Introductory Note by Marie-Claire Dumas

‘Bathing with Andromeda’ comprises nine poems, which were illustrated in colour by Felix Labisse. His images, classically drawn, their themes strangely erotic, make an effective counterpoint to the sensuality of the poems. These form a coherent set proceeding by scenes or episodes, a ‘morality’ whose characters all have an allegorical dimension. Labisse had worked on the images of Andromeda and the monster since the 1930’s. In the ancient myth, Andromeda’s parents deliver her to the monster threatening the city; Perseus, on the winged horse Pegasus, rescues the girl and marries her. Between the myth and Desnos’ version stands ‘Perseus and Andromeda, or the Happiest of the Three’, from the ‘Legendary Moralities’ of Jules Laforgue, where, as in ‘Beauty and the Beast’, an idyll is proposed between captor and prisoner. The myth, then, illustrated by Labisse and altered by Laforgue, is re-focused by Desnos on Andromeda and her fancies: a virgin on the edge of reality, dreaming of rape, intensely corporeal and projected on a void symbolic of the world. Hence the erotic violence of some scenes and ‘the rescue of Andromeda’, on her own: ‘Andromeda travels […] The monster has fled. It’s too much for high heaven.’ No raising-up of the heroine to be a constellation, in this version: she vanishes, giving way to ‘the handsome young man’s return’ – the day, that lights up the earth: ‘The day’s to be lived and the hour’s to be savoured’. In these nine poems, their lines rhyming regularly and mostly ordered in stanzas, Desnos evidently wanted to build a formal structure with symbolic import: time is announced by the return of verses of fifty-two lines, as many as weeks in the year; the banquet of twelve young persons - the twelve months; the nine poems – nine months of gestation. Andromeda and her three companions symbolise seasons, elements, the compass: she is summer, water, east; Hippolyte is autumn, earth, west; Sabina winter, north, fire; Rose spring, south, air. The whole poem runs from one dawn to the next, a complete day, the banquet in the middle under the noon sun: ‘It’s the noon […] Time to panic.’ Desnos has multiplied the formal and thematic links so that the poem celebrates the great global mechanism in which man exists, the complexity of the human spirit, shared by the imaginary and the real, and the pleasure of living, in full acceptance of this situation.

Finally the monster can also be the occupier, and the last carpe diem a salute to the coming day of victory over the oppressor.