Sens-Plastique

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). Copyright (c)1948 by Éditions Gallimard. Reprinted by agreement. English language translation copyright (c)1971, 1979, 2007 by Irving Weiss.