Peter De Vries and surrealism

Peter De Vries and Surrealism rereads De Vries in the light of surrealism and argues that the novelist and poet devised a new comic form, surrealist farce. De Vries's style and narrative technique are often surrealistic, and he mentions surrealism and surrealists in all but two of his twenty-six books. Yet, in fifty years of commentary on De Vries, scarcely any notice has been taken of these surrealist elements. This study moves from literary biography and historiography, which establish De Vries's points of contact with surrealism, through textual analysis, which traces De Vries's working through modernism toward surrealism in his early writing, to a consideration of De Vries's mature works that takes into account their surrealist aspects and allusions. Peter De Vries is not the Calvinist-in-spite-of-himself that he has sometimes been labeled. Writing in what Constance Rourke called "the extravagant vein in American humor," De Vries offers us what Thoreau called the "wild," Andre Breton the "marvelous." His mercurial writings accord not with any dogma, but with Kenneth Bruce's "conviction that mankind's only hope is a cult of comedy."