One Into Another

The Surrealist writing game of “L’un dans L’autre”

“L’un dans L’autre” (literally, “one in the other”) is one of my favorite surrealist games and concepts: the idea that anything can be identified as anything else is the essence of surrealist philosophy.

The surrealists played this game by having one person leave the room and choose an object (person, idea, etc.) while the others together chose a different object. As Breton and Péret explain, “When the first player returns he is told what object they have chosen. He must now describe his own object in terms of the properties of the object chosen by the others, making the comparison more and more obvious as he proceeds, until they are able to guess its identity. The first player should begin with a sentence such as I am an (object)…”

Examples:

I am a very beautiful female BREAST, particularly long and serpentine. The woman bearing it agrees to display it only on certain nights. From its innumerable nipples spurts a luminous milk. Few people, poets excepted, are able to appreciate its curve.
Benjamin Péret

I am a CHRISTMAS TREE seen several days after the festivities. My top is triangular like all christmas trees. Like them I hold some surprises in store for children, but also continue to affect a certain category of adults in that I participate simultaneously in times past and present.
Elisa Breton

I am a hardened SUNBEAM that revolves around the sun so as to release a dark and fragrant rainfall each morning, a little after midday and even once night has fallen.
Jean Schuster

I am a gleaming NECKTIE knotted around the hand so as to run across those throats at which I’m placed.
Toyen

(Answers. Péret: Milky Way. Breton: attic. Schuster: coffee-mill. Toyen: sword.)

You can see how much creative stretching is needed for the player to connect the two concepts. For example, the Schuster description of the coffee-mill in terms of a sunbeam is quite a leap, but you can see what he was going for: the sunbeam “revolving around the sun” must be the coffee beans rotating in the mill, and the “dark and fragrant rainfall” is freshly-ground and brewed coffee. The logic is that “rainfall” is a weather thing, like the sun, so he’s loosely working with the “sunbeam” analogy. But the logic is quite flexible: sunbeams are not “hard” and do not “release” rain (although the sun does cause rain in a manner of speaking, when it cause water to evaporate and form clouds). The player is sticking the prompt term but being rather loose in the imagery, as one presumably has to, to bridge the conceptual gaps.

My take on this game is that the philosophy behind it is more important than practically functioning as a game. Maybe I’m bad at riddles but I guessed none of those.

But I do think it’s a great concept to run as a writing prompt. Here’s a couple ways to use it as a prompt:

• Get a friend to send you an object (or get AI to do it.) You’ve already decided on your own object. Write a poem about your object in terms of the one your friend sent.

• The riddle aspect of this game can be preserved simply by suppressing the “answer” when you share your poem. You can have readers guess the answer in the comment thread or whatever.

• Play the game in three or more rounds. Pick an object, then have friends/AI prompt you with three nouns. Write a stanza for each one, describing your object in terms of each.

Here’s a poem using the last idea. I had a certain thing in mind, and I drew for my nouns: earth, ballet, magistrate, mattress . Can you guess what it is?

I am the earth
blue and green as the slime at the bottom.
I float in space directing myself
with twelve forces
around the stars.

I am a ballet. Synchronous in the five positions of my appendages,
the way I come out of shadows into the light,
the way the joints grow crooked as my career comes to a climax.

I am a magistrate with flashing cold eyes
hinting at impartiality. 
And the tapered ends of my body are the judge’s
silk hems. I have a righteous, curling lip,
a face of the law,
and scales.

I am a mattress,
blending with atmosphere,
sliding through the night,
warm only in the depths of myself
balanced against the forces almost beyond discernment,
the thing ahead that I catch a hint of
and turn away from just in time.

(For the answer to the riddle, see below.)

“L’un dans L’autre” is the logical extension of the concept of six degrees of separation—only, it is only one degree of separation and the entire universe is the semantic field. The philosophical conceit is that all things are interconnected, and, indeed, find their existence in each other. For surrealism, such a reality exists now, but it is hidden by the illusory separations and divisions imposed by reason, society, and superstition. The task of surrealism (and of poetry rightly understood) is to make the Heraclitean reality visible by breaking the illusion of separation.

In its simplest terms, this is what surrealism’s “word play” is up to. Theoretically, any two objects can be related, and—in the most developed conceptions of this philosophy—the relation they obtain has unique characteristics. Hence in Breton’s version of the game, objects form a distinct enough connection that the objects can be “divined” by other players.

In this game form, the connection between the two objects is the conceptual target and the players’ imaginations are stretched in an effort to identify them. But the concept of l’un dans l’autre as a general principle applied to writing invites writers to to try making wild metaphorical connections and analogies. Indeed, the goal of poetry can become to discover and enjoy the particular character of the seemingly limitless number of relationships between things.

If you write poems using this prompt, send them to me–I will enjoy reading them!

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Art: Edoardo de Falchi
source: A Book of Surrealist Games
Answer to riddle: fish