Book Review: Frank, Roger Caillois Reader

Claudine Frank, ed.
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader.
Duke University Press, 2003, 440 pp.
$US 22.95 paper (0-8223-306807), $US 79.95 hardcover (0-8223-3056-3)

Roger Caillois is perhaps best known as co-founder with Georges Bataille (and Michel Leiris) of the Collège de sociologie. Caillois and Bataille worked extensively together on questions concerning the sacred in the autonomous Collège from 1936 to 1939. While Bataille has found a place among significant 20th century French thinkers, Caillois has been undervalued and today his work registers softly if at all. As a result, compared with the critical literature on Bataille, contemporary work on Caillois is much less developed. Claudine Frank’s The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader will help to rectify this situation.

As the title suggests the Reader is focused by Caillois’s relationship with surrealism. Part I “Theory and the Thirties” begins with a first section that tackles Caillois’s relations with key figures such as Paul Eluard and André Breton, as well as introducing the infamous psychoanalytic readings of entomology “The Praying Mantis” and “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” The latter have been available in English translation for some time. The second section allows us to widen the context of Caillois’s criticism of surrealist “hedonism” through an anti-Darwinian and anti-utilitarian theorization of myth through the lens of biology. These first two sections provide the opportunity to appreciate the critical acumen of Caillois’s engagement with science, which would be a life-long obsession. The third section of Part I revisits the Collège years. Some of Caillois’s contributions to the sociology of the sacred are here alongside his statement of reticence in the face of his colleague Bataille’s insistence on self-ennobling convulsive and contagious ritual acts of sacrifice which, incidentally, never came off. Frank provides excellent historical French intellectual context as the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel seminars is front and centre, as is Kojève’s doubt about the Collège project. It was during the late 30s that Caillois published two of his most coherent sociological statements, Le Mythe et l’homme and L’Homme et le sacré (1938 and -39 respectively).

Any reader of Caillois and the Collège must return to and reckon with the foundational work on this topic by Denis Hollier, especially his important The Collège of Sociology 1937-39 (1988) and Absent without Leave (1997). Hollier’s editorial and translation activities have included key early writings and reviews of Collège figures, in addition to work on the diverse activities of the young Caillois (“Fear and Trembling in the Age of Surrealism,” in Caillois, The Necessity of Mind (1990)). Clearly, Frank’s efforts are beholden to Hollier.

In Part II “Writing from Patagonia” Frank assembles assorted materials that came in the wake of the Collège and Caillois’s relocation to Argentina, a short visit of a few weeks that was extended by the war into a few years (1939-1944). This period included the publication of literary theoretical texts such as La Communion des forts (1943) and the less well known work on detective novels Le Roman Policier (1941). Frank points us back to the critical reactions the former caused in 1945, regaining Meyer Schapiro’s telling indictment in “French Reaction in Exile” (Kenyon Review) of Caillois’s work of this period as anti-sensual, arid and lacking all feeling, which explained his fascination with executioners, secrecy (which replaces sacred as a key term), totalitarianism, contempt for the masses, and vast deserts.

Part III “Postwar Stances” contains the most sprawling sections covering works from the 1940s through the 1970s (Caillois passed away in 1978). One could criticize Frank because she has excluded the great works of this period such as Les Jeux et les hommes (1958)—one of the few Caillois books still in print in English translation and of great sociological interest when brought out from the shadow of Homo Ludens—not to mention the absence of the three books on stones. Scant attention has been paid to the existing translation, The Writing of Stones (1985 [orig. 1970]), but it is only one of several books on stones penned by Caillois that in addition include Pierres réfléchies (1975) and Pierres (1966). Indeed, there is a literature worth investigating and one could regain from the special issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française (1979) devoted to Caillois: several articles of appreciation by French and Spanish scholars on stones; also materials from a special issue of Sud “Minéral, minimal” (1995). Still, Frank outlines constructive routes of approach through her selections. For example, the final piece, “The Natural Fantastic” is situated in relation to the books on stones from which it diverges, reorienting the force of Caillois’s expansive lapidary reveries. Indeed, “Metamorphoses of Hell” reworked an earlier essay on the representations of the afterlife in American cinema; and several of the selections here link up with earlier thematics such as surrealism.

The Reader is an overview that touches upon various poetic and sociological topics, and provides in one place important statements on science, especially “A New Plea for Diagonal Science” of the final section,” as well as the early psychoanalytic writings and related texts that develop Caillois’s interest in the disappearance of subjectivity. We found the Reader useful for bringing Caillois’s reflections on science into chronological focus, even though one needs to dredge salient concepts from here and there in select essays, for example to find his method of combining the scientific and the poetic in such concepts as inverted anthropomorphism and objective lyricism.

There are many Caillois’s hinted at in Frank’s Reader. This is both a strength and weakness; the former because of the avenues and identities that are fragmentarily evoked; the latter because it is still difficult to escape the channeling of interpretation by the axes of surrealism and literary theory (especially the reduction to metaphor that Bataille’s work has suffered), even if the latter is open to some degree to sociological theory.

Yet this Reader’s greatest use would be as a field through which one could plot a route of one’s own toward a specific Caillois.

One might regain Caillois as an amateur entomologist. In his studies of mimesis Caillois drew upon an impressive literature of naturalist, zoological and biological material in order to investigative phenomena of adaptation. Unconvinced by existing explanations, he chose instead to consider mimesis as dangerous because neither gardeners wielding pruning shears nor leaf insects browsing together can distinguish between leaves and other insects. Progressive indistinction, this assimilation of the insect to its surroundings, was Caillois’s route toward the analysis of human-insect (and mineral) similarities. Caillois mapped a path of accelerated disappearance and in so doing refocused attention on resemblance as a fundamental problem. One task would be to put this idea into the vast arena of mimesis as a cultural practice involving insects: the current biomimesis hypothesis of micro-robotics research and the history of military research into insect devices. These areas carry a sense of disappearance in the mass production of disposable specimens (i.e., inexpensive “roachbots”).

There is another Caillois lurking in Frank’s selections - amateur geologist. He was, after all, a member of l’Association Française de Gemmologie. French physicist Vincent Fleury (Arbres de pierre (1998), and contributor to the special issue of Europe on Caillois in 2000) has integrated Caillois’s writings on stones into his studies of branching across mineral and vegetable realms. Fleury’s work in “morphogenesis” finds inspiration in Caillois’s diagonal science of analogies of forms, developed at length in Writing of Stones. Caillois’s lapidary aesthetics explored the power over the human imagination of unmotivated representational signs found on stones (such as dendrites imitating ferns on marbles).

Frank’s Reader will inspire those interested in Caillois to undertake productive adventures in his oeuvre, getting them started but without holding their hands along the way. However, the meticulously documented general introduction, as well as the trenchant introductions to each essay in the book, provide more than enough signposts.

Gary Genosko
Department of Sociology
Lakehead University

Jerry DePiero
Department of English
York University

Dr. Genosko is an Associate professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies. Mr. DePiero is a doctoral candidate.


	Canadian Journal of Sociology Online November - December 2003 Claudine Frank, ed. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Duke University Press, 2003, 440 pp. $US 22.95 paper (0-8223-306807), $US 79.95 hardcover (0-8223-3056-3) Roger Caillois is perhaps best known as co-founder with Georges Bataille (and Michel Leiris) of the Collège de sociologie. Caillois and Bataille worked extensively together on questions concerning the sacred in the autonomous Collège from 1936 to 1939. While Bataille has found a place among significant 20th century French thinkers, Caillois has been undervalued and today his work registers softly if at all. As a result, compared with the critical literature on Bataille, contemporary work on Caillois is much less developed. Claudine Frank’s The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader will help to rectify this situation. As the title suggests the Reader is focused by Caillois’s relationship with surrealism. Part I “Theory and the Thirties” begins with a first section that tackles Caillois’s relations with key figures such as Paul Eluard and André Breton, as well as introducing the infamous psychoanalytic readings of entomology “The Praying Mantis” and “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” The latter have been available in English translation for some time. The second section allows us to widen the context of Caillois’s criticism of surrealist “hedonism” through an anti-Darwinian and anti-utilitarian theorization of myth through the lens of biology. These first two sections provide the opportunity to appreciate the critical acumen of Caillois’s engagement with science, which would be a life-long obsession. The third section of Part I revisits the Collège years. Some of Caillois’s contributions to the sociology of the sacred are here alongside his statement of reticence in the face of his colleague Bataille’s insistence on self-ennobling convulsive and contagious ritual acts of sacrifice which, incidentally, never came off. Frank provides excellent historical French intellectual context as the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel seminars is front and centre, as is Kojève’s doubt about the Collège project. It was during the late 30s that Caillois published two of his most coherent sociological statements, Le Mythe et l’homme and L’Homme et le sacré (1938 and -39 respectively). Any reader of Caillois and the Collège must return to and reckon with the foundational work on this topic by Denis Hollier, especially his important The Collège of Sociology 1937-39 (1988) and Absent without Leave (1997). Hollier’s editorial and translation activities have included key early writings and reviews of Collège figures, in addition to work on the diverse activities of the young Caillois (“Fear and Trembling in the Age of Surrealism,” in Caillois, The Necessity of Mind (1990)). Clearly, Frank’s efforts are beholden to Hollier. In Part II “Writing from Patagonia” Frank assembles assorted materials that came in the wake of the Collège and Caillois’s relocation to Argentina, a short visit of a few weeks that was extended by the war into a few years (1939-1944). This period included the publication of literary theoretical texts such as La Communion des forts (1943) and the less well known work on detective novels Le Roman Policier (1941). Frank points us back to the critical reactions the former caused in 1945, regaining Meyer Schapiro’s telling indictment in “French Reaction in Exile” (Kenyon Review) of Caillois’s work of this period as anti-sensual, arid and lacking all feeling, which explained his fascination with executioners, secrecy (which replaces sacred as a key term), totalitarianism, contempt for the masses, and vast deserts. Part III “Postwar Stances” contains the most sprawling sections covering works from the 1940s through the 1970s (Caillois passed away in 1978). One could criticize Frank because she has excluded the great works of this period such as Les Jeux et les hommes (1958)—one of the few Caillois books still in print in English translation and of great sociological interest when brought out from the shadow of Homo Ludens—not to mention the absence of the three books on stones. Scant attention has been paid to the existing translation, The Writing of Stones (1985 [orig. 1970]), but it is only one of several books on stones penned by Caillois that in addition include Pierres réfléchies (1975) and Pierres (1966). Indeed, there is a literature worth investigating and one could regain from the special issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française (1979) devoted to Caillois: several articles of appreciation by French and Spanish scholars on stones; also materials from a special issue of Sud “Minéral, minimal” (1995). Still, Frank outlines constructive routes of approach through her selections. For example, the final piece, “The Natural Fantastic” is situated in relation to the books on stones from which it diverges, reorienting the force of Caillois’s expansive lapidary reveries. Indeed, “Metamorphoses of Hell” reworked an earlier essay on the representations of the afterlife in American cinema; and several of the selections here link up with earlier thematics such as surrealism. The Reader is an overview that touches upon various poetic and sociological topics, and provides in one place important statements on science, especially “A New Plea for Diagonal Science” of the final section,” as well as the early psychoanalytic writings and related texts that develop Caillois’s interest in the disappearance of subjectivity. We found the Reader useful for bringing Caillois’s reflections on science into chronological focus, even though one needs to dredge salient concepts from here and there in select essays, for example to find his method of combining the scientific and the poetic in such concepts as inverted anthropomorphism and objective lyricism. There are many Caillois’s hinted at in Frank’s Reader. This is both a strength and weakness; the former because of the avenues and identities that are fragmentarily evoked; the latter because it is still difficult to escape the channeling of interpretation by the axes of surrealism and literary theory (especially the reduction to metaphor that Bataille’s work has suffered), even if the latter is open to some degree to sociological theory. Yet this Reader’s greatest use would be as a field through which one could plot a route of one’s own toward a specific Caillois. One might regain Caillois as an amateur entomologist. In his studies of mimesis Caillois drew upon an impressive literature of naturalist, zoological and biological material in order to investigative phenomena of adaptation. Unconvinced by existing explanations, he chose instead to consider mimesis as dangerous because neither gardeners wielding pruning shears nor leaf insects browsing together can distinguish between leaves and other insects. Progressive indistinction, this assimilation of the insect to its surroundings, was Caillois’s route toward the analysis of human-insect (and mineral) similarities. Caillois mapped a path of accelerated disappearance and in so doing refocused attention on resemblance as a fundamental problem. One task would be to put this idea into the vast arena of mimesis as a cultural practice involving insects: the current biomimesis hypothesis of micro-robotics research and the history of military research into insect devices. These areas carry a sense of disappearance in the mass production of disposable specimens (i.e., inexpensive “roachbots”). There is another Caillois lurking in Frank’s selections - amateur geologist. He was, after all, a member of l’Association Française de Gemmologie. French physicist Vincent Fleury (Arbres de pierre (1998), and contributor to the special issue of Europe on Caillois in 2000) has integrated Caillois’s writings on stones into his studies of branching across mineral and vegetable realms. Fleury’s work in “morphogenesis” finds inspiration in Caillois’s diagonal science of analogies of forms, developed at length in Writing of Stones. Caillois’s lapidary aesthetics explored the power over the human imagination of unmotivated representational signs found on stones (such as dendrites imitating ferns on marbles). Frank’s Reader will inspire those interested in Caillois to undertake productive adventures in his oeuvre, getting them started but without holding their hands along the way. However, the meticulously documented general introduction, as well as the trenchant introductions to each essay in the book, provide more than enough signposts. Gary Genosko Department of Sociology Lakehead University Jerry DePiero Department of English York University Dr. Genosko is an Associate professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies. Mr. DePiero is a doctoral candidate. http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/caillois.html November 2003 © CJS Online Click here to download PDF file < Back to Current Table of Contents