L’Entrepreneur d’illuminations Le feu d’artifice chinois du douanier Salmon

This novel proliferates with naïve artists and popular figures who together construct an aesthetic discourse opposed to the unanimism of Jules Romains, transformed into a rapacious railway worker. Against the spontaneity and doctrinal character of the unianimist, Salmon proposes a lyrical machinery anchored in a French tradition far-removed from the academies. In this interwar period, L’Entrepreneur d’illuminations emerges as an aesthetic melting pot and a novelistic variant of the idiotic paintings celebrated by Rimbaud.