SubStance

“Et que nous ferait tout le génie du monde s’il n’admettait pas près de lui cette adorable correction qui est celle de l’amour…?”

—André Breton, Oeuvres I: 648

The product of an amusing or unusual event, an anecdote will be repeated both orally and in print. Its reliability and value as evidence or historical fact is, however, almost always suspect, which the study of multiple versions of single anecdotes confirms: chronology, places, major and minor characters, and so on, almost never fail to change in major and minor ways in the retelling (Saller 74–78). Even though the anecdote’s other most salient feature is its oral transmission, most studies, for obvious reasons, draw on published accounts—from the tablets of antiquity to the ephemeral newspaper—to verify its unreliability. That is not to say that a keen awareness of its origin in speech does not also work itself into examinations of the anecdote; no treatment of the anecdote can dispense with the word’s etymology as “unpublished news” without giving it its due. Oral narratives spring not only from a need for entertainment but also from the exercise of unauthorized free speech. As untrustworthy as they are insidious when spread as gossip, anecdotes lack authority yet exemplify free speech, which circulates in opposition to institutional and published forms of repression (Fenves 154–5).¹

I will examine this paradox in the context of modernist experiments with the anecdote that take a turn toward the visual in photographs. The photograph documents the contingent real of the narrative at the same time that it withholds the story or, figuratively speaking, unpublishes the narrative. As the basis on which a memory is often recounted, it is a surviving, merely anecdotal sign of oral storytelling. Beginning with one major engagement with anecdotes and photographs in André Breton’s work, I will trace my way back to what I consider to be the surrealist’s elusive precursor: Eugène Atget and his 1910 views of Parisian interiors. Each strikes up an amorous dialogue with an anekdota, the feminine noun in Greek meaning a woman not (an-) given out (ek-dota) [End Page 77] in marriage. She is the allegorical allure of the anecdote and its relation to unauthorized communication. The anekdota’s redress—the epigraph above is Breton’s reaction to an anecdote on Victor Hugo and his mistress, Juliette Drouet—does not, however, pertain to the elimination of errors undermining the anecdote’s accuracy, since this would make the tale history’s affair. It means retaining the errors, or at the very least, recalling their significance after they have been sacrificed to correction. In the preface to the 1963 edition of Nadja, Breton regrets losing the alliances of the original 1928 edition with “la lettre d’amour criblée de fautes” and, quoting Arthur Rimbaud, “les ‘livres érotiques sans orthographe’” (Oeuvres I: 646). Errors such as misspellings and even those of a factual nature are the surviving evidence of an immediacy with language; they are therefore cousins of the surrealist automatic image, which Breton described elsewhere as a “photograph of thought” and whose production more often than not resulted in minor errors in spelling and punctuation (Oeuvres I: 245). Love’s correction may be provisionally defined, then, as a poetics of a perishable moment of transmission, to which both the error and the photograph refer. Given its privileged link to the referent, the visual document may also be said to evade servitude to mediating representational rules, beginning with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It contains within itself what scholarly convention forbids: an “unlettered” or amateur access to the anecdotal.

Anecdotes proliferate in those modern works that were at the time of their conception departures from conventional genres: Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems, Stéphane Mallarmé’s autobiographical prose poems subtitled “anecdotes ou poèmes” in Divagations, Breton’s so-called “anti-novels,” and Walter Benjamin’s fragments of thought, quotations, and theses in the Arcades Project, to name some of the best known examples. Breaking the mold of fixed forms also opens a breach in long...