SOURCE: “The Surrealist Novel,” in Surrealism and the Novel, J.H. Matthews, 1966, pp. 59–73.

In the following essay, Matthews compares Crevel's novel, Babylone, with other surrealist writings published in the same year.

Novelists whose work antedated the formulation of the surrealist aesthetic enjoyed a kind of freedom that those referring to surrealism for inspiration and looking to it for guiding principles could not know. This is not to imply that the surrealist novelist has in view a prescribed form of proven validity or even a narrative pattern in which certain characteristics take their origin in opposition to tradition. The very idea of advocating a novelistic method is contrary to surrealism. Even so, whereas surrealism in the novel before the 1920's is, so to speak, innocent, the surrealist novels which have followed the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism must be admitted to reflect a distinctive orientation through the attraction...