Room with a View: the Surrealist Library in Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico
Abstract
De Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros (1929) is deeply influenced by contemporary Surrealist theories. Imitating the metaphoric space of a library, the narration combines the two dimensions of interiors and exteriors. The hero himself, Hebdomeros, is a room with a window – a window which is the direct link with the external world. Inside, the erudition deriving from experience and memory; outside the contemporary life, with its solicitations and spontaneity. Life is, in De Chirico’s and his alter ego Hebdomeros’s mind, an intricate skein of enigmas, waiting to be interpreted.
In order to accomplish the difficult task of interpretation, one has to compare Hebdomeros with other coeval surrealist novels: René Crevel’s Babylone (1927); Robert Desnos’s La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927); Georges Limbour’s L’Acteur du Lancashire (1923); Michel Leiris’s Le Point cardinal (1927); Breton’s Nadja (1928). De Chirico absorbed the deep sense of Surrealism: a man has to walk along an initiating path, guided by his thoughts and memories, with no other end than self-understanding
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