The Passive Vampire (Art Lit) [Paperback]

Gherasim Luca (Author, Illustrator), Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Art Lit | Publication Date: March 1, 2009

Originally published in 1945 by Les Éditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 in the magazine La part du sable. Luca, whose work was admired by Gilles Deleuze, attempts here to transmit the "shudder" evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as André Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between "objective chance" and delirium.

Impossible to define, The Passive Vampire is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation it is 18 photographs of "objectively offered objects," a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms by externalizing the ambivalence of our drives and bringing to light the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Passive Vampire is a poetic memoir that is also a surrealist living guide and a very sophisticated essay on the connections between objects and human feelings. --Andrei Codrescu

We are lucky to have access to this "lost legend" in English, which will surely become a rediscovered classic and a "must read" for anyone interested in surrealism. --Gwen Dawson, Literary License

The Passive Vampire is not what you think. It's not a book about vampires. It's not a book about passivity. It's not science fiction and it's not a horror story. What it is is challenging, semi-autobiographical, surrealist dissertation, erotic in a removed, intellectual George Bataille sort of way, and a book with a lot to offer but only to those who are open to understanding it. --Salonica

The book ... is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era's dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. --Irene Gammel, Bookforum

That auto-destruction, typical of Luca, was also the essence of the Surrealist project in its Eastern iteration. The artful fracturing of bourgeois French reality became, in a much more politically volatile and sexually repressive milieu, the frantic Othering of the creative self. In Bucharest, especially after the war, there was nothing else left to corrupt. --Forward

The Passive Vampire is excellently translated and introduced by Krzyzstof Fijalkowski and is what broadsheets would call "essential reading." It is undoubtedly a "classic" of the surrealist tradition while at the same time the kind of text that puts into question the very notions of classic and tradition. Offer yourself to it. --Phosphor

Much of The Passive Vampire is, indeed, a 'delirium of interpretation'. There is certainly some appeal to it -- here is a mind thinking and feeling out of most of the conventional boxes -- but also only within limits. --Complete Review

Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own. --Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues

Luca's grim, lewd, death-haunted writings puzzle, disgust, and induce laughter; ... [his] poems and prose are as playful and illuminating as they are bizarre and disturbing. -- John Taylor, "Killer Puns"

To hear and to see Ghérasim Luca read is like rediscovering the primordial power of poetry, its prophetic force and subversive effect. --Le Monde

There is no doubt that The Passive Vampire should take its place amongst the essential "classics" of surrealism's history, but, moreover, it provides a valuable stimulus for any current investigations into the workings of chance and its objects, of dream and desire. As the translator, Krzysztof Fijalkowski writes in his excellent introduction, this work is important "as a fixed marker for the questions asked today by those wishing to situate themselves in the continuing stream of a critical surrealist thought." --Kenneth Cox, Mute Magazine

The Passive Vampire explores our relation to the material world, especially objects, constantly subverting our preconceived ideas about what we see and think. The influence of the French surrealists, particularly Andre Breton's Mad Love and Nadja, is easily felt throughout. Luca's poetic, stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me of why I loved reading the French surrealists so much ... --Heidi Broadhead, Omnivoracious

The Passive Vampire, also from 1945, but written in 1941, is a surrealist work, but one that goes beyond mere dadaist playfulness and becomes much darker and more disturbing. There is a whiff of sulphur from its pages, and when he writes "the medieval pyres are still burning" you note the date and reflect that perhaps "surrealism" is not quite the mot juste. --Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

About the Author

was born July 23, 1913 in Bucharest into a liberal Jewish family. His father was a tailor. Luca, who spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French, traveled frequently to Paris in the late 1930s where he became acquainted with the Surrealists. World War II and Romania's official anti-Semitism forced him into internal exile. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, he helped to found the Romanian Surrealist Group. He finally left Romania in 1952, and moved to Paris, where he died on February 9, 1994, at the age of 80, by throwing himself into the Seine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 139 pages
• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8086264319
• ISBN-13: 978-8086264318
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #912,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful and strange work of surrealism, March 8, 2009

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Passive Vampire (Art Lit) (Paperback)

The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca was originally published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest. Thanks to Twisted Spoon Press and translator Krzysztof Fijalkowski, this important work of surrealist literature is now available in English in a beautifully designed edition, including 18 full-page photographs of Luca's Objectively Offered Objects (surrealist sculptures comprising strange combinations of symbolic objects).

In Fijalkowski's informative introduction, he explains that the Romanian Surrealist Group, which existed from 1940 until 1947 and of which Luca was a key member, stood for "a reinvention of the surrealist imagination" through:
"a critical approach to dreams, the eroticisation of the proletariat, the poetic appropriation of quantum physics, and the perpetual re-evaluation of surrealism through the negation of negation."

The Passive Vampire falls squarely within these professed values and is divided into two halves: The Objectively Offered Object and The Passive Vampire. In the first half of the book, Luca explores how his gift of an object transforms his relationship with the recipient:
"When offering an object to someone, external causality responds more rapidly to internal necessities. Erotic relations between myself and other individuals are more quickly established though the mediation of the object."

In the case of an object Luca intended to offer to André Breton, the object
"began to murmur a black-magical language between myself and Breton, one that was very close to dream and to primordial language. This secret and mysterious communication lasted uninterrupted for several days."

In creating his objects, Luca chose his materials based on their inner meanings and their harmony with subconscious emotions. The actual substance of his materials was unimportant: "In the world of dreams where I choose to operate, celluloid is flesh and paper is water."

The second half of the book is a poetic evocation of Luca's surrealist philosophies and imaginative visions. The imagery in this section is dark, brooding, and often very strange:
"I close my eyes, as active as a vampire, I open them within myself, as passive as a vampire, and between the blood that arrives, the blood that leaves, and the blood already inside me there occurs an exchange of images like an engagement of daggers."

In this half of the book, Luca reveals his pessimistic view of humanity:
"It is dawning on [the people] at last that they have long since ceased to live, that the corpses they show to the outside world, having taken the form of the useful, the beautiful, and the goo, have transformed the magnificent rotation of the Earth around the Sun into the funereal procession of a slowly decaying hearse as it approaches the ruins of a cemetery."

The Passive Vampire ends with a love story, but it's a gloomy love story that only "darkened the darkness" for Luca. Though challenging to decipher, this segment of the book is beautifully and powerfully written.

The Passive Vampire had an original print run of only 460 copies, and, until its recent reissue, Fijalkowski explains it had become "something of a lost legend within surrealist literature, rarely referred to and almost never seen other than in jealously guarded private libraries." We are lucky to have access to this "lost legend" in English, which will surely become a rediscovered classic and a "must read" for anyone interested in surrealism.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars new translation of 1940s work reflecting fears and trauma of WWII era, February 27, 2009

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Passive Vampire (Art Lit) (Paperback)

First published in 1945, Luca's book reflects all of the rampant, extremist fears and associated mental states in the pre-World War II and the War years in Europe. The style of the book is labeled surrealistic; but it is also existential despite its lack of elements such as setting and characterization with its implications of biography and interaction with one's surroundings. Although the book is patently dated as far as the historical and social circumstances it grew out of and by its heavily psychologistic style, a work with its vibrancy and display of aspects of human nature is never passe or irrelevant. One sees in the book, for instance, sources of the science fiction and horror literature and movies so popular today.

Besides its portrayals of charged, uncontrolled emotional states, Luca's book is of interest for its illustrations. These are surrealist with their mixed elements and cryptic presence. They are simpler though than the highly-wrought writing and than most surrealist art--as if the strange archetypes of Luca's psychology and imagination. With their relative simplicity, the objects in the illustrations seem more personal than typical surrealist art, like the art of Joseph Cornell. In combining text and illustrations, Luca's book comes within a relatively small category of art and is also marked as something of a rudiment or prototype of the comic or illustrated novel which has come onto the scene in recent years.

The Passive Vampire is noteworthy as outstanding representative literature of a particular period, and also as a work offering a rare, unusual, literary, artistic experience.

5.0 out of 5 stars Read This for the Sentences if Not the Paragraphs, June 12, 2011

By 

Tome Raider (California, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Passive Vampire (Art Lit) (Paperback)

I'd be lying if I told you I understood this book. Being a literal type, I read and re-read each of the early paragraphs trying to hammer out some coherent, rational meaning. Failing at that, I then just went with the flow and allowed the intense and powerful use of words to cascade by. I found myself captivated by Luca's language. It is extremely evocative, and the fact that I never really understood exactly what he was referring to only added to the mysticism of it all. The writing has a sinister, magical, poetical quality to it that I ended up finding to be quite elegant and seductive. This is somewhat like reading the thoughts of a demented psychotic genius and having the uneasy realization that he has some valid understanding of the world that escapes the rest of us.

I've survived Faulkner and Joyce, and this was relatively comfortable and rewarding in comparison. This only took me a few hours to read, so it won't be like you're investing a month in some epic.

My thanks to the two previous reviewers who gave me a context for this which I hadn't established by my own reading or by my familiarity with surrealism. I particulary agree with the sentiment that this is a potentially seminal work for writers (and perhaps film-makers) of horror. There is profound dark ambience here, erotic and bizarre, and I believe it could be readily expounded upon in other more accessible works.

This partiuclar edition (Twisted Spoon Press, 2008) is beautiful and I'm planting mine in a plastic storage sleeve because I can see some artsy type really desiring a copy of this in 20 years when it is long out of print. The several photographs of seemingly illogical little sculptures are also weirdly haunting and they alone will send shivers up your spine. They will make the imagery in your Dali coffee table book seem quite vanilla by comparison.

I was sorry to hear about the sad death of Mr. Luca, but his tragic ending by suicide strangely seemed to correspond to the verbal imagery of his book, adding only further intrigue to his legacy.