balakian, drawing partly on a later interview with Elisa, describes Breton as writing regularly in the mornings and spending the afternoons walking, collecting agates, visiting the bird sanctuary on Bonaventure Island, and observing the geological strata, erosion, weather, birds, and fishing life of the region. Gilles Lamontagne likewise stresses the precision of Breton's attention to the physical Gaspé environment, from fishing floats and seabirds to fossils, agates, covered bridges, local vocabulary, and the geological dimensions of Percé Rock.

Manuscript and poem-object

The original manuscript, now held by the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet, provides evidence of a visual dimension of Arcanum 17 that disappeared from the ordinary printed editions. Henri Béhar describes it as a 48-page Canadian school notebook in which Breton generally reserved the right-hand pages for the handwritten text and the facing pages for photographs, maps, tickets, packaging, Tarot cards, found objects, and other materials connected with the composition.

Béhar consequently interprets the manuscript as a poème-objet ("poem-object") offered to Elisa rather than merely as a working draft. The mounted documents have varying relations to the prose: some preserve tangible traces of the Canadian journey, some operate as poetic presences or visual correspondences, while others appear to have helped generate passages of the text instead of merely illustrating passages already written.

The manuscript also qualifies the association of Breton with automatic writing. Its densely filled pages contain cancellations, additions, revisions, and numerous corrections; Béhar describes it as a work visibly taking shape in the process of composition rather than as a specimen of uncorrected automatic transcription. In 2008 Biro published the first complete facsimile of the manuscript, prepared and presented by Béhar, together with a transcription and the standard text of Arcane 17.

Content and form

Mark Polizzotti describes Arcanum 17 as among Breton's most discursive and abstract works, moving from ancient mythology to contemporary history. Philosophical reflection repeatedly turns into prose poetry, descriptions of Quebec become declarations of love for Elisa, and autobiographical material merges with discussions of history, politics, mythology, and the prospective reconstruction of life after the Second World War. One of Breton's formulations for this project was to "re-impassion life" (repassionner la vie), an expression also used in his earlier text Lumière noire ("Black Light").

Suzanne Lamy places the formal heterogeneity of the work at the centre of her monograph André Breton : hermétisme et poésie dans Arcane 17. She treats the text in terms of an "aesthetics of rupture": conventional generic continuity gives way to the juxtaposition and interpenetration of autobiographical, narrative, descriptive, poetic, political, didactic, and mythological discourse. Connections among these different modes are established less through ordinary narrative causality than through analogy, repetition, verbal association, symbolic correspondence, and recurrent images.

Beaujour approaches the same structure through the concept of mythography. For him, the actual geography through which Breton moves becomes a "mythic space", one in which things are continually converted into signs and images requiring interpretation. He argues that Breton does not simply borrow an inherited mythology but attempts to restore a myth-making function to poetic language itself. In this reading, Arcanum 17 brings into a single configuration many tendencies dispersed throughout Breton's earlier work.

Pascaline Mourier-Casile develops the metaphor of the **palimpsest**. Her study presents the book as a text through which earlier writings, myths, legends, occult traditions, literary memories, and Breton's own previous works remain visible beneath or within the immediate autobiographical and historical surface. The resulting intertextuality is not merely allusive: inherited narratives are disassembled, superimposed, and rewritten as parts of Breton's contemporary meditation.

Rogow similarly describes the book as crossing the boundaries between prose and poetry and successively assuming characteristics of a love letter, travel journal, political pamphlet, collection of mythology and folklore, and meditation on poetry. Balakian situates the work within Breton's development away from the automatic writing of early Surrealism toward what she calls an "analogical form". In Nadja, The Communicating Vessels, and L'Amour fou, associations among images drawn from waking experience and dreams increasingly determine the development of the text; she regards Arcanum 17 as a culmination of that method.

Nathalie Vincent-Munnia places Arcanum 17 with Nadja, The Communicating Vessels, and L'Amour fou among Breton's major récits poétiques, or poetic narratives. She argues that Breton retains recognizable elements of myth and legend while changing their traditional functions: myth becomes at once autobiographical, symbolic, poetic, and Surrealist rather than requiring assent to a fixed sacred narrative.

Across these different modes, a recurrent pattern is that of loss followed not by simple restoration but by transformation. Love follows emotional devastation; liberty becomes newly perceptible through its suppression; nature transforms death into succession and metamorphosis; Osiris is reconstructed after dismemberment; Mélusine is imagined as capable of return; and the Star appears only after darkness.

Elisa and love

Elisa functions simultaneously as an individual beloved and as one of the principal sources of the book's symbolism of recovery. Breton presents the love he has discovered with her as an exclusive and reciprocal attachment capable of restoring meaning after devastation. In his account, the fullest form of love seeks its object in a single person and aims at a reconciliation of bodily and spiritual existence.

Breton repeatedly relates Elisa to legendary, literary, and artistic women: the Queen of Sheba as treated by Charles Nodier and Gérard de Nerval, Cleopatra, the sorceress of Jules Michelet, Bettina Brentano, and the female figures of Gustave Moreau. These analogies gradually broaden the private love poem into a meditation on myth, poetry, history, and regeneration.

Béhar places this movement within Breton's longstanding belief in what he had called a psychological law of compensation and in objective chance. From this perspective, adversity can become the occasion for a new configuration of signs through which the individual regains a sense of relation to his or her destiny. The meeting with Elisa consequently takes on in the text the character of both a biographical event and a revelation to be deciphered.

A reverie prompted by red floats and black flags on a fishing boat also returns Breton to demonstrations he had witnessed at Le Pré-Saint-Gervais in 1913, including opposition to the extension of compulsory military service and a commemoration of the Paris Commune. He invokes nineteenth-century social thinkers including Charles Fourier, Flora Tristan, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, whose work he associates with the idea of earthly social regeneration through women.

Love thereby ceases to be solely private. It becomes one of the principles through which Breton imagines overcoming the divisions between body and spirit, individual and world, and private recovery and collective regeneration. Mourier-Casile consequently treats the movement from Breton's earlier ideal of "absolute love" to the formulation of amour fou in Arcanum 17 as part of the book's larger network of rewritten earlier texts and myths.

Percé Rock and the Gaspé landscape

Percé Rock

Percé Rock is one of the principal organizing images of Arcanum 17. Lamontagne describes the work as broadly resembling a diptych: the first movement is dominated by Bonaventure Island and Percé Rock, while the Laurentian forest and lake from which Mélusine emerges provide the setting of the second. The movement from one landscape to another corresponds to a movement from observation of an actual place toward increasingly concentrated mythic and symbolic transformations.

Lamontagne emphasizes that this transformation begins with unusually close observation. Breton records the colours of fishing floats, varieties and habits of seabirds, local expressions, agate collecting, fossils, geological strata, and even the measurements of the rock given in a tourist brochure before allowing these details to enter the associative movement of the text. The imagined landscape is therefore not a replacement for the physical one but develops from it.

Beaujour likewise argues that the Gaspé geography becomes a mythic space through poetic language: the observable environment presents itself as a field of signs whose significance exceeds documentary description. Breton's continual passage between exact perception and associative transformation is one of the principal mechanisms by which this mythic geography is created.

Breton repeatedly transforms Percé Rock through analogy. Its geological layers become an image of the accumulated strata of human culture: Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, eighteenth-century France, German Romanticism, and modern Russian culture appear as different peaks linked by a common substratum. From this image he derives the assertion that civilization, despite political and national conflicts, is fundamentally one.

The visual transformations continue throughout the book. Percé Rock becomes successively a ship, an ark, an organ, a head, a theatrical curtain, and a structure containing multiple historical and legendary scenes. Lamontagne describes this process as a progressive "derealization" in which Breton dissolves the familiar identity of the landscape into the mystery of the arcanum and myth while continuing to draw upon its actual forms.

Near the culmination of the sequence Breton imagines the rock as an ark propelled by three symbolic forces: love between human beings, art at its highest intensity, and the uncompromising struggle for freedom. The ark thus gathers into a single image the private, aesthetic, and political strands of the book.

Céline Sangouard-Berdeaux interprets Breton's treatment of Percé Rock in terms of the sublime and émerveillement, or wonder. She notes that the scale of the formation repeatedly defeats the possibility of grasping it as a stable totality, while metaphors drawn from painting, theatre, writing, and music transform the natural spectacle into both a work of art and an enigma to be deciphered. Wonder in this reading possesses a revelatory and regenerative function rather than constituting merely scenic admiration.

Percé Rock and Bonaventure Island

The surrounding landscape also develops a criticism of human centrality. On Bonaventure Island, Breton sees the repose and movement of seabirds as corresponding with the shapes and strata of the cliffs, so that organic and inorganic rhythms appear superimposed upon one another. Later, reflecting on the antiquity of the geological formations, he challenges the assumption that the universe possesses intelligible meaning only in relation to humanity and criticizes the human tendency to regard itself as the privileged end of creation.

Balakian consequently describes an ecological dimension of the book, seeing in Breton's attention to relations among human, animal, vegetable, and mineral existence a challenge to anthropocentrism. The imagery of the rock makes this perspective inseparable from the political argument: the same natural object can symbolize erosion and catastrophe, cultural plurality, historical duration, and an underlying unity that resists nationalist fragmentation.

Breton also incorporates local Gaspé folklore. The legend of an ogre on Bonaventure Island who abducted women from the mainland and washed his clothing against the cliffs becomes associated with the white masses of nesting birds and then with the more difficult problem of cleansing collective memory of the scars left by war. Actual landscape, folk narrative, political history, and poetic analogy are thus made to occupy the same symbolic field.

The Star, myth, and esotericism

The Star

Arcanum 17 has sometimes been interpreted as marking an intensified turn in Breton's engagement with esotericism. His interest in such material, however, long preceded the work: texts including Entrée des médiums and Lettre aux voyantes had already explored what Breton described as the borders of accepted systems of knowledge during the 1920s.

His interest intensified during his American exile, partly in reaction to what he regarded as the excessively technological and utilitarian character of American society. Kurt Seligmann supplied him with material concerning Tarot, the myth of Isis and Osiris, and the symbolism of numbers. Breton also encountered the work of the nineteenth-century occultist Éliphas Lévi through Auguste Viatte's Victor Hugo et les illuminés de son temps, published in Montreal in 1942. Lévi's combination of magic, Romantic illumination, republican politics, and mystical ideas concerning women was particularly important for Breton.

Breton nevertheless does not present esotericism as a universal dogma. He explicitly qualifies his acceptance of its premises and values it principally as a means of keeping analogy in motion: a system capable of revealing possible correspondences among things that appear remote from one another. In Arcanum 17 he similarly rejects the reduction of myth to immediate social or material functions and argues that a viable myth can sustain several forms of meaning simultaneously, including poetic, historical, astronomical or "uranographic", and cosmological meanings.

Vincent-Munnia accordingly distinguishes Breton's use of myth from straightforward religious adherence. In his poetic narratives, recognizable mythological structures are preserved but transformed so that they acquire autobiographical and Surrealist meanings; myth becomes a symbolic mode for generating new relations to the world rather than the statement of a collectively binding creed.

Lamy places this operation within the extensive intertextual network of Arcanum 17. Her analysis follows Breton's use of the Book of Revelation, Mélusine, Novalis's Hymns to the Night, the seventeenth Tarot arcanum, Isis and Osiris, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and alchemical symbolism. Rather than functioning as separate references, these materials form intersecting symbolic systems through which the same movements—darkness and illumination, separation and conjunction, death and regeneration—can be rewritten in different registers.

Marc Eigeldinger similarly treats alchemical language as an important component of Breton's poetics of transformation. The alchemical vocabulary does not function merely as decorative occult terminology but supplies a language in which material, psychic, erotic, and poetic transformations can be conceived analogically.

Mourier-Casile develops the alchemical dimension through her comparison between Arcanum 17 and Jules Verne's Les Indes noires. She interprets the trajectory of Breton's work as a movement from the alchemical œuvre au noir toward an œuvre au blanc, from blackness and decomposition toward clarification and renewal. This movement corresponds to the book's larger transition from war, mourning, darkness, and the dismemberment of Osiris toward the Star, restored love, liberty, and the possibility of resurrection.

Balakian similarly interprets Arcanum 17 in terms of the alchemical Great Work, regarding it as a synthesis of Breton's earlier poetic and intellectual concerns.

Breton's immediate sources for his interpretation of the Tarot included Oswald Wirth's Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Âge (1927), itself influenced by Éliphas Lévi; Papus's Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889); and the Tarot deck issued by the Marseille manufacturer Grimaud in 1930.

The traditional image of The Star shows a nude woman beneath a field of stars pouring liquid from two vessels, one onto land and another into water. The card's imagery allows Breton to join the book's recurrent themes of woman, mediation, hope, fertility, renewal, and resurrection.

Breton eventually personifies the two streams flowing from the woman's vessels. The left-hand stream is associated with fire, dissent, agitation, and the destruction of exhausted dogmas; the right-hand stream with water, fertility, multiplication, freshness, and the regeneration of hope. Their interaction makes destruction and renewal complementary rather than simply opposed processes.

The imagery of resurrection is likewise not confined to supernatural belief. Breton finds analogues for it in vegetation, generational succession, geological transformation, and especially the butterfly, whose metamorphosis becomes an image of renewal arising through natural processes.

The book's culminating symbolism joins the Tarot Star to Breton's readings of Éliphas Lévi and Victor Hugo. In the mythographic sequence Breton reconstructs, Lucifer, understood as the "light-bearer", gives rise to Poetry and Liberty, while love participates in the redemption of the rebel angel. Rebellion consequently becomes a source of illumination rather than simply negation. Breton concludes by bringing together three recurrent values—poetry, liberty, and love—as paths toward the renewal symbolized by the Star and "eternal youth".

Didier Ottinger has interpreted the movement from Nadja to Arcanum 17 as a trajectory of desire in Breton's poetry in which the star becomes increasingly identified through analogy with woman.

Melusine and women

Melusine bathing while watched by her husband Raymondin. Roman de Mélusine by Jean d'Arras, c. 1450–1500. BNF Fr. 24383, fol. 19.

Breton identifies the female figure of The Star with Melusine, the fairy of the medieval narrative traditionally associated with Jean d'Arras. According to the legend as Breton uses it, Raymondin promises not to observe Melusine during her periodic transformation but breaks his oath and discovers her in a form that is half woman and half serpent. His betrayal causes her to lose her human existence.

Breton transforms this legend into a meditation on the social condition of women. Melusine becomes both the woman deprived of her full human position by masculine power and the figure who, precisely through her marginal or metamorphic condition, remains in contact with the elemental forces of nature.

The transformation is also part of the book's larger theory of renewal. Breton's Mélusine is first the "lost woman" but must become the woman found again: her legendary cry, conventionally marking separation and disappearance, is imagined as reversible and followed by a second cry associated with return and regeneration.

Pierre Brunel situates Breton's use of Mélusine within a much longer personal engagement with the legend, noting that Mélusine had already appeared allusively in Nadja. In Arcanum 17, however, the figure becomes structurally central. Brunel points to the correspondence established between Elisa and Mélusine and to Breton's continual superimposition of Mélusine upon other female and mythological figures.

Among these figures are Medusa, Mélisande, the Queen of Sheba or Balkis, Cleopatra, Michelet's sorceress, Bettina von Arnim, Moreau's fairy, the woman of the Star, and Isis. Brunel relates this accumulation to the syncretic procedures of Gérard de Nerval, in which different mythic and historical women can appear as changing manifestations of a deeper symbolic figure.

Mourier-Casile likewise treats Mélusine as a point where several symbolic systems intersect. She draws attention to Breton's rendering of the seventeenth Hebrew letter as phé and proposes a possible play between phé and the French fée ("fairy"), thereby creating another verbal connection between the number seventeen, language, the Star, and Mélusine.

Mélusine is also joined to the Osiris-Isis narrative. Like the dispersed body of Osiris, what has been lost must be reconstructed rather than simply returned in its previous form. Isis's recovery of Osiris and Breton's imagined recovery of Mélusine consequently participate in the same network of resurrection imagery.

This symbolism becomes explicitly social and political. Breton associates war with the bankruptcy of a predominantly masculine organization of power and calls upon artists to value modes of perception and judgment that he identifies as feminine. He argues for the restoration to women of a power exercised "not only in art but in life".

The argument is connected with the nineteenth-century figures Charles Fourier, Flora Tristan, and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, whom Breton sees as predecessors in imagining social transformation through a revaluation of women. It is also connected with his literary ideal of the femme-enfant, or "child-woman", whom he associates with figures including the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Michelet's young sorceress, Bettina Brentano, Moreau's fairy, and Elisa herself.

Apertures

In 1947 Breton returned to the notebook in which he had composed Arcanum 17 and added three texts. He called them Ajours, rendered by Rogow as Apertures. The French term allowed Breton a wordplay involving ajout ("addition"), mise à jour ("updating"), and the older sense of ajour given by Littré as an opening through which daylight can pass.

The expanded volume incorporated Lumière noire ("Black Light"), written in May 1943 and first published in Montreal in December of that year in Le Monde libre, together with two texts written in 1947. The additions revisit questions raised in the 1944 work, including esotericism, love, nationalism, war, freedom, and the possibilities of postwar renewal.

Writing three years later, Breton argues that the spirit of the wartime Resistance had not developed in the emancipatory direction he had hoped. He explicitly identifies nationalism as a corrupting force and acknowledges that one weakness of Arcanum 17 was its failure to warn sufficiently against the resurgence of nationalist feeling.

Breton argues that the aggressive forces manifested in Nazi Germany cannot simply be regarded as an exclusively German aberration. A durable response to war must instead examine the social, psychological, and cultural structures that permit or encourage violent nationalism, and ultimately dissolve the restrictive collective "us" of nation, race, regime, caste, or belief into an identification with humanity as a whole.

An important element of the argument is Breton's distinction between liberation and liberty. Liberation from a particular oppressor is temporary and essentially negative; it removes an immediate condition of servitude. Liberty, by contrast, must remain dynamic, continually renewing itself as new forms of coercion emerge. Breton therefore warns that military or territorial liberation need not by itself produce a genuinely free society.

This conception extends the wartime Resistance beyond opposition to a particular occupying power. Breton regards resistance in its broader sense as valuable insofar as it maintains rebellion against constraint, but he fears that resistance justified only by national feeling can turn back into chauvinism after victory. The postwar problem is therefore not simply to recover a previous social order but to prevent the energies released by resistance from becoming fixed in nationalism.

In Black Light, Breton gives the demand to "re-impassion life" a wider social meaning. Although economic transformation remains essential, he argues that it will fail if everyday existence continues to be dominated by monotonous labour, compulsory routine, domestic constraint, imaginative deprivation, and boredom. These conditions can make war itself appear to offer an escape from ordinary life.

His alternative includes greater scope for curiosity, storytelling, imaginative activity, public festivity, collective participation, and individual exploration. Breton therefore connects the struggle against war with a transformation of everyday experience: a society incapable of giving legitimate expression to imaginative and passionate energies will continually leave those energies vulnerable to destructive forms of mobilization.

The second of the Apertures also connects the book's account of love with earlier Surrealist investigations of altered states of consciousness. Returning to his 1933 essay Le Message automatique ("The Automatic Message"), Breton recalls his attempt to overcome the habitual distinction between external perception and mental visualization. He describes the desired reconciliation as a "state of grace" and ultimately as ecstasy, explicitly mentioning Teresa of Ávila and mediums.

Breton now connects this state directly with reciprocal passionate love. At its highest intensity, he argues, bodily sensation and the aspirations of the mind cease to be distinguishable. He extends the same demand to artistic creation: a poem, painting, or act of love reaches its fullest value only through a comparable condition of total involvement, which he describes as a form of trance.

The final Aperture returns to chance, occult correspondence, Saint-Jacques Tower, Gérard de Nerval, and the symbolic number seventeen. Breton relates an episode involving the painter Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner, an enigmatic encounter reported by Jacques Halpern, and the discovery of occult inscriptions associated with Nerval. These coincidences renew the book's earlier concern with signs that seem to converge across separate moments of experience.

The enlarged work consequently ends not by abandoning the central symbols of the 1944 text but by reopening them. The very title Ajours, with its suggestion of apertures admitting light, complements the recurring passage from darkness and opacity toward illumination.

Opening and ending

The original 1944 text opens from one of Elisa's dreams, in which an old Romani woman who attempts to kiss Breton becomes associated with Bonaventure Island. Breton then moves from the dream to their boat journey around the island, the seabirds, coloured fishing floats, black flags, and the movement between actual landscape and symbolic association.

Beaujour sees this opening as characteristic of the entire work: ordinary geography is immediately placed under pressure from dream, verbal association, memory, and myth until the landscape comes to function as an oracular field of signs.

With the addition of the Apertures, the enlarged work ends by returning to Gérard de Nerval. Breton associates the number seventeen with 1808, both the year of Nerval's birth and the year in which Fourier's Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales appeared. The final formulation, "My only star lives...", reverses Nerval's line "My only star is dead" from the sonnet El Desdichado.

Brunel consequently suggests that Arcanum 17 may be read in part as a rewriting of the Nervalian constellation surrounding El Desdichado. The dead star becomes a living one, while the lost female figure is transformed through Mélusine and Isis into the possibility of recovery and regeneration.

Reception and interpretation

The 1947 publication of the enlarged edition received relatively little critical attention, partly because it coincided with the more conspicuous success of the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947.

Subsequent French and Francophone criticism has approached the book from several different directions. Michel Beaujour's 1967 study, "André Breton mythographe : Arcane 17", treats it as a major point of convergence in Breton's work. Beaujour argues that Breton is not simply a consumer or disciple of myths but a modern mythographer who seeks to restore the necessity of interpreting signs and an oracular dimension to poetic language. He presents Arcanum 17 as the point at which a quest pursued fragmentarily through Breton's previous writings receives one of its fullest formulations.

Gilles Lamontagne's 1975 study concentrates on the book's Québécois geography. Beginning with Breton's detailed observation of Percé and Bonaventure Island, Lamontagne follows the progressive conversion of the physical landscape into ship, ark, organ, historical structure, and emblem of the conjunction of love, art, and freedom.

Suzanne Lamy's 1977 monograph, André Breton : hermétisme et poésie dans Arcane 17, offered an extended study of the relationship between the work's formal discontinuity, analogical composition, intertextuality, occult sources, and poetic language. Rather than treating esotericism as an isolated subject within the book, Lamy considers its various hermetic and mythological systems as structural components of Breton's method of poetic correspondence.

Marc Eigeldinger's study of Breton's alchemical language similarly situates the occult vocabulary within a poetics of metamorphosis and analogy rather than reducing it to adherence to an esoteric doctrine.

Pascaline Mourier-Casile's André Breton, explorateur de la mère-moire (1986) develops three extended readings of Arcanum 17 under the general description of the work as a "palimpsest". Her study traces the interaction of the Mélusine and Lilith traditions, Breton's earlier formulations of absolute and mad love, and an alchemical movement from the œuvre au noir to the œuvre au blanc, including an intertextual relation to Jules Verne's Les Indes noires.

Pierre Brunel's later study of Mélusine examines Breton's transformation of the medieval legend within a wider Nervalian and mythological constellation. He emphasizes the overlay of Elisa, Mélusine, Isis, the Queen of Sheba, and other figures and the passage from the "lost woman" toward the possibility of the woman found again.

French scholarship has also continued to examine the relation between landscape and poetic revelation. Céline Sangouard-Berdeaux interprets Percé Rock as an example of Surrealist sublimity in which wonder becomes a means of poetic and philosophical regeneration, while the continual use of artistic metaphors turns the landscape into both spectacle and decipherable sign.

In English-language scholarship, Balakian regarded Arcanum 17 as one of the major achievements of Breton's American exile and as a synthesis of longstanding concerns in his thought: analogical poetry, myth, alchemy, erotic love, revolt, political liberty, and the transformation of despair into renewed possibility. She also emphasized what she regarded as the work's ecological implications, particularly its criticism of anthropocentrism and attention to the interdependence of human, animal, vegetable, and mineral existence.

The work was among the later major writings by Breton to become available as a complete book in English. Zack Rogow's translation, accompanied by Balakian's introduction and explanatory notes, appeared in 1994, approximately fifty years after its original composition.

The 2008 publication of the complete manuscript facsimile opened a further line of interpretation by restoring the visual and material dimension of the original notebook. Béhar's description of the manuscript as a poème-objet draws attention to a form of composition in which handwriting, revision, collage, found material, travel documents, and poetic prose were initially parts of a single object.

Editions

• March 1945 – Brentano's, New York; first French edition, limited to 325 copies, with four Tarot-inspired illustrations by Roberto Matta.
• 15 April 1945 – Brentano's; smaller-format unillustrated edition with a foreword by Robert Tenger.
• June 1947 – Éditions du Sagittaire; expanded as Arcane 17 enté d'Ajours.
• 1965 – UGE, 10/18 series, followed by an essay by Michel Beaujour.
• 1971 – Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
• 1994 – Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles; first English-language edition, translated by Zack Rogow and introduced by Anna Balakian, as Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End. ISBN 1-55713-170-8.
• 2001 – Le Livre de Poche, Biblio series.
• 2008 – Biro, Paris; Arcane 17 : le manuscrit original, a complete facsimile of the manuscript prepared and presented by Henri Béhar, with transcription and the complete text. ISBN 978-2-35119-036-4.

Bibliography

• Balakian, Anna (1994). "Introduction". Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Rogow, Zack. By André Breton. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press. pp. 7–16. ISBN 1-55713-170-8.

• Beaujour, Michel (1967). "André Breton mythographe : Arcane 17". Études françaises (in French). 3 (2): 215–233. doi:10.7202/036267ar.

• Béhar, Henri (2005). André Breton, le grand indésirable. Paris: Fayard. ISBN 2-213-62602-2.

• Béhar, Henri (2008). "D'un poème-objet". Arcane 17 : le manuscrit original (in French). Paris: Biro. pp. 7–31. ISBN 978-2-35119-036-4.

• Biro, Adam; Passeron, René (1982). Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs. Fribourg / Paris: Office du livre / Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-037280-5.

• Breton, André (1988). Œuvres complètes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-011138-5.

• Breton, André (1994). Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Rogow, Zack. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press. ISBN 1-55713-170-8.

• Breton, André (1999). Œuvres complètes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-011376-0.

• Brunel, Pierre (1998). "Mélusine dans Arcane 17 d'André Breton". L'Imaginaire du secret (in French). Grenoble: ELLUG. pp. 181–196. ISBN 2-84310-009-7.

• Clébert, Jean-Paul (1996). Dictionnaire du surréalisme. Chamalières / Paris: ATP / Éditions du Seuil. ISBN 978-2-02-024588-3.

• Duits, Charles (2024) [1969]. André Breton a-t-il dit passe. Maurice Nadeau. ISBN 978-2-86231-554-6.

• Eigeldinger, Marc (1981). "Poésie et langage alchimique chez André Breton". Mélusine (in French) (2): 22–38.

• Lamontagne, Gilles (1975). "Vu et imaginé par André Breton : le Rocher Percé". Revue d'histoire du Bas Saint-Laurent (in French). 2 (1): 2–7.

• Lamy, Suzanne (1977). André Breton : hermétisme et poésie dans Arcane 17 (in French). Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal. ISBN 0-8405-0362-8.

• Mourier-Casile, Pascaline (1986). André Breton, explorateur de la mère-moire : trois lectures d'Arcane 17, texte palimpseste (in French). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-039338-1.

• Ottinger, Didier, ed. (2013). Dictionnaire de l'objet surréaliste. Paris: Centre Pompidou / Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-014181-4.

• Polizzotti, Mark (1995). André Breton. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-073298-3.

• Rogow, Zack (1994). "Translator's Preface". Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Rogow, Zack. By André Breton. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press. pp. 17–22. ISBN 1-55713-170-8.

• Sangouard-Berdeaux, Céline (2019). "De l'émerveillement comme ressort du sublime surréaliste. L'exemple du Rocher Percé". De l'émerveillement dans les littératures poétiques et narratives des XIXe et XXe siècles (in French). Grenoble: UGA Éditions. pp. 65–74.

• Vincent-Munnia, Nathalie (1998). "De la colombe sacrifiée au second cri de Mélusine : mythe et figures féminines dans les récits poétiques d'André Breton". Mythe et récit poétique (in French). Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal. pp. 295–324.

See also

• André Breton
• Surrealism
• Western esotericism
• Tarot
• The Star (tarot card)
• Melusine
• L'Amour fou

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 1945 books
• Works by André Breton
• Surrealist works
• Western esotericism
• Melusine