Henri Michaux's early publications reveal the same concerns of his later works: problems of communication, the absurdity of the self as a single unit, the subconscious as a means of knowledge, psychoanalysis, the deformation of shapes, the mechanism of things, the exploration of the fantastic to explain the everyday. His first work, Les Rêves et la jambe (Dreams and the Leg, 1923), deals with incommunicability and physical fragmentation…. The dream [as he maintained in this first work], because it disorients and distorts the conscious real, gives value to the experience of the conscious, a value that would in all probability have remained undiscovered except through the instrument of the subconscious, here the dream.

While this fascination with the dream and the subconscious may seem to border on Surrealism, Michaux does not share the Surrealist interest in the processes of the subconscious. On the contrary, he views the dream...