Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

The imaginative enterprise of the Surrealists goes without saying. Though Andre Breton or Louis Aragon may not be widely read, they’re accepted as profoundly influencing a 20th century way of thinking and writing. Ideas about tapping into the unconscious, transfiguring ordinary life through dreaming and fantasy, accepting the happenstance of chance and coincidence have had far-reaching effects that are still with us (Paul Auster for one is unthinkable without them). The Surrealists’ fascination and praise of “primitive” cultures, of tribal masks, sculpture, costumes and customs--from Oceania, Africa and the Americas--famously helped direct the aesthetic of modern art. Yet Benjamin Peret, one of the founding members of the movement, is all but forgotten. An oracular poet, a militant who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was imprisoned by the Vichy government in 1940, he accepted the Mexican offer of sanctuary for political refugees in 1941; there, he attempted to do for Pre-Columbian literature what Picasso and others had done for the artifacts (the masks and the sculpture). He began collecting the scattered stories and beliefs of indigenous American peoples. The resulting “Anthologie des mythes, legendes, et conles populaires d’Amerique” (“Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales of America,” Paris, 1960) was published after Peret’s death in 1959. It’s a vast, rich, surprising collection, which reconstitutes (re-members) a huge body of oral tales from Jesuit reports, explorers’ descriptions, ethnographic journals, in a dozen languages. Peret wrote that he had entered, as it were, the mind of a Hopi doll and found himself inside a marvelous chamber, whose walls gave way before him “like tall grasses parting at the passage of a wary wild beast . . . 1/8and 3/8 I am inside, drawing down gleams of aurora borealis.”