La lampe dans l'horloge

BRETON André. La Lampe dans l'horloge [The Lamp in the Clock]
Robert Marin, Paris 1948, 11 x 17 cm, original wrappers with custom slipcase
First edition, one of the numbered copies on alfa mousse paper, this one not justified.
Wrappers in chemise and case.
With an exceptional and important presentation inscription from André Breton to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Case with almond-colored paper boards and chemise, red morocco title-piece and label with “exemplaire de J. P. Sartre [J.P. Sartre's copy]”.
This inscription from the Pope of Surrealism to the master of Existentialism – of whose rare meetings, most notably in New York, there remain barely any traces in their biographies – is all the more surprising since Sartre had just published a vitriolic article on Breton in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? [What is literature?]:
“The theoretical accord between Surrealism and the Communist Party against the bourgeoisie does not in fact go beyond the formal; it is the formal idea of negativity that unites them…Negativity subsists, no matter what anyone says, outside of history: it is, at the same time, of the instant and everlasting – it is the ultimate end of both literature and art. Somewhere, Breton approves of the… ‘sacred mission' of the proletariat. But in the end, this class – imagined as a legion of exterminating angels – is in reality nothing more for authors than a religious myth that plays a role (for the salving of their consciences) analogous to that played by the myth of ‘the People' in 1848 for well-intentioned writers.”
André Breton did not reply to Sartre's criticisms, nor even the ones formulated a year later by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.
This little work, as much political as it is poetical, is nonetheless a part of the common cause of these two intellectuals within the extremely ephemeral Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire. Founded in 1947 by Sartre, it very quickly floundered despite the active engagement of Breton.
1948 was therefore the only intellectual meeting of these two great “Masters of Thought” of the second half of the 20th century, whose personalities – intransigent and exclusionary – did not allow for a lasting philosophical union.