Surrealist collage, favouring immediacy over sustained diegetic developments, would seem to contradict the possibility of coherent or cohesive narratives. Yet the elliptical mode of juxtaposition, which replaces in collage the (con)sequential links of conventional narratives, tantalizes the viewer-reader into searching for new links between disparate elements, recalling past stories or imagining potential scenarios. The chapter explores various key examples of surrealist collage narrative in both the verbal and visual fields: the micro-narratives suggested in André Breton’s early collage poems; Benjamin Péret’s collage poems made up of newspaper fragments; Giorgio de Chirico’s or René Magritte’s painted collages of enigmatic encounters; or Czech surrealist Jindřich Štyrský’s erotic scenarios. Focusing in particular on the parodic rewriting of the codes of melodrama in Max Ernst’s collage-novels, the chapter examines how fragments of popular nineteenth-century illustrated novels are recycled into new narratives. Finally, the study proposes a critique of psychoanalytical or alchemical interpretations, hermeneutic models that erase local disruptions in favour of a global coherence.

The principle and technique of collage as the juxtaposition of disparate elements is generally considered to be the fundamental model of twentieth-century avant-garde art forms. As structure rather than representation it ranges from Picasso’s cubist works to Rauschenberg’s combines; and within Surrealism, from Joan Miro’s pasted papers to George Hugnet’s “poèmes découpés.” This chapter argues that verbal and visual collage is at the heart of Surrealism’s revolutionary project, the means of contesting the established order, by imaginatively reconfiguring signs to produce new meanings – poetic, erotic, or satirical. Various questions regarding collage are explored. What are its limits? Can the concept embrace Dalí’s assemblages, film montage, Breton’s display of objects, or examples of citation, parody, or pastiche? Can it be defined as an experimental form rather than an aesthetic object, a dynamic process rather than a finished product? If collage is considered a collective activity, can it be identified with intertextuality? Finally, the chapter examines critical interpretations of collage by the surrealists themselves and explores examples of postsurrealist collage.