As he developed his technological interests in the setting of the Musée de l’Homme, Leroi-Gourhan was particularly attentive to the description and documentation of material objects. Cardboard fiches (index cards) with standardized entries – name, function, material, location of finding, etc. – served to ‘bring the milieu of the object’ back into the museum. During his fieldwork in Japan from 1937 to 1939, Leroi-Gourhan refined his documentary approaches, combining ethnographic photographs and object collections. Back in France, however, following the defeat and German occupation, this mass of accumulated fiches became less compelling, especially when Leroi-Gourhan discovered Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) with its élan vital and intuitionist philosophy. This notably inspired him to develop the distinction between technical ‘facts’, which are unstable and localized, and technical ‘tendencies’, which are stable, wide-ranging and deterministic. These two concepts, outlined in Evolution et techniques (1943, 1945), characterized his approach to technical phenomena and material civilizations.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

This essay explores attitudes towards childhood in the surrealist novel but does so not via the familiar lens of psychoanalysis but via the concept of ’nostalgia’ as theorized by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Taking two contrasting examples of surrealist writing on childhood – Giorgio de Chirico’s seminal Hebdomeros (1929) on the one hand and Michel Leiris’s autobiographical novels Manhood (1939) and Scratches (1948) on the other – it is argued that, in both cases, Boym’s concept of ’reflective nostalgia’ (as opposed to ’restorative nostalgia’) provides a useful tool of analysis. However, the melancholic tone of de Chirico’s writing – with its stylistic debts to Lautréamont and Nietzsche – has a regressive dimension, and lacks the self-reflexivity specified in Boym’s account of a critically incisive ’reflective’ nostalgia. By contrast, Leiris’s more robust exploration of his male sexuality, along with the ’anthropological’ tenor of his analysis of the linguistic and material universe of childhood, fits more productively with Boym’s conception of a positive role for nostalgia within modernism.

This essay explores the nature and significance of the intersection of surrealist automatism and autobiography in the surrealist novel through an analysis of Aurora (1927–8; pub. 1946), by Michel Leiris, as compared with other surrealist novels such as Louis Aragon’s Anicet, or the Panorama (1921). Hoping to recover from a major emotional crisis, Leiris embarked upon a five-month trip to Egypt and Greece in 1927. Commenced during this journey, Aurora combines surrealist approaches with fictional and documentary elements in an investigation of the limits and fluid expanses of the writing self. How does automatism at once reinforce and obliterate the autobiographical source? In Aurora, surrealist automatism and elements of autobiography become epistemological demonstrations, via the words of the writer who is writing in real time, of the sheer fact of being alive and the possibility of impending death. Therefore, Aurora also experiments with thanatography, which is a written account of the death of the self. One way of understanding Aurora, Leiris asserts, is as a surrealist magnum opus, or account of the alchemical striving towards the creation of the philosopher’s stone recast as the surrealist path to greater awareness of a fundamentally unknowable, unbounded, and unstable self.