ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with some reflections on the nature of the traditional public realm of the pre-modern European city. A scenographic setting for a variety of festivals and ceremonies and the source of social cohesion of the community, the traditional city throws into relief the familiar modern urban predicament. Among the more poetic twentieth-century attempts to reinvest the city with its former significance and magic was that of the French surrealists, whose work was deeply situated in Paris. The main body of the chapter consists of an interpretation of André Breton’s urban landscape in his book L’Amour fou. In Breton’s writings, Paris often becomes a theatre of mysterious encounter, modern myth, and uncanny coincidences. In the Night of the Sunflower section, it is a non-perspectival psychic terrain, where the poet meets and is guided through a marvellous nocturnal topography by the beautiful nymph Ondine. The lovers’ allegorical walk from periphery to centre is structured through allusion to initiatic and alchemical themes – the labyrinth, death and regeneration, pilgrimage, courtly love, and royal entry procession. The familiar places and landmarks of the city form a personal poetic itinerary, taking on archetypal character in the journey toward the transmutation of the imagination in triumphant surreality. While Breton’s powerful poetic evocation of mythical themes aspires to the universal, his narrative is quite introverted and personal. Concerned primarily with self-discovery and transformation, it offers the hope of a kind of salvation in a desacralised world. Can such an inevitably modern understanding contain – as the traditional festivals did – a truly civic ethos?
