Jonathan Lethem Post

   The passage I chose is on page 215 and it is on a quote by Andre Breton. The quote is "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." To research this I first went onto google scholar to try and find a biography of Breton. I did not have much luck with this. I then went straight onto google itself and found some information about Breton and even found where the quote Lethem used was from. The quote actually comes from a 19th century French poet, Comte de Lautréamont, in his work Les Chant de Maldoror. Breton, who found the quote, used it as an example of how to link two seemingly different ideas together in order to challenge a viewers preconceived idea of the two ideas. Lethem took the maxim to mean that a person can place objects, that mean one thing, in strange places and create a new type of meaning for them. This new background context displays how Lethem made this conclusion. It is not exactly the same meaning that Breton was going for, but it is similar enough and eventually plays into Lethem's claims about plagiarism. The quote that Lethem took from Breton, was actually appropriated by Breton from the poet, Comte de Lautréamont. So this is just another example of how plagiarism helped lead to some great works. Without Breton's ideas spinning off of Comte de Lautréamont, many surrealists would lose the basis of most of their works. This example pervades the point that in order for there to be new ideas, old ideas need to be taken from and improved.