André Breton's and Eugène Atget's Valentines

Having criticized in the first surrealist manifesto (1924) the novel and “tout ce qui participe de l’anecdote” (Oeuvres I: 320), Breton affirms later on that the form does serve avant-garde interests: listed as one of the movement’s precursors, “[Raymond] Roussel est surréaliste dans l’anecdote” (Oeuvres I: 329). [...]the most valuable literary criticism on novels is that which, as Breton discusses it in Nadja, unearths the “extra-literary” tidbits where “la personne de l’auteur, en proie aux menus faits de la vie courante, s’exprime en toute indépendance, d’une manière souvent si distinctive” (Oeuvres I: 648). [...]the stylistic theme of her own place, love, is echoed by the foregrounding of the photographer’s one most visibly valuable piece: the cupid clock, synchronized with Poseidon, a prodigious lover of mortals, immortals, and monsters.11 Furthermore, physiognomic and class determinisms are vitiated by means of another opposition or a back and forth movement between one’s work and one’s désoeuvrement. If the collector/ photographer does not transcend social divisions, he studies them by masquerading in them and striking up dialogues across them. [...]the collectible is inherently anecdotal in that for every collectible there is, in addition to its history and provenance, the story of how it came to take up residence in the collector’s home and, most especially, its coincidence with his or her interests. [...]it is this artist whom Benjamin cites in the concluding paragraph of “A Small History of Photography”: “‘The illiteracy of the future’, someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography’” (256; see also Cadava xix, 21).