Malcolm de Chazal - the work has attained a near-legendary status and readers have discovered in Chazal’s brilliant aphorisms what the author himself described as a synthesizing of a “new view of life” ...everything on earth is sensuously connected to everything else and that we all belonged to the same mold, ‘plastic’ suggests art in all its forms

Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, Trans. by Irving Weiss, Green Integer, 2018.

The Mauritian writer Malcolm de Chazal’s great masterwork, Sens-Plastique, was published in France in 1948, with a preface by Jean Paulhan, a year after its publication in Mauritius. Since that time, the work has attained a near-legendary status and readers have discovered in Chazal’s brilliant aphorisms what the author himself described as a synthesizing of a “new view of life” requiring a unique title. “I finally settled on Sens-Plastique because apart from the fact that it seems to say that everything on earth is sensuously connected to everything else and that we all belonged to the same mold, ‘plastic’ suggests art in all its forms. I liked that because I consider my whole enterprise to be more of a picture than a book.” As W. H. Auden writes in the Foreword to the 1971 edition, “Sens-Plastique now been a companion of mine for nearly twenty years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal (1902-1981) is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war.” The original was first published as Sens-Plastique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1948). 

In my log-rolling between Daphnis and Chloe and Paul et Virginie, I also stepped inadvertently onto Malcolm de Chazal. Though the author’s name had swum into my ken a few years ago via Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the Spanish writer whose “greguerías” were an aphoristic poetic form much like those that the radically more sensual and imaginative de Chazal uses in his lengthy Sens-Plastique, I’d not been aware at the time that de Chazal was from Mauritius. The link from Paul et Virginie, or perhaps the magic worked by this Indian Ocean island, seems clear in de Chazal’s statement that his work is derived “from the principle that man and nature are entirely continuous.” The book, a world unto itself, attracted the attention of Andre Bréton, W. H. Auden, François Ponge, Georges Bataille and a legion of other writers. Of the more than 2,000 strikingly poetic aphorisms collected here, a selection just of those referencing light and color (i.e. "Blue catches cold in blue-green and sneezes in gray") were they to be extracted and compiled together, would be of interest to any visual artist. -

http://seraillon.blogspot.com/2019/12/best-of-2019-part-2-everything-else.html

"...Sens-Plastique alone is enough to make Chazal one of the great heretics of literature—a heretic above all because he refuses to accept the distinction between metaphoric and literal language. Likewise, he overrides any absolute distinction among the senses or between the human realm and that of animals, plants, and natural forces like wind and water: spiritual energies all."

Great Sensations: Malcolm de Chazal infused ordinary experience withthe poetically peculiar

by Barry Schwabsky