The Inventor of Love: Not just the invention of love and death

Wei Guangji, Zhonghua Reading Daily ( 2021-06-23 11 edition)

"The Inventor of Love", by [French] Geracim Luca, translated by Wei Guangji, Guangxi People's Publishing House, May 2021, first edition, 38.00 yuan

On the path of Luca's invention, love and death also met decisively, becoming each other's witnesses. Luca uses surreal uninhibited fantasies and black humor to create a dark and charming monster image.

The author of The Inventor of Love, Geracim Luca, whose real name is Salman Lokell, was born on July 23, 1913, to a liberal Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania. Benefiting from Bucharest's unique cultural atmosphere, Luca speaks not only Yiddish and Romanian, but also German and French. He read a large number of German philosophical works in his early years and was familiar with psychoanalytic theory.

In the 1930s, inspired by his friend Dolfi Trost, Luca became exposed to the surrealist movement that was flourishing in Europe. By the late 1930s, like his compatriot and pioneer Tristang Chala, Luca turned his attention to the Parisian Surrealist community: in 1938, he traveled to Paris several times to meet the French Surrealists. Soon, war broke out and Luca had to return to Romania, and official anti-Semitism forced him into exile. In the short years after Romania's independence, Luca, together with dolfy Trost, Victor Brauna, Gru Naum, Paul Pau and other friends, set out to establish the Romanian Surrealist community and put forward his idea of "non-Oedipus". He drafted a Non-Oedipal Declaration, but the manuscript was never preserved. In 1945, together with Trost, he wrote the group's trans-automaticist manifesto, Dialectics of Dialectics, as a message to the Parisian Surrealism. In the same year, Luca's collections of Romanian prose poems, A Wolf Seen through a Magnifying Glass, and The Inventor of Love, as well as Passive Vampire, written in French, were published in Brussels. It was from this period that Luca deliberately broke with his native language and switched to Writing in French.

In 1952, Luca left Romania and settled in France to continue his poetry and artistic work. While in Paris, he became close friends with the artists Jean Alp, Max Ernst and the poet Paul Zellland. His "non-Oedipus" ideas also attracted the interest of the French philosophers Gil del Dérèse and Felix Gatali. After moving to France, Luca further developed his collage art called "Kubermania", while his poetry inherited the spirit of the previous Surreal "invention of everything", devoting himself to exploring a new linguistic expression in the complex relationship between life and death, mind and body, love and the world, and its endless phonological magic formed a unique "stuttering" style, which was appreciated by Deleuze, who praised him as "one of the greatest poets". Although Luca has won international fame by participating in european and American poetry festivals since the 1960s, and even participated in the recording of a television recitation directed by Raoul Sangra in 1988, his life has always been poor, and he has been repeatedly expelled from his residence because of identity problems in his later years, which has exacerbated his pessimistic attitude. On February 9, 1994, just as his friend Celan had done twenty-four years earlier, Luca jumped off the Mirabeau Bridge and into the Seine, ending his life.

The Inventor of Love is Luca's masterpiece and is available in two versions. Fifty years after the publication of the original Romanian Inventor of Love, Luca personally transposed it into French and, on the basis of abridgements, changed the original prose poem to a poetic style, thus expressing in a more poetic and concise form the surrealist passion that he had never forgotten. The book is translated from the French version of The Inventor of Love. The work consists of two parts, "The Inventor of Love" and "The Death of Death", which point to two basic topics of Surrealism: "Love" and "Death". The concept of the "inventor of love" is undoubtedly borrowed from the famous quote of the French poet Rimbaud: "Love must be reinvented." But Luca gave the invention of love a more radical revolutionary meaning, starting from Freud's psychoanalytic theory and demanding a breakthrough in the Oedipal complex that human beings were born with, and the realization of truly free love, that is, truly free life. As Luca put it in his 1947 letter, The Inventor of Love is "a program of theoretical and practical plans for the complete emancipation through love", which allows "love to encounter revolution for the first time freely". The "death of death" further illustrates the subversive power of non-Oedipal love in Luca's eyes, trying to use it to overcome the ultimate obstacle to freedom, the "universal absolute paralysis" represented by death. To this end, Luca recorded one virtual death experiment after another, initiating the "dialectical leap" he pursued in the ultimate spiritual tempering, opening up a passage that no one had yet set foot on to the non-Oedipal universe, fearlessly moving towards the unknown fate of human liberation. Therefore, "The Inventor of Love" is not only the invention of love and death, but also the birth of a new life form, the creation of an unprecedented external world. In this sense, Lucca's year of 1945, as a true year of invention and liberation, deserves to be remembered by human history.

Finally, on the path of Luca's invention, love and death also met decisively and became witnesses to each other. That's why Luca's passion for his lover takes on the form of infinite destruction, and his determination to die echoes the despair of love's absence. In such a close connection between love and death, Luca creates a dark and charming monster image with surreal uninhibited fantasies and black humor: under the moonlight of midnight, he quietly comes, cloaked in black cloaks, and his traces flutter, whispering the deepest secrets of human nature to the sleepers and insomniacs, and you will hear bold and straightforward confessions of desire, even unabashedly announcing his name on the psychiatric diagnosis sheet, and chanting the songs of Mardolo, which the villains of literature have long heard. Who is he under the cloak? Is it a repressed and bitter sexual pervert, or a criminal who confesses or provokes the gods? Are they devout members of secret societies, or are they monks who are enchanted by the devil? Is it a wizard who rushes to the altar, or a vampire looking for prey? In an obviously fictional tone, is he talking about a cruel legend, or a terrifying nightmare? Or is he another marquis of Sade in prison, or angela Carter at another desk? It's up to the reader to decide.

Source: China Reading Daily