Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s *Les Malheurs des immortels* (1922) — The Public Domain Review

Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence. It subverts traditional conceptions of authorship, not just in its collaborative, two-man composition, but also in the use of found images, echoed in the text by the frequent recourse to clichés and hollowed-out turns of phrase. Certain passages, like the first poem’s repeated refrain, “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” (The little one is ill, the little one will die), recall children’s nursery rhymes, with a sing-song quality stripped of sense. In this respect, the reference on page twenty-one to “phrases édentées” (toothless sentences) can be read as a metapoetic reflection on the language of the poems, which is emptied of its semantic force. Meaning is instead generated through what Lauren Van Arsdall calls the “cross-pollination” between text and image, the surprising resonances that arise through their juxtaposition.