Aesthetic suicide in avant-garde literature of the 1920s : portraits of self-destruction by Breton, Gide, and Cocteau

“Aesthetic Suicide in Avant-Garde Literature of the 1920s” explores the connection between portraits of suicide and reflections on art and its production in select avant-garde works by André Breton, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. I suggest more specifically that each author used portraits of suicide as a vehicle to articulate their artistic principles in the early twentieth century. These principles are visible, for instance, in Breton’s construction of the Vaché suicide myth from 1919 to 1924, in Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), and in Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants terribles (1929). The ambiguity that clouds the act of suicide served each author’s representation of art and its production in various ways: by modeling a form of artistic abstention from life as poetry in line with an avant-garde rejection of literary ambition; by holding a mirror to the ways in which counterfeit infiltrates the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, or by expressing the imperfect coalescence of content and form in the production of the work of art. Given the diversity of the select authors’ thematic concerns, their use of diverse forms and mediums, as well as their personal and profession disputes, this project provides a window to a shared attribute across three otherwise discordant oeuvres. In this comparative, thematic study, I suggest the unanticipated link between Breton, Gide, and Cocteau implies suicide’s broader association with art and its production within varying factions of the avant-garde during the 1920s. In this way, this project situates itself in the fields of modernist studies and literary suicidology through its evaluation of the suicide as an allegory for the fragmentation of the work of art. To the existing body of research on suicide in modernist literature, which primarily addresses the psychological narrative of the suicidal individual, this project contributes a reading of suicide as a vehicle for the avant-garde criticism of art in French literature from 1919 to 1929.