What dreams may come : Marguerite Yourcenar, Van Gogh, Akira Kurosawa

imagined a history of world literature in the absence of the writers' names.What would literature become, Valry asked, if its major interpretative frame -the concept of the Author, as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would deconstruct it a few decades later -were to be removed?Would we still see differences between different parts of the giant archive, or would we read it as one single, coherent, and organic text?If so, would we perhaps see patterns of affinities that we never thought could be connected, and what questions would this raise about notions of paternity, authorship, and influence?Building on Coleridge's concept of the self, Valry imagined that all the literature in the world was only the manifestation of the same creative spirit -an idea that fascinated Jorge Luis Borges for decades -and in his "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci" Valry proposed to think of art and literature not as the creation and invention of different individual minds but rather as the discovery of what already exists silently and invisibly in nature.From there, Valry's disciple and prodigal son Andr Breton, the future father of surrealism, developed the practice of collective automatic writing that as early as 1919 became the landmark of surrealist creation through Breton and Philippe Soupault's revolutionary Les Champs magntiques.