Raoul Vaneigem

J/1FD , /I ,-, UPUIS

Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
A Cavalier History of Surrealism
A CAVALIER
HISTOR Y OF
SURREALISM
by Jules-Franois Dupuis
(Raoul Vaneigem]
Trnslated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Edinburgh. London. San Francisco
First published as Histoire desinvolte du surrealisme by Paul Vermont,
Nonville, France, 1977.
English translation copyright 1999 by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
ISBN 1-873176-94-5
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record
for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record
for this title is available from the British Library.
AK Press
PO EVA 127GG
Edinburgh
Scotland EH8 9YE
AK Press
PO Box 40M2
San Francisco, CA 94140-0682
USA
AUTHOR
'
S NOTE
Commissioned in 1970 by a French publisher who planned to issue
it in a series intended for high-school pupils, this Histoire desinvo/te du
surrealisme was written in a couple of weeks under the pressure of a
contractual deadline. The fact that the original bearer of the name
chosen as a pseudonym, "Jules-Fran< ois Dupuis", was the janitor of
the building where Lautreamont died, and a witness to his death cer
tificate, should be a clear enough sign that this book is not one of
those that are particularly dear to my heart; it was merely a diverion.
When the original publisher's projected series was abandoned,
the manuscript was returned to me. It then languished for some years
at the house of a friend, who in 1976 showed it to a young publish
er of her acquaintance. As a result it was published a year later
(Nonville: Paul Vermont). It was reprinted in 1988 (Paris: Llnstant).
Perhaps it is fair to say that, despite its polemical character and
peremptory tone, it remains a useful "schoolbook"-and one which
may steer those just discovering Surrealism away from a certain number
of received ideas.
R.V
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. HISTORY AND SURREALISM
The Crisis of Culture
The Break from Dada
The Specificity of Surrealism
In the Shadow of the Communist Party
2. CHANGING LIFE
The Refusal of Survival
Fragments of a Project of Human Emancipation
Knowledge of the Human and Its Experimental
Investigation
3. TRANSFORMING THE WORLD
Revolutionary Ideology
An Informal Organization
4. PROMOTING THE IMAGE AS OBJECT
Language and Its Subversion
The Savage Eye and the Civilization of the Image
5. CONVERTING TO MYSTICISM
Reconsecration
An Anti-Christian Ecumenism
6. NOW
TRANSLATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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11
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49
54
67
74
81
95
105
121
125
131
CHAPTER 1
HISTORY AND
SURREALISM
THE CRISIS OF CULTURE
Surrealism belongs to one of the terminal phases in the crisis of cul
ture. In unitary regimes, of which monarchy based on divine right is
the best known example, the integrative power of myth concealed
the separation between culture and social life. Artists, writers, schol
ars and philosophers, just like the peasants, the bourgeois, the wield
ers of power, and even the King himself, had to live out their con
tradictions within a hierarchical structure which was from top to
bottom the work of a Cod, and unchangeable in its very essence.
The growth of the bourgeois class of merchants and manufac
turers meant the moulding of human relationships to the rationality
of exchange, the imposition of the quantifiable power of money with
mechanistic certainty as to its concrete truth. This development was
accompanied by an accelerating tendency toward secularization
which destroyed the formerly idllic relationship between masters
and slaves. The reality of class struggle broke upon history with the
same brutality as the reign of economics, which had suddenly
emerged as the focus of all preoccupations.
Once the divine State, whose form constituted an obstacle to
the development of capitalism, had been done away With, the
exploitation of the proletariat, the forward march of capital, and the
laws of the commodity, by everywhere bending beings and things to
their will, became cumbersome realities susceptible neither to the
authority of a divine providence nor to incorporation into the myth
of a transcendent order: realities which the ruling class, if it was not
to be borne away by the next revolutionary wave-already incon
testably foreshadowed by the Enrages and Babouvists-was now oblig
ed at all costs to conceal from the consciousness of the proletariat.
Out of the relics of myth, which were also the relics of Cod, the
bourgeoisie sought to construct a new transcendent unity capable of
using the force of illusion to dissolve the separations and contradic
tions that individuals deprived of religion (in the etymological sense
of a collective bond with Cod) experienced within themselves and
3
between each other. In the wake of the abortive cults of the Supreme
Being and the Goddess of Reason, nationalism in its multifarious
gUises-from Bonaparte's Caesarism to the gamut of national
social isms-came to the fore as the necessary but increasingly inad
equate ideology of the State (whether the State of private and monop
olistic capitalism or the State of capitalism in its socialized form).
Indeed, the fall of Napoleon marked the end of any prospect
of reinstituting a unitary myth founded on empire, on the prestige of
arms or on the mystique of territorial power. All the same, there is
one trait common to all the ideologies that evolved either from the
memory of the divine myth, or out of the contradictions of the bour
geoisie (liberalism), or by way of the deformation of revolutionary
theories (that is, theories thrown up by real struggles which feed
back into those struggles and hasten the advent of a classless
society by remaining necessarily opposed to all ideology). That
common trait is the same dissimulation or distortion, the same dep
recation or misapprehension, of the real movement that arises from
human praxis.
The radical consciousness cannot be reconciled with ideology,
whose only function is to mystify. What the acutest eighteenth-cen
tury consciousness perceived for the most part, in the void left
behind by the ebb tide of divine consciousness, was the suffering of
separation, isolation and alienation. Disenchantment (in the literal
sense of the end of the spell cast by a unifying God) thus went hand
in hand with an awareness of contradictions that had no chance of
being resolved or transcended.
As all sectors of human activity proceeded to break apart from
one another, culture, just as much as the economic, social or politi
cal spheres, became a separate realm, an autonomous entity. And as
the masters of the economy gradually built up their hegemony over
society as a whole, artists, writers and thinkers were left in posses
sion of the consciousness of an independent cultural domain which
the imperialism of the economy would be very slow to colonize.
They turned this domain into a citadel of the gratuitous, but they
4
acted as mercenaries of dominant ideas as often as they raised the
flag of rebellion or revolution.
Victims of the unhappy consciousness, despised by those con
cerned with finance, trade and industry, these creators tended in the
main to turn culture into a replacement for myth, into a new totali
ty, a reconsecrated space starkly opposed to the material spheres of
commercial transaction and production. Naturally, since the area
they governed was no more than a fragment, irreducible to econom
ic terms and cut off from the social and the political, they could not
aspire to any genuine resuscitation of the unitary myth: all they
could do was represent it-and in this respect indeed they were no dif
ferent from the more astute minds of the bourgeoisie, seeking to
build a new myth by resacralizing all those zones where the econo
my did not interene directly (no attempt would be made to conse
crate the Stock Exchange, for instance, but the cult of work was an
attempt to sanctify the factor).
The "spectacle" is all that remains of the myth that perished
along with unitary society: an ideological organization whereby the
actions of histor upon individuals themselves seeking, whether in
their own name or collectively, to act upon history, are reflected,
corrupted and transformed into their opposite-into an autonomous
life of the non-lived.
We shall understand nothing of Romanticism, nor of Surrealism,
if we lose sight of culture's entanglement with the organization of
the spectacle. To begin with, everthing new thrown up by these
movements bore the stamp of a rejection of the bourgeoisie, a refusal
of everything utilitarian or functional. There is no artist of the first
half of the nineteenth centur whose work was not grounded in con
tempt for bourgeois and commercial values (which of course in no
way prevented artists from behaVing exactly like bourgeois and tak
ing money wherever they could get it-Flaubert is a case in point).
Aestheticism acquired ideological force as the contrary of commer
cial value, as the thing which could make the world worth living in,
and which thus held the key to a particular style of life, a particular
5
way of i nvesti ng being with value that was di ametrically opposed to
the capi talist' s reduction of being to having. Wi thin the spectacle, i t
was cul ture's task to supply val i dati ng rol e models al ong these l i nes.
Gradual ly, as economic rational i ty created a cul tural market, trans
formi ng books, pi ctures or scul pture i nto commodi ties, the domi
nant forms of cul ture became ever more abstract, eventually cal l i ng
forth anti -cul tural reacti ons. At the same time, the greater the sway
of the economy, and the more wi dely it imposed i ts commodi ty sys
tem, the greater was the bourgeoi si e' s need to update i ts spectacular
ideol ogical free market as a way of masking an expl oi tation that was
ever more brutal-and ever more brutally contested by the prol e
tari at. After the Second World War, the col l apse of the great ide
ol ogies and the expanding consumer market, wi th its books, records
and cul turali zed gadgets, brought cul ture to centre stage. The pover
ty of the mere survival imposed on peopl e accentuated thi s devel op
ment by encouragi ng them to l ive abstractly, i n accordance wi th
models whose universal fictions, dominated by stereotypes and
i mages, were conti nually i n need of renewal . Surreali sm would pay
the price here, i n the coin of a co- optation which i ts heart, if not i ts
i ntel l ect, had always refused.
Cul ture, however, was not a monol i th. As a separate sphere of
knowl edge, it i nevitabl y attested to the spl i ts that had been brought
about; i t remai ned the l ocus of parti al forms of knowl edge that
claimed to be absolute in the name of the old myth, which, though
irremedi ably lost, was forever being sought after The rnmr;!'5'SS
of creators underwent a corresponding evoluti on, as cul ture estab
l i shed a parallel market of i ts own (around 18507), so givi ng rise to
'units' of presti ge which in the spectacul ar system repl aced profi t, or
refined i t, and i n any event i nteracted with i t.
Creators who failed to burst the bubble in whi ch they were usu
ally content to generate endless reflecti ons of themselves risked
becomi ng mere producers of cul tural commodi ti es or fncti onaries
of the i deological - aesthetic spectacle. The man of refusal, so defined
by the scorn poured upon hi m by the worl d of commerce, could very
6
easily be transformed into a bearer of false consciousness. When
reproached by the businessman for not having his feet on the
ground, the artist tended to appeal to the life of the mind. Surrealism
bore the traces of this absurd antagonism between mercantile "mate
rialism" on the one hand and Mind (whether in its reactionary or its
revolutionary form) on the other.
All the same, the more lucid or sensitive creators succeeded in
identifying their own condition more or less clearly with that of the
proletariat. The result was a tendency that might be called "radical
aesthetics"-exemplified by Neral, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Keats,
Byron, Navalis, Buchner, Forneret, Blake, etc.-for which the quest
for a new unity was expressed through the symbolic destruction of
the old world, the provocative espousal of the gratuitous, and the
rejection of commercial logic and the immediate concrete dimension
which that logic controlled and defined as the only reality. Hegel
would come to represent the historical consciousness of this attitude.
Another tendency, extending "radical aesthetics" into a "radical
ethics", arose from an awareness of the separatedness of culture, from
the consciousness of thinkers and artists, hitherto alienated in the
pure impotence of the mind, who now developed creativity as a
mode of authentic existence welded to the critique of the commod
ity system and of the survival imposed universally by that system.
Marx and Fourier were this tendency's main voices.
Lastly, there was a third current which, without grounding itself
as firmly in history as Mar or Fourier, made its basic principle the
abolition of culture as a separate sphere through the realization of art
and philosophy in everyday life. This tradition runs from Meslier to de
Sade, and thence, via Petrus Borel, Holderlin, Charles LassailIy, Ernest
Coeurderoy, Joseph Dejacque and Lautreamont, to Ravachol and Jules
Bonnot. It is in fact less a tradition than a somewhat serendipitous trac
ery of theories and practices constituting a kind of ideal map of radi
cal refusal. Though thrown up by history, and reinserting itself into
history, often in violent fashion, this was a heritage with no clear con
sciousness of its power over that history, no effective knowledge of its
7
actual potential. In the years between 1915 and 1925, however, as his
tory took its revenge upon all its ideological travesties, these isolated
voices were revealed as eminently harmonious, called forth as they all
were by the pressure for human emancipation.
Dada embodied both the consciousness of the crumbling of ide
ology and the will to destroy ideology in the name of authentic life.
But Dada in its nihilism sought to constitute an absolute-and hence
purely abstract-break. Not only did it fail to ground itself in the
historical conditions by which it had itself been produced, but, by
deconsecrating culture, by mocking its claims to be an independent
sphere, by playing games with its fragments, it effectively cut itself
off from a tradition forged by creators who in fact shared Dada's
goal, the destruction of art and philosophy, but who pursued this goal
with the intention of reinventing and realizing art and philosophy-once
they had been liquidated as ideological forms, as components of
culture-in everyone's actual life.
After Dada's failure, Surrealism for its part renewed ties with the
older tradition. It did so, however, just as though Dada had never
eXisted, just as though Dada's dynamiting of culture had never
occurred. It prolonged the yearning for transcendence, as nurtured
from de Sade to Jarry, without ever realizing that the transcendence
in question had now become possible. It curated and popularized the
great human aspirations without ever discovering that the prerequi
sites for their fulfilment were already present. In so doing, Surrealism
ended up reinvigorating the spectacle, whose fnrt;o! 'a to :0"
ceal from the last class in history, the proletariat, bearer of total free
dom, the history that was yet to be made. To Surrealism's credit,
assuredly, is the creation of a school-for-all which, if it did not make
revolution, at least popularized revolutionary thinkers. The Surrealists
were the first to make it impossible, in France, to conflate Marx and
Bolshevism, the first to use Lautreamont as gunpowder, the first to
plant the black flag of de Sade in the heart of Christian humanism.
These are legitimate claims to glory: to this extent, at any rate,
Surrealism's failure was an honourable one.
8
DADA AND CULTURE IN QUESTION
Dada was born at a turning-point in the history of industrial
societies. By reducing human beings to citizens who kill and are
killed in the name of a State that oppresses them, the model ideolo
gies of imperialism and nationalism sered to underline the gulf that
separated real, universal man from the spectacular image of a human
ity perceived as an abstraction; the two were irreparably opposed,
for example, from the standpoint of France, or from the standpoint
of Germany. Yet at the very moment when spectacular organization
reached what to minds enamoured of true freedom appeared to be its
most Ubuesque representational form, that organization was suc
cessfully attracting and enlisting almost all the intellectuals and
artists to be found in the realm of culture. This tendency arose,
moreover, in tandem with the move of the proletariat's official lead
ership into the militarist camp.
Dada denounced the mystificator power of culture in its entiret as
early as 1915-1918. On the other hand, once Dada had proved itself
incapable of realizing art and philosophy (a project which a successful
Spartacist revolution would no doubt have made easier), Surrealism
was content merely to condemn the spinelessness of the intelligentsia,
to point the finger at the chauvinist idiocy of anyone, from Maurice
Barres to Xavier Montehus, who was an intellectual and proud of it.
As culture and its partisans were busily demonstrating how
actively they supported the organization of the spectacle and the
mystification of social realit Surrealism ignored the negativity
embodied in Dada; being nevertheless hard put to it to institute any
positive project, it succeeded only in setting in motion the old ide
ological mechanism whereby today's partial revolt is turned into
tomorrow's official culture. The eventual co-optation of late
Dadaism, the transformation of its radicalism into ideological form,
would have to await the advent of Pop Art. In the matter of
co-optation, Surrealism, its protestations to the contrary notwith
standing, was quite sufficient unto itself.
9
The ignorance that Surrealism fostered with respect to the disso
lution of art and philosophy is every bit as appalling as the ignorance
Dada fostered with respect to the opposite aspect of the same ten
dency, namely the trnscendence of art and philosophy.
The things that Dada unified so vigorously included
Lautreamont's dismantling of poetic language, the condemnation of
philosophy in opposing yet identical ways by Hegel and Marx, the
bringing of painting to its melting point by Impressionism, or theatre
embracing its own parodic self-destruction in Ubu. What plainer
illustrations could there be here than Malevich with his white square
on a white ground, or the urinal, entitled Fountain, which Marcel
Duchamp sent to the New York Independents Exhibition in 1917, or
the first Dadaist collage-poems made from words clipped from
newspapers and then randomly assembledt Arthur Cravan conflated
artistic activity and shitting. Even Valery grasped what Joyce was
demonstrating with Finnegans Wake: the fact that novels could no
longer exist. Erik Sa tie supplied the final ironic coda to the joke that
was music. Yet even as Dada was denouncing cultural pollution and
spectacular rot on every Side, Surrealism was already on the scene
with its big plans for clean-up and regeneration.
When artistic production resumed, it did so against and without
Dada, but against and witb Surrealism. Surrealist reformism would
deviate from reformism's well-trodden paths and follow its own new
roads: Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Guevarism, anarchism. Just as the
economy in crisis, which did not disappear but was in<tfrr rnm
formed into a crisis economy, so likewise the crisis of culture out
lived itself in the shape of a culture of crisis. Hence Surrealism
became the spectacularization of everything in the cultural past that
refused separations, sought transcendence, or strggled against
ideologies and the organization of the spectacle.
10
THE BREAK FROM DADA
When exactly did Surrealism emancipate itself from Dada? The
question is badly framed, because it suggests that the Surrealists
were reconstructed Dadaists, which is far from certain. Indeed, if we
look closely at the beginnings of the earliest proponents of
Surrealism, we find that their works are of a personal kind, hostile,
certainly, to the dominant tradition, but bearing scant trace of
Dada's corrosive spirit.
The good relations maintained by the early Surrealists with
Pierre Reverdy, editor of the literar review Nord-Sud, or the poems of
Breton, Benjamin Peret, Paul
E
luard or Philippe Soupault, are quite
adequate testimony to the adherence of these new voices to a certain
conception of literature. What the first Surrealists knew of Dada was
above all its edulcorated Parisian version, the antics of Tzara, and a
few clashes between individuals. With Grosz, Huelsenbeck,
Schwitters, Haussmann, lung or even Picabia they were still largely
unacquainted.
In 1917 the word "surrealist" appeared in the subtitle to
Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Trisias [The Teats of Tresias). [n
1920 Paul Dermee used the term in the review [Esprit Nouveau, and
in 1924 Yvan Goll chose it as the title of a periodical that lasted for
only one issue.
As early as 1919, however, the concept had acquired less vague
connotations. In that year Aragon produced his first automatic texts.
In "Entree des mediums" [Enter the Mediums], Breton sought to cir
cumscribe the notion-a task that he would pursue further in the
first Maniesto of Surrealism (1924). From the outset "surrealism" signi
fied a new quest; the word immediately became the label of a new
cultural product, clearly reflecting the will to distinguish that product
unequivocally from all others. The contradiction between a volun
taristic rigour and the inclination to compromise that was objective
ly encouraged by Surrealism's fresh embrace of culture created a per
manent point of stress and led to endless splits in the movement.
1 1
The revi ew Litteature, founded in 1919, was so named by anti
phrasis, but from the begi nni ng it retai ned not a few genuinely l i ter
ary aspects; even i n appearance i t resembl ed a traditional l i terary
magazi ne in many respects. Thi s was the starti ng poi nt for the
Surreal i st proj ect of foundi ng a new way of thi nki ng, feel i ng and l iv
i ng, of creating a new worl d; and here l ay the seeds of the particul ar
way i n which thi s proj ect would be worked out, as of the particular
way in whi ch it would fai l. I n the regressive conjuncture which fol
lowed the tri ple defeat of Spartacus, of Dada and of the revolution
of the Sovi ets i n Russi a (co-opted by the Bolsheviks), the Surreali sts
made a promi se which they kept: to be the capricious consci ousness
of a time without consci ousness, a wi l l - o' the-wi sp i n the night of
Nati onal Soci al i sm and Nati onal Bolshevism.
The first few i ssues of Litterature i ncluded contributions from
Val ery, Gide, Leon-Paul Fargue, Blaise Cendrars, Jules Romai ns, Max
Jacoh, Georges Auric and Darius Mi l haud. The young Breton admired
Val er, Pierre Reverdy and Sai nt-Pol -Roux, and to the last of these he
remai ned loyal his whole l i fe long; yet he also had a fascination for
Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vache, prime exempl ars of Dada ni hi l ism
authentically l ived out. In a sense Breton' s work and even Surral ism
itself were the product of these two divergent ori entations.
The impl icati ons of thi s doubl e allegiance are clear from
Breton' s remarks in the Second Maniesto of Surrealism (1930):
In spi te of the various efforts peculi ar to each of those who
!_!sed tc c1.im kinship V-ith SUHtdlism, or who stIli do, one
must ultimately admit that, more than anythi ng el se,
Surrealism attempted to provoke, from the i ntel l ectual and
moral poi nt of vi ew, a crisis of consciousness of the most gener
al and serious ki nd, and that the extent to which thi s was or
was not accompl i shed al one can determi ne i ts hi storical
success or fai lure.
The restri ction here to "the i ntel l ectual and moral poi nt of
view" clearly i ndi cates an attachment to cul ture as an i ndependent
sphere, whi l e "a cri si s of consciousness of the most general and seri -
12
ous ki nd" evokes what Surreal i sm woul d i nheri t, al bei t superfi ci al ly,
of the Dada spi ri t .
I n fact Dada preci pitated the purgi ng of Litterture: i t was under
Dada's i nfluence that quarrel s between litterateurs metamorphosed
i nto a general hosti l ity towards the homme de lettres per se-that ani
mosity towards a Max}acob, an Andre Gi de or a}ean Cocteau came
to be j usti fi ed i n terms of contempt for wri ti ng as a trade or craft.
I n 1 920 Littirature's thi rteenth i ssue opened the doors wider than
ever before to the Dadai st i nfluence, publ i shi ng twenty- three of the
movement's mani festoes. Si mul taneousl y, however, the break
between Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara was i n the maki ng.
Breton's i ntel l i gence and discreti on undoubtedly endowed
Surreali sm with a good part of its genius. For Dada, unfortunately, j ust
the opposi te occurred: al ready sorely l acki ng for revolutionar theo
rists, i t l ost much of i ts rich potential when i t came under the thumb
of Tzara, the poverty of whose i deas and the banal ity of whose i mag
i nation were onl y rivall ed by hi s lust for recognition, for celebri ty.
Tzara possessed nothi ng of the critical sense and clear- mi nded
combativeness needed to i nci te artists to despair of art, grasp hol d of
everyday l i fe and transform themselves i nto the subj ect of a col l ec
tive work of revoluti on. And the sai d artists, i ndecisive and at bot
tom more susceptible to the temptation of an artistic career than
they cared to acknowledge, quickly discovered that repeati ng the
fami l i ar j apes of Dada's anti - art "show", wi th Tzara as choreograph
er and star, offered a conveni ent way of surreptitiously resuming cul
tural activity wi thout formally renounci ng the Dadaist contempt for
art: they merely had to pretend to bel i eve that that contempt appl i ed
sol el y to the domi nant forms of l i terature, thought or art. I n a sense,
Surreal i sm itsel f resided in these shortcomi ngs of Dada.
Littiature's surey based on the questi on "Why do you wri te?"
was not so radical as one mi ght justifiably have supposed at first
glance. True, it cl early exposed the general vulgarity of i ntent and
l ack of i magi nati on of t he makers of novel s, the asi ni ni ty of versi fi ers
and academi c thi nkers, yet at the same ti me it l ai d the groundwork
13
for the "discovery" of profounder justifications for a new art of writ
ing, feel i ng, or painting and authorized a new form of expression
with cl aims to being authentic and total .
Such a form of expression already existed experimentally. As Breton
recal ls in Entretiem [ Conversations ( 1 952)], "I n 1 9 1 9, I began paying
attention to those more or less complete sentences which, when one
was entirely alone, as sleep came on, would become perceptible to the
mind without it being possible to find any pre-existing reason for them. "
The practical resul ts appeared in a joint work by Breton and
Soupault, The Magnetic Fields ( 1 920), supposedly written under the
direct dictates of the unconscious. The book foreshadowed the l ater
experimental "sleeping" by means of which Robert Desnos, Benj amin
Peret and Rene Creve I sought to express themselves without any
mediation by the conscious mind.
By the time Breton took over as editor of a new series of
LittCtture i n March 1 922, and evenhandedly rejected both Dadaism
and the l i terary brigade (Gide, Val ery and Co. ), he al ready had a
clear agenda, in the form of a positive project.
The coming break with Dada was hastened in 1 92 1 by a public
event organized by Aragon and Breton: the "indictment and trial of
Mauri ce Barres". Barres was a literary anarchist of the "cult of the Ego"
variety who sang the praises of nationalism in dulcet tones. He was, in
short, the perfect symbol of a fin-de-siecl e intel l igentsia that now
practised the poetry of the bugle-cal l , thus by their negative example
The trial was hel d on 1 3 May. The accused was represented by
a carnival manikin; Breton presided, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
took the role of public prosecutor, and Soupault and Aragon, who
had every a priori reason to like Barres, were his defenders.
No effort was spared in the attempt to ensure that the event
would provoke l egal action and spark a confrontation which woul d
ratify Dada's seditiousness in the eyes of revolutionary groups. Short
of such an outcome, indeed, there was no hope of saving Dada.
Benj amin Peret, whose entire life was informed by an unwaver
ing and intransigent radicalism, testified to great effect at the Barres
1 4
tri al, speaki ng i n German and pl ayi ng "The Unknown Sol dier". Al l
the wi tnesses, moreover, waxed el oquent upon the excrementi al
character of veterans, of Barres and of everythi ng havi ng to do wi th
the nati on and its trai ts. Victor Crastre i s right, however, when he
i nsists i n hi s book Le Drame du surrialisme [The Tragedy of Surreal i sm]
that the Barres trial was a fai l ure:
The absence of any reacti on from the right, coupled with
the si l ence of the revolutionary parties, meant that the tri al
had fai l ed. Thi s fai lure was echoed by a regressi on to aes
theti ci sm, in the shape of the Salon Dada that opened at the
Galerie Montai gne on the 6th of June 1922, and i ts mediocre
triumph. I n thi s connection Breton wrote: "It seems to me
that the sponsorshi p of a series of utterly futile 'Dada' actions
i s on the poi nt of very seriously compromi si ng an undertak
ing to which I remai n attached." Thi s attachment would
obl i ge Breton to try and save Dada from the steri l i ty that
was now threateni ng i t. He deci ded to convene a congress
in order to cl ear matters up: the "Paris Congress for the
Ori entati on and Defence of the Modern Spiri t". Thi s was an
ambi ti ous project, ai mi ng as it did to get poetry and art back
onto fi rmer ground than the shi fti ng sands in which they
had been caught. And it did not succeed. Wri ters and artists
who had made smal l reputations for themselves in and
through Dada saw l i ttle reason to throw everythi ng away
for the sake of a venture which seemed to them to have no
future, for they had nothi ng but mi strust for the "spirit" i n
whose name the Congress was bei ng called.
After this setback Breton and hi s fri ends scal ed down their
ambi ti ons, being i ncl ined to explore the depths while cast
i ng their net less wi dely. They refused all all iances. And, now
much reduced in numbers, the group withdrew i nto i tsel f.
I t i s notable that Pi cabia, the most consi stent ni hi l i st of the
Dadai st group, l ent his support to the projected Congress. By con
trast Tzara opposed the i dea, cl ai mi ng that such a proj ect was essen
tially constructive, whereas Dada was by defi ni ti on pure negati on!
15
THE SPECIFICITY OF SURREALISM
The break with Dada became utterly final in 1923, when, at a per
formance of T zara's Coeur a gat [The Gas Heart], the author called
the police and sought to have Eluard, Breton and Peret thrown out
as troublemakers.
Around a hard core made up initially of Breton, Aragon and
Soupault, there now revolved an often disparate group of personali
ties, among them Eluard, Peret, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Max
Morise, Georges Limbour, Joseph Delteil, Jacques Baron, Rene
Crevel, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. 1924 and 1925
were to be the pivotal years of Surrealism: until then, the movement
was detaching itself from a Dadaist spirit which it had always
espoused only with reticence; afterards, the Surrealists began to
seek agreement with communists of one kind or another, from the
somewhat marginal Leninists of Clareto the hard-line Stalinists of the
French Communist Party.
This fruitful period saw the conception and publication of
Breton's Maniesto of Surrealism, the appearance of a review, La Revolution
Surrealiste, and the creation of a "Bureau for Surrealist Research". The
Surrealists' interest in dreams and automatic writing, the attention
they paid to Freud, their invention of games, their cultivation of the
derive and of chance encounters, and their experiments with spiritual
ism-ali these together constituted a unified set of preoccupations
the first issue of La Reolution Surreal iste proclaimed the need for "a new
declaration of the rights of man".
The group was soon joined by Andre Masson, Mathias Lubeck,
Georges Malkine, Pierre Naville, Raymond Queneau, Antonin
Artaud, Jacques Prevert, Marcel Duhamel and Pierre Brasseur, while
in Yugoslavia a Surrealist movement emerged whose prime mover
was Marco Ristitch.
At this time, too, Surrealism created a piquant genealogy for
itself which included figures whose work cried out for dialectical
16
supersessi on on the pl ane of real l i fe ( de Sade, Lautreamont, Fourier,
Marx, etc. ) , great dreamers ( Nerval , Noval i s, Achi m von Arni m) ,
alchemists ( Paracelsus, Basi l Val enti ne) , a motley of i mpassi oned,
eccentric and fantastic forebears, poets of bl ack humour, and so
on-i n short, a whol e pantheon that was conti nual l y bei ng added to
( and occasi onal l y reduced, as i n the case of Poe, who was i nducted
at first, only to be expel l ed subsequently on account of hi s contribu
ti on to the science of pol i ce work) . Most i mportant of al l , the group
appropri ated the Dadaist techni que of scandal -maki ng and turned i t
effectively agai nst the representatives of official cul ture. Two scan
dals i n particular may be sai d to have thoroughly shaken up the con
venti onal wi sdom of the time. These were the publ i cati on of the
pamphlet A Corse, hai l i ng the buri al of Anatole France, and the
events surroundi ng the Sai nt- Pol - Roux banquet. Anatole France, as
Breton explai ns i n Entretiens,
was the prototype of everythi ng we hel d in contempt. I n
our eyes, i f ever there was a n undeserved reputati on, i t
was hi s. The supposed transparency o f hi s style l eft us
col d, and hi s much vaunted scepti ci sm we found repug
nant. It was he who had said that IIRi mbaud's sonnet
'Voyel l es' [ Vowel s] defi es common sense", even i f i ts vers
es were lIamusi ng" . On the human level , we found hi s att i
tude as s i ni ster and despi cabl e as could be: he had done
whatever one had to do to garner the support of Right
and Left al i ke. He was so puffed up wi th his honours and
hi s own sel f- i mportance that we fel t no compuncti on
whatsoever.
Thi s wi ndbag has si nce been so thoroughly deflated that
i t i s hard today to i magi ne the rage that those four pages,
contai ni ng texts by Aragon, Delteil, Drieu l a Rochel l e and
me, were capable of unleashing. Accordi ng to Cami l l e
Maucl ai r, Aragon and I were nothing but IIravi ng maniacs",
and he added that 'These are the manners not of upstarts
and ruffi ans but of j ackals . . . ". Others went further, cal l i ng
for l egal sancti ons agai nst us.
17
In July 1925, a banquet i n honour of Sai nt- Pol - Roux, who was
an i dol to Breton and several other Surreal i sts, offered the perfect
opportuni ty to get rid of the l i terary trash once and for al l . The
French ambassador, Paul Cl au del , had decl ared to an I tal i an news
paper that Surreal i sm, just l i ke Dadai sm, had "one meani ng onl y-a
pederastic one". The Surreal i sts' ri poste came i n the form of an
"Open Letter" pri nted on sang-de-boeuJ paper and sl i pped under each
pl ate at the Cl oserie des Li l as, where the banquet took pl ace.
Breton' s amused account of what ensued i s well known:
By the ti me a rather sad "hake i n whi te sauce" was bei ng
served, a number of us were standi ng on the tables. Thi ngs
fel l completely apart when three of the guests went off and
came back soon afterwards wi th the pol i ce i n tow. But, as
humour woul d have i t, it was Mme Rachi l de, by this time at
a hi gh pi tch of agi tati on, who in the general chaos ended up
getting arrested.
On this occasion, too, Mi chel Lei ri s was nearly lynched for
shouti ng sedi tious slogans from the restaurant wi ndow at a passi ng
veterans' parade: "Long l ive Germany! Long l ive Chi na! Long l ive
Abd-e1- Krim!"
Anarcho-Dadaism was sti l l a livel y strand in the Surrealism of
thi s period. For i nstance, the cover of the first number of La Revolution
Surrfaliste showed a photograph of the anarchi st Germai ne Berton
u 0 .. gsl i\ib"x; of dlt gIUp. Bur [here was more provocation
here than commitment, for neither Bonnot nor Ravachol were mem
bers of the Surreal i st pantheon; what is worse, Meci sl as Charrier
would be gui l l oti ned by Poi ncare wi thout so much as a peep out of
Breton and hi s fri ends. Al l the same, i t was the ferment of revol t that
they kept on the boi l , and the preci Si on wi th which they conti nued
to denounce the permanent outrageousness of the prevai l i ng organi
zati on of soci ety ( a preci si on sti l l very much i n evidence i n the i nter
venti on i n favour of Vi ol ette Nozieres) that woul d prevent the best
Surreal i sts from reduci ng thei r dream of a global revolution, no matter
18
how confused it was, to the mediocre level of Bolshevism. It was
these, together with the cult of the passions, and especially of love,
that saved the movement from any outright compromise with
infamy. (Surrealism's passing alliance with Trotsky, the butcher of
Kronstadt in 192 1, may be put down to ignorance.)
19
IN THE SHAOW OF THE COMMUNIST PART
Beginning in 1924 and 1925, the feeling gradually came to prevail in
the movement that its aesthetic critique needed political reinforce
ment. Meetings were held between the Surrealists and members of
Clartc, among them Victor Crastre, Marcel Fourrier and Jean Bernier.
This was a group of avant-garde intellectuals on the left of the
Communist Party who opposed the conformism of Henri Barbusse,
then literary editor of the Party newspaper L'manite
There were many Surrealists who felt that ensuring the sup
port, or at any rate the benevolence of the Party was a more deci
sive way of breaking with the l itteateurs than merely playing the
barbarians hammering at the gates of culture, a ploy which in any
case ran the risk that one day those gates would give way, allowing
the barbarians to pitch their tents within the citadel, and thus be
co-opted. For those who felt this way, and for a few others too, the
image of the Bolshevik with a knife between his teeth, much
exploited by the Right, continued to be very seductive. What they
did not know was that the freshest blood on that knife, fresher
than that of the Whites, was that of the Makhnovists and the left
opposition, and that before long it would be put to work settling
all of Stalin's vendettas.
Only Artaud, ever sensitive to the merest hint of oppression, now
distanced himself in clear awareness of what was at stake. As his
friend: ic'ed cosc.- and iLscf tv Clulii, ile iood more and more
aloof, and eventually withdrew altogether. Soupault, Vitrac, Baron
and a few others opted straightforwardly for literary careers at this
point; they thus made their exits by the opposite door to Artaud, duly
receiving Breton's farewell in the Second Maniesto as they departed.
In 1926 it was resolved that a new periodical entitled La Guerre
Civile would be launched in conjunction with Clarte That this plan
came to naught bespeaks the fact that it was now too late for two
autonomous spheres, that of a specialized politics and that of a spe
cialized reanimated art, to fuse into one.
20
Surrealist activity had nonetheless never before reached such
heights. The spirit of the movement was spreading internationally. In
Belgium, Rene Magritte, Paul Nouge and Louis Scutenaire founded a
Surrealist group whose inventiveness, style and violence would carry it
a very long way before-much later on-it collapsed into a sopho
moric humour punctuated by Stalinist professions of faith.
The game of "Exquisite Corpse", in which a poem or picture is cre
ated collectively by players who are unaware, except for the first ele
ment, of what the others write or draw, was a successful revival, with
increased emphasis on language, of the spirit of Dadaist collage, of the
notion of a poetry made by all, of the idea of objective chance. This
pastime supplied Surrealism with one of its best and most interesting
ways of satisfying its propensity for playfulness.
In 1927 Andre Breton joined the Communist Party. Assigned to
the "gasworkers' cell", he set out with a disarming willingness to do his
bit, but he was exasperated by the Communists' bureaucratic tenden
cies (which for the time being were not so much sinister as ridicu
lous), and before long he left the Party militants to their illusions.
On the Artaud side of things, meanwhile, though without any
direct input from Artaud, a tendency emerged in Surrealism which
would become preponderant after the Second World War. The voice of
this tendency was Rene Daumal and Roger-Gilbert Lecomte's review Le
Grand leu, whose first issue appeared in 1928. The possibility of a con
vergence between this group and Breton's was explored, but proved
impossible. Daumal and Lecomte had little taste for the kind of disci
pline Breton imposed. Furthermore, they had a certain contempt for
politics, this at a time when the mainstream Surrealists were hastily
becoming politicized, and whenever they were reproached on these
grounds, which was often, they would respond by warning of the dan
ger of Surrealism's co-optation. The two groups had a common interest
in union, but neither side felt passionately enough about its necessity
for it to come about, and as soon as a pretext presented itself, they went
their separate ways. That pretext was an apologia for the Prefect of
Police, Chiappe, written for a newspaper by Roger Vailland, a member
21
of the Grand Jeu group. Daumal and Lecomte rebuked Vailland for
this in the weakest of termsi Breton was not accustomed to tolerating
the ahsence of a viol ent reacti on to a fai l ing of this kind.
( Subsequently Daumal moved cl oser and cl oser to a Gurdjieffian
position, so much so that in 1 93 3 he broke with Lecomte. )
The Second Maniesto, publ i shed i n 1 930, became in effect a gen
eral settling of accounts. Among those expel led were Jacques Baron,
Georges Limbour, Andre Masson, Roger Vitrac, Desnos, Prevert and
Raymond Queneau. I t was Artaud above al l , however, who came
under attack. Admittedly, he had brought anathema upon himsel f by
cal ling the police on his friends when they tried to disrupt a perfor
mance at the Al fred Jarry Theatrei yet T zara, after all, had pointed
Breton and
E
l uard out to the police in 1 92 3, and Breton was now
reconciled with him.
During this period the Surrealist group was reinforced by the
arrival of Luis Bunuel , Salvador Dal f and Rene Char. I n Prague the
movement was riding hi gh thanks to Vitezl av Nezval, Jindrich
Styrsky, Karel Teige and Toyen. I n 1 929 Jacques Rigaut, like
Cravan and Vache a great l i vi ng exempl ar of Dadaist nihilism,
kil led himsel f.
On the scandal front, the psychiatrists got up in arms over the
cal l s to murder contained in Breton's Ni dj 1 , which were indeed
directed at them personally. A new periodical, Le Surrealisme au Service
de la Revolution [ Surrealism at the Service of the Revol ution], was
l aunched with an appropri ate aggressivenpss tho!!Gh th. tit!. Sg
gested a marked retreat as compared with that of the earlier La
Revolution Surrealiste. I f Surrealism was to be in the train of a revolu
ti on whose only possibl e motor was the Communi st Party, the fate
of poetry-not to mention that of the revolutionaries-was surely
sealed. Happily, the content of the new periodical tended to belie
its title. Crevel, summari zi ng the state of play in the third issue, was
able to write:
Surrealism: not a school but a movementi does not therefore
speak ex cathedra but goes to see, goes in search of knowl-
22
edge, of knowledge applied to the Revolution (via a poetic
route). Lautreamont had said: poetry must be made by all,
not by one.
E
luard's comment On this: poetry will purify all
men. All ivory towers will be demolished.
And Crevel adds: "Starting out from Hegel, like Marx and
Engels but following a different path, Surrealism ends up at dialecti
cal materialism. " Truth to tell, Hegel was discovered very belatedly
by the Surrealists, and, even more important, they made barely any
practical use of him-not even as a tool for discriminating between
the dialectic and the thinking of a Maurice Thorez. Their taste for
life made a much greater contribution, and the best of Surrealist
thought unquestionably arose from their analyses of lived moments,
which revealed the dialectic far better than quotations from Hegel
and created poetry far more effectively than any poem.
In response to Breton's diatribes in the Second Maniesto, the
excludees issued a violent pamphlet which emulated the tone and
borrowed the title of the compendium of insults earlier directed at
Anatole France: Un Cadavre [A Corpse]. The "Bar Maldoror"-a pre
mature attempt at commercial co-optation-was sacked by Breton
and his friends. Bufuel's film rAge d'or roused the ire of war veterans
and of the Right. One particularly fine expression of anger, an open
letter to the top student applicant of the year admitted to the Saint
Cyr Military Academy, exposed Georges Sadoul, one of the signa
tories, to a three-year prison term. And a critic at La Liberti called for
Peret to be shot for having written the poem "Vie de l' assassin Foch"
[Life of the Murderer Foch], which dealt with its subject in tones of
unparalleled execration.
At this time too, Maurice Heine published his admirable preface
to de Sade's Justine. Heine exerted a much greater influence on the
Surrealist movement than his natural discretion, and that of his
friends, might lead one to suppose.
In 1931 Surrealism's dalliance with the Communist Party took a
militant turn. The group signed up with the Association of
Revolutionary Writers and Artists, which was controlled by the
23
Party. Was it perhaps by way of a counterweight that at this same
time research i nto "magical" works i ntensi fi ed, spurred on by the rev
elati on of Alberto Giacometti's "obj ects wi th symbol i c functions"? At
al l events, the l i nks between al chemy and creative paths to new and
sacrosanct relati onshi ps was very much i n the forefront of Surreal i st
meditations even as the "Aragon affai r" was bubbl i ng up.
This affai r began when Breton and hi s fri ends, though approv
i ng of neither its spi ri t nor its form, nevertheless took up the defence
of Aragon's long poem "Front rouge" [Red Front], wri tten duri ng a
vi si t to the USSR. The embarrassment Breton experienced at thus
having to stand behi nd Aragon, whose text al ready contai ned the
seeds of the paeans to the fatherl and that were to fol l ow, i s quite tan
gible i n his Misere de la poesie [The Poverty of Poetry].
I n the meantime, Aragon was sendi ng very optimistic reports
back from Moscow concerni ng the prospect of the Surreali sts reach
i ng agreement wi th the Communi sts. Sadoul, Aragon's travel l i ng
companion i n RUSSia, returned to Paris ahead of Aragon himsel f, who
stopped off i n Brssels for a few days. Here i s Breton's account in
Entretiens of the conversation he had wi th Sadoul on the latter's return:
Yes, everythi ng had gone well; yes, the objectives we had
deci ded to set ourselves had been met, but.. . . There was
indeed a very large "but". An hour or two before their depar
ture, they had been asked to sign a decl arati on that impl i ed
the abandonment, not to say the expl i ci t rej ecti on, of prac
tl(l1y ever PC5!t!Or ;C had held lp lU"liii then. They were
expected to renounce the Second Maniesto "i nasmuch"-I
quote word for word-"as it is contrary to dialectical materi
al i sm". They were supposed to denounce Freudi ani sm as "an
idealist i deol og" and Trotskyi sm as "a soci al - democratic
and counter- revolutionary ideol ogy" . Fi nal l y, they would
undertake to submi t their l i terary activi ty "to the disci pl i ne
and control of the Communi st Party". "And so?", I asked
Sadoul brusquely. And, getti ng no repl y, "I take it you
refused?" "No," he repl i ed, "Aragon fel t that we-that is,
you as well as us-would have to go al ong if we wanted to
24
work in the Party's cultural organizations. " That was the
first time in my life that I saw a chasm opening up before my
very eyes, a chasm that has since widened dizzyingly, in
proportion to the relentless headway made by the outra
geous idea that truth should bow down before efficacity,
that neither conscience nor individual personality are worth
heeding-in short, that the end justifies the means.
In 1932 Aragon rallied to the Communist Party. The same year
saw the publication of Breton's Communicating Vessels and one of Rene
Crevel's finest texts, Le Clavecin de Diderot [Diderot's Harpsichord].
THE BREAK WITH THE SO-CALLED COMMUNIST PARTY
Breton was saddened by Aragon's lack of spine; his friends, outraged,
reacted according to the tradition. Several of them produced texts
lambasting the author of "Red Front".
E
luard, notably, did not hesi
tate to write:
What was inconsistency has become calculation; what was
subtlety has become intrigue. Aragon has become other,
and his memory henceforward cannot attach itself to me. To
defend myself I have a sentence which between him and me
can no longer have the exchange value I so long accorded
it, a sentence which has never lost its meaning and effec
tively passes judgement on Aragon as on so many others: All
the water in the sea could not wash away a single intellectual bloodstain
(Lautreamont).
This turned out, however, to be a case of the pot calling the ket
tle black. A few years later,
E
luard, hand in hand with Aragon, would
be a fashionable figure in the Stalinist star system, ever ready to
claim that the words party, fatherland and freedom rhymed to per
fection. And in 1950, when Breton implored him to intervene on
25
behal f of an ol d mutual friend of theirs, Zavis Kal andra, condemned
to death in Prague,
[
Iuard ( though he forgot to quote his favorite
sentence) had thi s to say: "1 am too busy with i nnocents procl aiming
their i nnocence to bother with peopl e who are gUil ty procl ai ming
their gui l t. " Kalandra was executed.
In 193 3 the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists
announced its first expulsion: Andre Breton. As Breton recal l ed l ater
i n Entretiens:
The reason for this expul si on was that Number 5 of Le
Surrealisme au Serice de la Revolution contai ned a l etter addressed
to me by Ferdi nand Al quie, a l etter written in a libertarian
spi rit, indeed a most movi ng letter, in which the writer took
vi olent exception to the civic and moral tone i nforming the
Russian film Te Road to Lie. Regardl ess of the opi nions
Alquie expressed, not all of which I agreed with, the intensi
ty of life and revolt distil led into his letter seemed to cr out
for its publication. There was therefore no chance at all of
my uttering the retraction that was bei ng demanded of me.
The fol l owi ng year a Surrealist group appeared in Egypt, with
Georges Henei n as its prime mover. In Brussel s, Documents 34 pub
l ished a special issue on "Surreal ist I nterventi on" which included a
number of contributions remarkable for thei r viol ence and uncom
promiSing attitude. 1934 was above al l the year of the Surrealists'
hO!!agc to \-ro!ette uZi(;c5. iCI Li.i yuung parricide, who had
been condemned to death, the Surreal ists saluted a symbol of active
resistance to oppression by the family. I t i s hard, though, to expl ai n
the fail ure of the group to raise a si mi l ar cry i n support of the Papi n
si sters, servants who around the same ti me i l l ustrated Swift's
Directions to Serants after thei r own fashion by murderi ng thei r mis
tress and her daughter. It is true that by thi s ti me pol i tical events
were fast gathering momentum.
Rel ations between the Surreal i sts and the Communist Party
leadershi p grew ever more hostile. An i nci dent i n 1 93 5 was to bring
26
these relations to an end once and for all. About ten o'clock one
night, shortly before the opening of the Congress of Writers for the
Defence of Culture, a Stalinist-rn event, Breton ran into Ilya
Ehrenburg on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Once again we may
rely on Breton's account in Entretiens :
There was a passage I was not ready to forget i n a book of
Ehrenburg's, Vus par un ecrivain de / 'R. S. S. [Observations of
a Soviet Writer], which had appeared a few months earlier.
Among his remarks therein were the following: "The
Surrealists are all for Hegel, all for Mar, all for the
Revolution. What they are absolutely against, however, is
work. Not that they do not have their occupations. They
study pederasty and dreams, for example.. . . They keep
themselves busy consuming their inheritances and
dowries . . . . " And so on. So, after identifying myself, I
slapped him several times, while he tried pathetically to
palaver with me without so much as raising his hand to pro
tect his face. I fail to see what other revenge I could have
taken on this confirmed slanderer . . . .
On the eve of the Congress, after exhausting discussions with the
organizers over their refusal to let Breton address the gathering, Rene
Crevel took his own life. This gesture, just like Artaud's solipsism, con
stitutes an immediate, spontaneous, negative response to the problem
that Surrealism had posed-a false problem, in fact, because its basic
assumptions were false. For how was it conceivable, on the basis of
independent sectors already objectively stripped of all human values
by the depredations of the spectacular-commodity system, on the
basis of activities which, though in fact partial, were promoted as
totalities (as art, politics, thought, the unconscious, survival, etc.) and
presented as positive-how was it conceivable that on such bases any
unity of the individual, either within himself or with respect to others,
might be achieved? How could Surrealism, while ignoring the Dadaist
quest for total negativity, expect to provide any historical foundation
for the positivity and global transcendence to which it aspired?
27
The Surreal i sts denounced the Moscow tri al s. They moved
cl oser to Georges Batai l l e, whose Contre- Attaque movement
defi ned i tsel f as " a combat group of revol uti onary i ntel lectual s
opposed to fascism" . I n Tokyo a Surreal i st revi ew was started by
Yamanaka. I n London Rol and Penrose mounted a major exhi bi ti on.
Benj ami n Peret publ ished Je ne mange pas de ce pain-li [ I ' d Rather
StarveJ-poetry genui nely searchi ng for adequate practi cal expres
si on wi th its cal l for the l i qui dati on of army, pol i ce, priests, bosses,
money, work and al l other forces of brutal i zati on. Peret, who had
the courage of hi s convicti ons, enl isted wi th the anarchi sts i n the
Spani sh Revolution. He was the onl y Surreal i st to partici pate direct
ly i n that struggl e; all the others supported the cause enthusiastical ly,
but from afar.
Pi ctori al concerns, which seemed to come back to the fore after
the break with the Communi st Party, did not override the Surreal i sts'
conti nui ng embrace of a l esser-evi l approach to pol i ti cs, and before
l ong they ral l ied to Trotsky and the Fourth I nternati onal : on a vi si t
to Mexi co i n 193 8, Breton publ i shed the mani festo "For an
I ndependent Revolutionary Art" i n col l aborati on wi th Di ego Rivera
and the author of The Crimes of Stalin.
Dal f's i mbeci l i c games had fi nal ly pal l ed, and he was expel l ed
from the group i n 1939. He was thus compl etel y free to devel op a
"techni que", bl endi ng obscuranti sm wi th the symptoms of demen
ti a praecox, which to thi s day conti nues to provi de ferti l e soi l for
the avant- gardists of the adverti si ng worl r f".pite the a,:gr;:;
mati c ni ckname of "Avi da Dol l ars" , used by Breton to casti gate hi m,
Dal f at l east had the meri t, i n hi s shamel ess pursui t of money, con
tracts and honours, of openl y treati ng art works as commodi ti es
somethi ng whi ch the Ernsts, the Mi ros, the Pi cassos and all the
other Surreal i st arti sts, whether they were tal ented or not, did onl y
shamefacedly.
Breton now made up with both Artaud and Prevert. Nothi ng,
real ly, shoul d ever have i nduced them to part company. Prevert and
Peret were cut from the same cl oth, and i n Breton, al bei t strictly con-
28
trolled, there was a good deal of Artaud. These four waged unceas
ing war on Surrealism as ideology, on the growing co-optation of the
movement. Unfortunately Surrealism had been an ideology in the
profoundest sense from the beginning; it was always doomed to be
part of the game of old and new in the cultural sphere-and could
have avoided this destiny only if, say, the Spanish Revolution had
triumphed over both the Stalinists and the fascists and hence made
possible a transformation of Surrealism into revolutionary theory.
Unaware of this, or refusing to accept it, Artaud, Breton, Peret and
Prevert fought to the glorious strains of what sounded very much
like a song of defeat. They were the last formation of four, and,
having nothing more to lose, they never surrendered.
On the other hand, Salvador Dalf adopted Surrealism at its
most ideological on a full-time (and fll-space) basis. He espoused
fascism, Catholicism or Franco just as Aragon had espoused
Stalinism.
E
luard took the same road as Aragon. As Breton recalls
in Entretiens :
When I learnt, in Mexico City, that poems of
E
luard's had
just appeared in Commune. which was the magazine of the
"Maison de la Culture", I naturally hastened to inform him
about the unspeakable methods those people had used
against me, nor did I doubt for a second that he would
immediately distance himself from them. But I had no reply
from
E
luard, and upon my return I was stupefied to hear him
claim that a collaboration of this kind in no way implied any
particular commitment on his part, and indeed that in the
last few months he had contributed, just as willingly as to
Commune. to various fascist publications (these are his words,
not mine) in Germany and Italy. I confined myself to the
obseration that this attitude of his amounted to a rejection
of any kind of agreement that we had ever reached between
us and made any further meeting pointless.
In 1940 the deaths of Paul Klee, Maurice Heine and Saint- Pol
Roux-three non-Surrealists who nevertheless left a deep impression
29
on the movement-i n a way marked the end of Surreali sm's great
peri od. Breton, it is true, would still have much to say, as would Peret,
but from now on these two would be virtually alone as they strove to
keep thi ngs goi ng. In the summer of 194 1 Breton disembarked in New
York, soon to be joi ned by Ernst and Masson. Peret chose Mexico.
The onl y Surrealism known in the Uni ted States was the "Avi da
Dol l ars" versi on. With hel p from Marcel Duchamp, Breton contrived
to produce a revi ew, VVv i n which he publ ished "Prolegomena to a
Third Surrealist Mani festo or Not" ( 1942) .
POSTWAR YEARS
After 1 945 Surrealism began firi ng i ts last salvoes. It l ived on wi th
out achi eving cl earer defi niti on. The movement turned i ts attenti on
i n a more determi ned manner towards mysti ci sm and alchemy, whi l e
i ts pol i tical effusions betrayed growi ng confusi on and vapi di ty. I n
1 946 the pamphlet Liberte est un mot vietnamien ( Liberty Is a Vi etnamese
Word] protested agai nst French repressi on in I ndochi na. Inau
g
url
Break ( 1947) was a denunci ati on of Stal i ni sm-though i n 1956 the
Surreali sts would express the hope that after the Khrushchev speech
at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communi st Party a new
broom woul d be applied to the party apparatus. No sooner had they
dispensed this consi derate advi ce. however th;n thp)' fourG then
selves obl iged to hail the Hungari an upri si ng in Hon
g
rie, soleil levant
( Hungary: The Sun Rises] .
I n 1 960 Surreali sts were the i ni ti ators of the "Declarati on on the
Ri ght of Conscientious Objection in the Algeri an War"-the so
called "Declarati on of the 12 1", Eight years later, whatever resi due
sti l l went by the the name "Surreali st" was si ngi ng the praises of Cuba!
Along the way the Surreal i sts worked wi th the anarchi sts of Ie
Libertaire, and for a time supported Garry Davi s's Ci ti zens of the
World movement.
30
Before the war the review Minotaure had been the last real melt
ing pot of Surrealist ideas. Its successors in the post- war world, Neon
( 1 948- 49) , Medium ( 1 953 - 55) , Le Surrealisme, mee ( 1 956- 59) , L Breche
( 1 96 1 - 65) , Bie ( 1 958- 60) , and rArchibras ( 1 967-69) bear increasingly
brutal witness to the decay of the movement.
Important Surrealist works did appear in the post- war years;
unfortunately they were overshadowed by the fashionable but dis
mal elucubrations of the likes of Sartre, Camus or Saint-Exupery.
These works included Breton's Anthologie de l 'humour noir [Anthology of
Black Humour J, banned by the Vichy government in 1 94 1 and bare
ly noticed in 1 945; Le Deshonneur des poetes ( 1 944) , in which Peret
hauled Aragon,
E
luard and the other patriot-poets over the coals;
Breton's Arcanum 1 7 ( 1 945) , a lyrical meditation on sensibility, love
and poetry, his very beautiful Ode to Charles Fourier ( 1 947) , and his
Flagrnt Deiit [ Caught Red- Handed] , which exposed a fraudulent
attribution of poems to Rimbaud, condemned the imbecility of liter
ary critics in general, and heaped scorn on Maurice Nadeau, author
of a Histor oj Surrealism; Peret's Anthologie de l 'amour sublime, with its
extraordinary profusion of linguistic fireworks; the novels of Jul ien
Gracq and Maurice Fourre; Malcolm de Chazal's Sens plastique; and
Jean Markale and Lancelot Lengyel's studies on Celtic art.
Apart from such personal works, however, Surrealism now dis
played a great tolerance for rehashes, for mere imitation of the masters,
for sor expressions of mutual admiration. Many Surrealists made their
peace with the incoherence of the dominant system. Others fell silent.
Yet others followed the example of Crevel and committed suicide
indeed, the decline of Surrealism, the last movement to have held a
genuine belief in the purity of art, is peppered with suicides, among
them those of the painter Arshile Gorky ( 1 948) , the painter Oscar
Dominguez ( 1 957) , the poet Jean- Pierre Duprey ( 1 959) , the painter
Wolfgang Paalen ( 1 959), as well as that of Karel Teige, who killed him
self in Prague as the police were coming to arrest him.
A pamphlet published on 7 June 1 947 by the Revolutionary
Surrealists, a dissident Belgian group, had issued a salutary warning
31
to the movement as a whole. Signed by Paul Bourgoignie, Achille
Chavee, Christian Dotremont, Marcel Havrenne, Rene Magritte,
Marcel Marien, Paul Nouge and Louis Scutenaire, it declared:
Landlords, crooks, Druids, poseurs, all your efforts have
been in vain: we persist in relying on SURREALISM in our
quest to bring the universe and desire INTO ALIGN
MENT ... First and foremost, we guarantee that Surrealism
will no longer sere as a standard for the vainglorious, nor
as a springboard for the devious, nor as a Delphic oracle; it
will no longer be the philosopher's stone of the distracted,
the battleground of the timid, the pastime of the lazy, the
intellectualism of the impotent, the draft of blood of the
"poet" or the draft of wine of the litterteur.
But, as though to give the true measure of their protest, and cer
tainly exemplifying the grotesquerie which would thenceforard dog
Surealism in its dotage, the aforesaid signatories declared without fur
ther ado that they placed their entire faith in the Communist Party!
32
CHAPTE R 2
CHANGI NG LI F E
THE REFUSAL OF SURVIVAL
It is significant that the first Maniesto of Surrealism starts out by
denouncing that mode of existence which, to distinguish it from pas
sionate and multidimensional lie, has been called "survival" :
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life
real life, I mean-that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that
inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his lot, has
trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects
that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has
earned through his own efforts, almost always through his
own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not
refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luckl ). At this
point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he
has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is
unimpressed by his wealth or poverty, in this respect he is a
newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I
confess that he does very nicely without it.
The only thing absent from Breton's tableau of intolerable medi
ocrity is history. No doubt the nostalgia for the "chateau life" which
always haunted the Surrealist dream contained an implicit reference to
the great myth of the unitary society of old, wher the individual tra
jectory of even the humblest of men was inextricably bound up with
the cosmic in a mass of fictional realities and real fictions, an atmos
phere in which every event was a sign and ever word or gesture mag
icaIIy sparked off mysterious currents of mental electricity. The col
lapse of this myth, and its subsequent co-optation as spectacle by the
bourgeoisie, were never successfuIIy analysed by Surrealism. In the end
the Surrealist movement never did more than echo the kind of furious
foot-stamping which, from Romanticism to Dada, had been the sole
response of artists thwarted by the demobilizing combination (supplied
courtesy of the commodit system) of a lifeless soul and a soulless life.
Romantic rebellion from SheIIey to Karl Sand and Pierre
Franois Lacenaire had given way to the aggressive aestheticism of
35
Vi l l i ers de l ' l sl e-Adam and the pl unge i nto Symbol i sm, i nto the man
neri sm of the theatrical transposi ti on of decadence and death. The
bl oody comic opera of the Great War was to l end real content to the
macabre imagi ni ngs of a Rol l i nat or a Huysmans, as l i kewise to those
baroque decors which paradoxi cal l y expressed a taste for great
refi nement. Nati onal i sm thus contrived to crown the sorry festivities
of the fi n de siecle with the apotheosis of a great feast of the dead.
A few mi l l i on corpses quickly revived the taste for l i fe. And when
the prol etariat redi scovered its voice, and the voi ce of history, i n the
shape of the cal l for soviets and the Spartacus movement, the great
est hopes were justi fied regardi ng the prospects for a radi cal ly di f
ferent l i fe, for the creation of the onl y condi ti ons capabl e of under
pi nni ng such a l i fe: the abol i ti on of the commodi ty system and of
bourgeoi s- Christian civi l i zation .
Dada had not been mi staken about thi s, though some Dadaists
erred less than others. Breton was l i kewise correct i n 1922, i n the
fi fth issue of Litterture, when he wrote: "In fairness to Dada i t must be
acknowledged that, had i ts strength not fai l ed i t, i t would have want
ed nothi ng better than to destroy everythi ngfrom top to bottom. " Yet i n
general the Surreal i sts grasped even l ess cl early than the Dadaists to
what degree and i n what sense the sai lors of Ki el , the Spartaci st
workers or the members of the fi rst Russi an counci l s were putti ng
I nto practice the same project that they themselves nurtured.
Once revol uti on had been crushed from Berl i n to Kronstadt, via
La Courti ne and the plains of the Ukrai ne, Dada alone conti nued to
demand, unabashedly if confusedly, the global destruction of art,
phi l osophy and cul ture as separate spheres and their realization i n the
context of a uni tary soci al l i fe. The gui l ty consci ence of Surreal i st
reformism is testi mony to this global revol uti onary project, which
the movement rejected onl y with great rel uctance and i ndeed con
ti nued to embrace i n a repressed form.
Thus Breton was qui te able to procl ai m, in Number 4 of La
Revolution Surrealiste, that "There is no such thi ng as a work of art that
can withstand our total pri mi tivism", and Aragon could evoke "the
pal try pol i tical activi ty that has occurred to the East of us over the
36
last few years". Though both these remarks are accurate enough, the
first bespeaks someone who is still lacking in consciousness, the sec
ond someone who is already an imbecile. The sequel was to demon
strate, i n any event, that these were merely words wi thout practical
consequences. The Dada spirit outlived itself as an empty verbal form;
Surrealism surreptitiously endowed that form with another content.
All the same, the melancholy of everyday life was the sti rrup
that enabled Surrealism to take its wild ride through the world of
dreams. Contrary to the prognostications of not a few Stalinist
thinkers, the movement was not destined to sere si mply as a tram
poline for escapism and mysticism. On the contrary, i t became that
focus of despai r whence all new hope derives, even i f the road taken
was the cultural one.
Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vache, two great wi tnesses to mal de
v;vre, were soon to die. The fi rst put out to sea one stormy evening
on the Gulf of Mexico; the second, who had written from the front
that i t was "ti resome to die so young", ki lled himself i n Nantes no
sooner than the War was over. Soon after there would be Jacques
Rigaut and Raymond Rousse! and, among the Surreali sts, Rene
Creve\ . Like Artaud, Creve! had been struck by the predominance of
non-life in the totali ty of human affairs, and it was he who, in a text
on Paul Klee, voiced a sentiment that the Surrealists would have
done well to pursue further: "We care neither for the asparagus of the
poor nor for the leeks of the rich. "
Dada held up a mirror to surival as an absence of real life and as
a directly apprehended reality, thus "making its shame more shameful";
suicide constituted a condemnation, by way of the negative, of sur
vival's logi c of death.
Being an ideology, Surrealism was a strictly static vi sion whose
impressi on upon hi stor could never surpass the wei ght which hi s
tor i tself accorded it (as distinct from revolutionary theory, which
starts out from history, then returns to hi stor and moves it forward) ;
for Surreali sm, surival, suicide and death were the starting point
which life was supposed to negate, but which it could not transform
without first achi eving a state of "absolute deviation". Thi s was the
37
metaphysical conundrum from which the Surrealists were trying to
escape when they mistakenly pinned thei r hopes on Bolshevism
That i s why the first issue of La Revolution Surdaliste is replete wi th
press clippings concerning suicide. In the survey conducted in that
issue on the question of why people kill themselves , Artaud's
response remains exemplary:
I suffer frightfully from life. There is no state I cannot attai n.
And without a doubt I have been dead for a long ti me
already-I have already committed suicide. I have, as it
were, been suicided. But what would you think of a suicide
before the fact-a suicide that made you redirect your
steps, but to somewhere beyond being, not towards death.
Artaud's path was already quite clear. Through a nihilism that
Dada never attained, though it had sought it as a basi s on which to
reconstruct the self, life, and social organization, Artaud chose a
return to the dissolution of the self in a spiritual totali ty. The
Surrealism of the years after the Second World War would adopt a
comparable stance, returning in this way to the movement's starting
point, and even transcending it, but it nevertheless avoided the
lucidity and the drama lived out by Artaud. Very few Surrealists
would ever apprehend their own alienation with Artaud's courage
and awareness: " I am unhappy like a man who has lost the best part
of himself. " Very few would face up so directly to their own frag
mented state: "I no longer want to he onf 0f the deluded. Iki i i g
dead, others are not separated from themselves. They continue to
circle around their own corpses. As for me, I am not dead, but I am
separated from myself. "
For Artaud, i n 1924, the hope of a classless society, the hope of
a coming reign of freedom, so passionately entertained by
Surrealism, had already been dashed. Later, when the unmasking of
Stalinism cast a dark cloud over these aspirations in the hearts of
Breton and his friends, Surrealism embraced Artaud's conclusion in
an intellectual way, and resolved like him to live the drama of every-
3 8
day al i enati on as a cosmi c tragedy of the mi nd.
I n 1 924, though, Surreal i sm was nowhere near that poi nt. I ts
survey of sui ci de al so addressed the questi on of l i fe. To the possibi l
i ty of death were qUickly attached al l the possi bi l ities of freedom and
all the freedoms of the possi bl e. As Breton put i t,
It i s remarkabl e how these repl i es, be they subtl e, l iterary or
derisive, al l seem so arid; why is i t that no human resonance
is detectable i n them? To kill onesel-has no one wei ghed the
fury and experi ence, the disgust and passi on, that are con
tai ned i n thi s phrase?
Surreal i sm thus recogni zed the mark of the ol d world and its
oppressive structures in the i nhumanity of survival . Though i t may
have di spl ayed a si ngul ar lack of discernment with regard to the ram
ificati ons of commodity fetishi sm, it must sti l l be given credit for
havi ng so very rarely fai l ed to measure up (as Breton was wont to
say) to the revoluti onary ethic of freedom. The Surreal ists' denunci
ation of oppressi on was well - ni gh continual , and the vi ol ence of
their tone cannot hel p but arouse our sympathy.
The fact remai ns that these young people, who ought by ri ghts
to have turned themselves i nto theorists and practi ti oners of the rev
oluti on of everyday l i fe, were content to be mere arti sts thereof, wag
ing a war of mere harassment against bourgeois soci ety as though it
fel l to the Communi st Party alone to mount the mai n offensive. I t
thus came about that targets of great moment were chosen without
any deep conviction that they ought to be designated as spheres of
oppressi on towards which the proletari at's anger should be directed;
i ndeed many a fl ami ng brand hurled by the Surreal ists amounted to
l i ttle more than pyrotechnics.
The struggle agai nst Christianity, for i nstance, by now abandoned
by Bolshevism, suffered not a l i ttle from this misconceived modesty.
Apart from the anodyne imagery of Clovis Troui l l e, and Max Ernst's
Virgin spanking the i nfant Jesus with her hal o, Surrealist pai nti ng
eschewed the theme altogether.
39
Responding to an attempt to annex him (by means, no doubt, of
one of those miracles for which the Christians are so renowned) ,
Artaud offered the following unambiguous and definitive answer: "I
shit on the Christian virtues and on whatever it is that does duty for
them among the buddhas or the lamas" (Histoire entre la groume et Dieu
[ History between Grousing and God]) . Ever faithful to his photo
graph in L Revolution Surrealiste, which bore the caption "Our
Contributor Benjamin Peret Insulting a Priest", Peret did much to
rescue modern poetry from its tinkliness, and re-endow words with
the promise of action, when he wrote such lines as these, from "Le
Cardinal Mercier est mort":
Cardinal Mercier mounted on a policeman
you looked the other day like a dustbin spilling over
with communion wafers
Cardinal Mercier you stink ofgod as the stable stinks of dung
and as dung stinks of Jesus
Or these, from "La loi Paul Boncour" [The Paul Boncour Law l
Men who crush senators like dog turds
looking each other stright in the eye
til/ laugh like mountains
will force the priests to kill the last generals with their crsses
and then using the fag
!'ill ,'s:;c; t]c pdrsts t1)cm:eivfs by way of an Amen
The bases of a practical approach to religion were laid down in
fAction immediate by Rene Magritte, E. L. T Mesens, Paul Nouge,
Louis Scutenaire and Andre Souris:
We are convinced that what has been done to oppose
religion up to now has been virtually without effect and that
new means of action must be envisaged.
At the present time the Surrealists are the people best
fitted to undertake this task. So as not to lose any time,
40
we must aim for the head: the outrageous history of reli
gions should be made known to all, the lives of young
priests should be made unbearable, and all sects and orga
nizations of the Salvation Army or of the Evangel ical vari
ety should be discredited by means of every kind of
mockery our imagination can devise. Think how exhila
rating it would be if we could persuade the better part of
our youth to mount a weI l prepared and systematic cam
paign of disruption of church services, baptisms, commu
nions, funerals and so on. Meanwhile roadside crosses
might usefuIly be replaced by images promoting erotic
love or poeticaIly eulogizing the natural surroundings,
particularly if these happen to be grim.
In an article published in Interention surrialiste ( 1 934) which went
scandalously unheeded, Pierre Yoyotte set the tone for a debate that
ought by rights to have sparked action of the broadest scope:
The Communists have always officially evinced an extreme
ly unintelligent suspicion with respect to the discoveries of
psychoanalysis, discoveries which would in fact have
allowed them to combat the emotional processes associated
with family, religion and fatherland in a completely
informed manner.
Though hardly a response adequate to the seriousness of this project,
Rene Crevel's delicious psychoanalytical account of Jesus in Le Clavfcin
de Diderot (family and neuroses/family of neuroseslfamily neurosis)
is well worth quoting:
As the masochistic little chickabiddie of the Father
Eternal, much given to turning the other cheek, Jesus was
not the sort to be satisfied by some brisk return visit to the
mother's breast.
On the contrary, he had to go back up into the most pri
vate of the genital parts of the genitor, to become one of
those parts himself-the right testicle, say-because the
Trinity may be, indeed must be interpreted as the tripartite
4 1
assemblage (in appearance) of the male sexual apparatus: a
banana and two mandarin oranges, perhaps-since the
Oriental style insists on fruit similes only.
Tre, the apotheosis of masochism is preceded by a num
ber of smaller diversions, by what the French call diddlings
at the door: baptismal badinage with Saint John the Baptist,
intimate grooming with perfumed oils at the hands of saint
ly women, and, above all, the Last Supper with its loaves
(long loaves, that is, whose meaning we all know; we also
know that not one of the painters who have represented this
meal in so many celebrated pictures has ever put on the
table the little split loaves that commonly symbolize the sex
of the woman) .
Dressed in a most elegant white robe, bent under the
weight of his cross, Jesus offers his back to whatever blows
might be forthcoming. As soon as Pontius Pilate has washed
his hands of the accused, the sexual symbolism becomes
crystal- clear. Jesus falls, then gets up again: in other words,
he has come, and is ready to come again under the whips of
the athletic types with their skimpy costumes.
And, just as the young newly-wed wife cal l s for her
mother, so frightened is she so of voluptuous pleasure, so
Jesus continually calls out for his father . . . . Then comes the
vinegar-soaked sponge, signalling the contempt of the
handsomest of Jesus's ruffianly guards for this tatter
demalion yearning to be his pretty boy. In other words,
the legionary in question, who can hardly have failed to
spot the practised hips of Mary Magdalene among
thp
whores crowding around the foot of the cross, flatly refuses
to pay Jesus the hommage of even the tiniest drop of sem
inal fluid, and in effect pisses in his mouth to underline the
point. So . . . no more threesomes . Between the two fel ons
all that remains are two chestnuts-the former juicy divine
oranges have shrivelled into a pair of pitiful dried-up
conkers, and the Christ is just a pathetic empty vessel.
Before leaving the subject of the critical avenues which were
suitable for exploration by Surrealism in its revolutionary specificity,
42
but which were barely entered upon in practice, it is worth citing
one quite exemplary demonstration of the popular character of anti
Christian feeling. The Communist paper L:Humanite having reported
how a church in flames had been saved thanks to the courage of a
few young people, a reader sent a letter of protest to the editors that
was published in Number 2 of Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution :
Dear Comrades, I cannot but deplore your reporter's praise
for the courage of a group of young people when the only
result of that courage was the preseration of a building that
should by rights have been razed long ago.
After Christianity, and setting aside capitalism, with regard to
which the Surrealists espoused Lenin's arguments, the chief target of
execration was the family. The trial of Violette Nozieres, who had
murdered her father, the engine-driver of the presidential train, after
he tried to rape her, offered the Surrealists the perfect opportunity
to voice their views on this question. The young parricide inspired
some of Eluard's sincerest lines:
Violette dreamed of undoing
And did undo
The frightul viper' nest of blood ties
Another emblematic figure, gleefully pounced on by Peret, was
the prodigiously fertile "Mother Cognacq":
Alas she has croaked Mother Cognacq
croaked just like France
From her belly green as a pasture
swarmed record-breaking broods
and for each new arrival
they got a stoker' shovel
43
No more Mother Cognacq
No more babies coming after eighteen others
ever Easter or Christmas
to Piss in the family cooking-pot
She has croaked Mother Cognacq
So let' dance let' dance in a ring
round her grave with a turd on the top
Peret was the most enthusi asti c member of the group when i t
came to pouri ng scorn on the fatherl and-on France, on Gal l i c
avari ci ousness, on the cops and the army. I n thi s vei n he produced
many emi nently quotabl e l i nes, among them thi s one, from "Briand
creve" [ Briand Has Croaked]: "Fi nal l y thi s parboi l ed sperm sprang
forth from the maternal whorehouse wi th an ol ive branch stuck up
his arse . . . ". Or these, from "La Stabi l i sati on du franc":
I the pigs ' ears quiver
It is because "L Marseillaise" is being sung
Come on children of the shit bucket
Let' fi1/ Poincarts ear with our snot
And let us not forget two cl assics, "La Mort heroique du l i eu
tenant Condami ne de l a Tour"-
Rot Condamine de la Tour
With your eyes the Pope will make communion wafers
for your Moroccan sergeant
and your prick will become his brigadier' baton
Rot Condamine de la Tour
Rot you spineless shit
-and "Epitaphe sur un monument aux morts de la guerre" [Epi taph
on a Monument to the War Dead] , which Peret entered i n the l i ter
ary contest of the Academi e Fran<ai se:
44
Te general told us
with his finger up his bum
The enemy
is that way Move out
It was for the fatherland
So off we went
with our fingers up our bums
In Breton i t i s possible to fi nd the somewhat scattered maki ngs
of a l ibertari an posi ti on. A footnote in the first Maniesto of Surrealism
i s particularly suggestive in this regard:
Whatever reservati ons I may be al l owed to make con
cerni ng responsi bi l i ty i n general and the medi co-l egal con
si derati ons whi ch determi ne an i ndi vi dual's degree of
responsi bi l i ty-compl ete responsi bi l i ty, irresponsi bi l i ty,
l i mi ted responsi bi l i ty (si c}-however di fficult it may be for
me to accept the pri nci pl e of any degree of responsi bi l i ty, I
woul d l i ke to know how the first punishable offenses whose
Surreal i st character i s cl early apparent will be judged. Wi l l
the accused be acquitted, or wi l l he merely be given the
benefi t of the doubt because of extenuati ng circumstances?
I t i s a shame that the violation of the l aws governi ng the
press i s today scarcely punished, for otherwi se we would
soon see a trial of this sort: the accused has publ ished a
book whi ch is an outrage to publ i c decency; several of hi s
"most respectabl e and honorable" fel low ci ti zens have
l odged a complai nt against hi m, and he is also charged with
sl ander and l i bel; there are also all sorts of other charges
agai nst hi m, such as i nsul ti ng and defaming the army, i nci t
i ng to murder, rape, etc. The accused, moreover, wastes no
ti me i n agreei ng wi th the accusers i n "sti gmatizi ng" most of
the i deas expressed. Hi s onl y defence i s clai mi ng that he
does not consi der hi msel f to be the author of hi s book, sai d
book bei ng no more and no less than a Surreal i st concoc
tion, which precludes any questi on of merit or l ack of merit
on the part of the person who signs it; further, that al l he has
45
done is copy a document wi thout offeri ng any opi nI On
thereon, and that he i s at l east as forei gn to the accused text
as is the presi di ng judge hi msel f.
What i s true for the publ i cati on wi l l al so hol d true for a
whole host of other acts as soon as Surreal i st methods begin
to enjoy widespread favour. When that happens, a new
moral i ty must be substi tuted for the prevai l i ng moral i ty, the
source of al l our tri als and tribul ati ons.
This l ast paragraph i s truly extraordi nary i n i ts i mpl i cati ons. To
describe every act condemned by law as Surreal i st woul d serve i n the
first i nstance to poi nt up the universal i ty of al i enati on, the fact that
peopl e are never truly themselves but rather that everyone acts for
the most part i n accordance wi th the i nhuman tendencies i nsti l led i n
them by soci al condi ti oni ng. I t woul d then become a si mpl e matter,
when consideri ng acts that were "reprehensi bl e" from the standpoi nt
of the l aw, to disti nguish cl early between those whi ch i ndeed obey
a l ogic of death, the l ogic of i nhumani ty i mposed by the powers in
pl ace, and those which by contrast flow from a reflex of the wi l l to
l ive. It is thus surpri si ng on the face of it that Breton should ever
have been embarassed when remi nded of hi s cel ebrated proposi ti on
i n the Second Maniesto:
The simplest Surrealist act consists in dashi ng down i nto the
street, pistol i n hand, and firi ng bl i ndly, as fast as you can pull
the trigger, i nto the crowd. Anyone who, at l east once i n hi "
li te, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty sys
tem of debasement and creti nization i n effect has a wel l
defined place i n that crowd, with hi s belly at barrel level .
Thi s was a quite adequate expl anati on, after al l , of why such an act
would si mply be a way of maki ng al l the worki ngs of an economic
and soci al system whi ch kills human bei ngs by redUCi ng them to the
state of objects clear and comprehensi ble to everone. For it i s true
not onl y that the cri mi nal is not responsi bl e, but al so that the hi er
archi cal organi zati on of soci ety, wi th its batteri es of flunkeys-its
46
magistrates, cops, managers, bosses and pri ests-i s i tsel f ful l y
responsi bl e for al l the acts that i t condemns. But thi s negative aspect
escaped Breton-and consequently he was unable to grasp the pos
i tivity involved ei ther. The point of transcendence here was,
nonethel ess, obvious to hi m, and he immediately adds a ri der:
The justi fication of such an act is, to my mind, i n no way
incompatible with the beli ef in that gleam of l ight that
Surreal i sm seeks to detect deep within us. I simply wanted to
bring in here the element of human despair, on thi s si de of
whi ch nothing would be abl e to justify that belief. I t i s impos
sible to give one's assent to one and not to the other. Anyone
who should pretend to embrace thi s belief without truly shar
ing this despai r would soon be revealed as an enemy.
While it is tre that extreme despair may arouse l imitless hopes,
the real si te of the struggle still has to be made clear. Once we have
arrived at the sort of despair that impel s us, following the logic of death
that power i mposes, to open fire into the crowd, there i s only one way
beyond thi s predicament, and that is the l i quidation of power in the
name of a dialectic of l i fe and of all the hope l i fe embodies. Having
reached that point, i t behoved Sureal i sm, as a mirror held up to the
power of death, to inaugrate an anti - Surreal i sm capable of combining
in a single practice the strggle against all forms of oppression and the
defence of ever positive spark thrown up by everday l i fe.
On such a proj ect, whi ch the Si tuationists clearly formulated i n
the early 1960s, the Surreali sts possessed but a few scattered
insights, and the only cohesion they could achieve here was a lyri
ci sm endowing these fragments with an i l lusory uni ty.
Here is Breton on Viol ette Nozieres:
In face of your sex winged like a fower of the Catacombs
Students old fogeys jouralists rte bastards fake rrvolutionaries
priests judges
Wanking lawyers
Know full well that all hierarchy ends here
47
When all is said and done, however, poetry as incitement to
practice, and in this instance as action directed towards the abolition
of the bourgeois order, is far more apparent i n Breton's di atribe
against psychiatrists in Nadja:
I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement
J should take advantage of any l apses i n my madness to mur
der anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least
this woul d permit me, like the viol ent, to be confined in
solitary. Perhaps they'd l eave me al one.
48
FRAGMENTS OF A PROJECT OF
HUMAN EMANCI PATI ON
Any attempt at a total revolution of everyday life i s condemned to
failure and fragmentation if it does not embody a coherent and glob
al negative critique. What is more, such theoretical and practical
inadequacy means that authentic desires for freedom are rendered
abstract by ideology, even though they may continue to manifest
themselves in the shape of an illusory will to transcendence at the
ambiguous level of language.
There is thus a trace, in the Surrealists' striving to circumscribe
exceptional or disturbing occasions in lived experience, of a theor
of passionate moments. "I pay no heed to the empty moments of my
life," wrote Breton, and indeed his entire work revolves around
intensely experienced instants. These he celebrates with a lyricism
which by no means excludes their critical analysis, but which, since
it fails to incorporate them into a generalized social practice, suc
ceeds only in sealing them in the amber of aesthetic emotions. The
verbal always carries the day, and, sadly, the only consistency
attained by Surralism was that of its self- justification in cultural
terms. These revolutionaries of the heart were fated to carr out
their revolution solely in the realm of the mind.
The points at which the old worl d was crumbling were emi
nently perceptible to the Surrealists, and they surounded these
areas with an aura that lent them a certain omnipotence. Moments
of love, encounter, communication, subjectivity-all were allegedly
unified by a shared quality of freedom, yet in reality they remained
isolated so long as no heed was being paid to the fact that liberation
as a material force cannot be detached from the overall emancipa
tion of the proletariat; so isolated, indeed, that not a single Surrealist
reSisted the temptation to turn one or another of them into an
absolute, so creating an illusory totality.
Love in particular (and justifiably so) was the object of
Surrealism's most firmly and consistently sustained hopes. Presenting
49
the " I nqui ry" i nto love in Number 1 2 of La Revolution Surrealiste ( 1929) ,
Breton wrote that "I f there i s one i dea which to thi s day seems to
have escaped every attempt at reduction . . . it i s, we bel ieve, the idea
of love, alone i n i ts capaci ty to reconci l e every man, temporarily or
not, wi th the i dea of l ife. " On every occasion, and at every stage, the
Surreal ists i nvoked the desired uni ty of poetry, love and revol t.
''There i s no solution outside of love" , procl ai med Breton over and
over agai n. Yet, si nce he had fai l ed to understand that as part of the
same process there i s no love wi thout a revol ution of everyday l i fe,
Breton ended up, vi a the notion of "mad l ove", promoti ng a veri table
cult of Woman. The Surreal i sts opposed l i berti ni sm in the name of
an elective and exclusive form of love, but it i s an open question
whether these two antagonistic atti tudes do not i n the end amount
to much the same thi ng, whether a woman el evated to the rank of
the Chosen One and a woman fucked l ovelessly are not both bei ng
treated as objects. Be that as i t may, nei ther Breton nor Peret ever
changed their mi nds, no matter how closely they studied Fourier and
his detai led theories on thi s subj ect.
De Sade offers a perti nent counterwei ght to the hi nt of
Romanticism in thi s conception of love. Marcel Marien is right to
poi nt out, in hi s Les Poids et les mesures [Wei ghts and Measures], that we
shoul d thank the Divi ne Marquis for "so judi ciously enl ighteni ng us
as to the real i ty of our nature and for provi di ng us with a basis for
understanding love". Likewise Rene Char, in the second issue of Le
Surreali'me au Serl fcf dp 11 R(po'Htion : IIDe Sade': !egucy i; i love at I Ul l g
last cl eansed of the muck of the cel esti al , wi th al l the hypocrisy
exposed and extermi nated: a legacy capabl e of preservi ng men from
starvation and keepi ng thei r fi ne strangl ers' hands out of thei r
pockets. " Nevertheless, no matter how often they deni ed i t, the
Surreal i sts were conti nually (and curiously, for readers of de Sade)
drawi ng the Christian distinction between carnal and spi ri tual love.
Here, once agai n, the poi nt of vi ew of real practice was never
grasped. What could be more Sadean than the di alectic of pleasure
in i ts dual relati onshi p to love on the one hand and i nsurrection on
50
the other; Even the ni hi l i st Jacques Rigaut acknowledged that any
reconstructi on of love must fol l ow this path: " I have ridiculed many
thi ngs. There i s only one thi ng i n the worl d that I have never been
able to ri dicule, and that i s pleasure. "
Now i t i s true that the very same Peret who compi l ed a superb
anthology of "subl i me l ove" also wrote the ejacul atory poems of
Rouilles encagees [ Caged Rusts-meani ng couilles enragees , or "ragi ng
ball s"-Trns . ] . But where exactly do the two obj ects of celebrati on
i nvolved here really come i nto conjuncti on? That the practical activ
i ty of i ndivi dual s wi thi n the Surrealist mil ieu somehow guaranteed a
uni ty of thi s ki nd is a disti nctly dubious proposi ti on. Breton, sup
posed standard-bearer of every freedom, was quite capable of the
bald asserti on, uttered duri ng a publ ic debate on the issue, that he
"found homosexuals gui l ty of beggi ng human tolerance for a mental
and moral shortcomi ng that tends to set itself up as a system and
paralyse every undertaki ng of the ki nd for which I have any respect".
And he proceeded to confess, after deigni ng to pardon Jean Lorrai n
and ( nothi ng l oath! ) de Sade, that he "was quite prepared to be an
obscuranti st i n that particular area". Thi s way of promoting a per
sonal di staste to the level of a general law or pri nci pl e ( Breton even
threatened to walk out of the meeti ng if the discussi on of homo
sexual i ty was not abandoned) cl early bespeaks the worst ki nd of
repressive atti tude. Duri ng the same debate the author of Mad Love
evi nced deep hosti l i ty to the idea of a man maki ng l ove with two
women at the same ti me. If this was Surreali sm's way of accordi ng al l
power to passi on, i t woul d hardly take a Fourier to describe it as a
very rocky road.
Subj ectivity, which Surreali sm simultaneously obscured and i l l u
mi nated, i s one of those fragmentary spheres whose fl i ghts of lyri
cism may mask thei r fai lure to evolve i nto revoluti onary theory. The
very first i ssue of L Revolution Surrealiste quoted Pierre Reverdy's credo
accordi ng to which 'The poet must seek the true substance of poet
ry everywhere wi thi n hi mself. " And throughout hi s work Breton
repeatedly emphasi zes the i rreducible aspect of each i ndividal , the
5 1
magic of the surrender to chance, the pursuit of adventure real or
imaginary, and the revelation of unsuspected desires. "I n order to
remain what it ought to be, namely a conductor of mental el ectricity,
poetic thought must in the first pl ace be charged up in an isolated
environment", writes Breton, while Georges Batail l e maintains that
"Surrealism is precisely that movement which strips the ultimate
interest bare, emancipating it from all compromise and resolutely
casting it as caprice pure and simpl e. " Yet neither this prescription of
Batail le's nor Breton's meditations on chance ( which Nietzsche
defined as "yourself bringing yoursel f to yoursel f") opens the way to
a practical investment of the riches of subjectivity in the col l ective
struggl e for the total liberation of the individual . Thus subj ectivity
and its demands, acknowledged but not realized on the social pl ane,
became a source of artistic inspiration and a measure of expressive
value, but nothing more. Nothing more, in sum, than that cel ebrat
ed "inner necessity" which Kandinsky hel d to be the one essential
determinant of all creation.
Primacy accorded subjectivity i n the cul tural real m l ed t o the
cal l for a new "way of feeling", a notion that a curious figure like Lotus
de Paini would successful ly nurture in response to the general ener
vation of the senses, of thought and of sensation. The Grand Jeu
group went ahead of the Surrealists down the mystical road which
confl ated subjectivity not onl y with the new way of feel ing but al so
with the myth of ol d. This was what Rene Daumal cal l ed "the turn
ing back of Real i ty towar! i t 5(rC
"
, ard it focused al l hvPC5 0fl
the point described by Breton as fol l ows: "Everthing tends to sug
gest that the mind may reach a point whence life and death, real and
imaginar, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, and
high and l ow, al l cease being perceived as contradictory. " So l ong as
it remained detached from the revol utionary project of the total
man, however, this outl ook could never become anything more, at
best, than an initiatory or hermetic doctrine.
So al though Surrealism drew attention to each individual's
potential for creativity in everyday life, it failed to spur the col l ec-
52
tive actual i zati on of that creativity by means of a revolution made by
al l in the i nterests of al l ; i nstead, it i nvited the i ndividual to lose hi s
way twi ce over: to engage i n a margi nal activity which rel i ed on
Bolshevism to spark the revolutionary process, and to strive for a
strictly cul tural overthrow of cul ture. Thi s de facto renunci ati on of
the possi bi l i ti es for subj ective sel f-real i zati on, even as these were
i nvoked on the l i terary and pictorial levels, was accompani ed by a
call to sacri fice ( from Breton on several occasi ons)-a cal l , i n other
words, to the castrati on which i s the Iynchpi n of al l hi erarchical
power. Those who had wanted to restore art to l i fe thus ended up
turni ng direct experi ence i nto just one more value on the art market.
What prevented Surreal i sm from becomi ng a cultural cattle- trough,
after the fashi on of abstract art, existenti ali sm, the nouveau roman, Pop
Art, or happeni ngs, was the fact that-unl ike Aragon,
E
luard and
Dal f-Breton, Peret, Tanguy and Artaud di d conti nue, confusedly
and spontaneously, to reject anythi ng in the movement that deni ed
thei r subj ecti vi ty or ul ti mate uni queness. I n his "Preface for a Repri nt
of the Mani festo" ( 1929), Breton put i nto words what the best of the
Surreali sts almost certai nly fel t:
I f a system whi ch I make my own, which I slowly adapt
to mysel f, such as Surreali sm, remai ns, and must always
remai n, substanti al enough to overwhelm me, it wi ll for
all that never acquire the wherewithal to make of me what
I wanted to be, as ready and wi l l i ng as I mi ght be for i t
to do so.
The choi ce of l i fe, i f not restricted to the rol e of nourishi ng l i t
erary or pictorial forms of expressi on, to the world of i mages, anal o
gi es, metaphors or trick words, i s thus apt to lead to an i nci pi ent
practice, to an embryoni c science of man that is stri pped of al l pos
i tivism, as far removed as can be imagi ned from the speci al i zed atti
tude of the "sci enti st", and i nhabited by a desire to experi ment i n
every directi on, and to document all such experi mentation to what
ever extent mi ght be requi red.
53
KNOWLEDGE OF THE HUMAN AND ITS
EXPERI MENTAL I NVESTI GATI ON
Paul Nouge of the Belgi an Surreal i st group puts hi s fi nger on a very
important concern of the movement when he wri tes:
We must turn what can be ours to the very best account. Let
man go where he has never gone, experience what he has
never experienced, thi nk what he has never thought, he
what he has never been. But help i s cal led for here: such
departures, such a cri si s, need to be preci pi tated, so with
thi s in mi nd let us create disconcerti ng objects.
Leavi ng aside the fai th thus pl aced i n the earth-shattering power of
such objects, whose transformation i nto commodi ties and condi tion
ing mechanisms Surrealism failed to foresee, Nouge's proposition has
the great merit that i t prohibits from the outset any appeal to pure
knowledge. Likewise, when the first number of L Revolution Surrealiste
rei terated Aragon's formulation, in Une Vague de reves [A Wave of
Dreams], to the effect that "We have to arrive at a new decl aration of
the ri ghts of man", the clear i mpl ication is that nothi ng that concerns
thought, imagi nation, action, expression or desi re mu<t he deemed
al ien to the revolutionary project. The founderi ng of this project
under the helmsmanshi p of Stal i ni sm and i ts attendant leftisms was to
reduce Surreal i sm to a mere generator of what mi ght be ca1 ! er thp
speci al effects of the human. From this box of tricks, not al together
unl i ke a Renai ssance "wonder- cabi net", al bei t one richer in wri tten
testimonials than in actual phenomena, Breton and his companions
contrived to produce a shi mmeri ng rhetori c, but despite al l their
efforts they were unable wholly to conceal the i nsurrectional purpos
es for which all these di scoveries had origi nal l y been made.
"We need to form a physi cal i dea of the revolution, " sai d Andre
Masson i n La Revolution Surrealiste, Number 3 , and here we have both
a way of gauging the contribution of the human dimension and the
key that in a revol utionary si tuation wi l l make it possible to loot
54
(while at the same time enriching) the Surrealist storehouse of
knowledge.
Before Breton located the moment of revolution in a mythical
absolute where individual and collective history were supposed to
come together, Guy Rosey, in Violette Nozieres ( 1933), wrote the fol
lowing lines, resounding like a last echo of Masson's watchword:
Here revealed at last by another inviolate sel of hers
is the personalit
unknown and poetic
of Violette Nozieres
murderess as one might be
a painter
FRUD AND AUTOMATIC WRITING
A considerable portion of Surrealism's energ was applied to
research into the limits of the possible, into extreme forms, varieties
of expression, and the affirmation or destruction of the human phe
nomenon in its relationships with the world, as seen from the stand
point of a total liberation of the emotions. A multitude of character
istically Surrealist preoccupations arose from this attitude, among
them the interest in spiritualism; the taste for Gothic novels; the
experimentation with techniques of simulation and critical paranoia;
the interest in childhood and in madness; the exploration of the
world of dreams and of the unconscious or subconscious; the ana
lytical approach to individual mythologies, as to the mythologies of
allegedly primitive peoples (Michel Leiris, Breton, Artaud, Peret);
the excursions into Celtic origins Oean Markale and Lancelot
Lengyel); the infatuation with alchemy and hermetic doctrines; and
the constrction of a new literar, artistic and philosophical pan
theon which rescued many very great names from the silence, lies or
discredit of official culture, among them Lautreamont, de Sade,
55
Fourier, Loui s- Cl aude de Sai nt- Marti n, Germai n Nouveau, Oscar
Pani zza, Antoi ne Fabre d' Ol i vet, Al phonse Rabbe, Chri sti an
Dietrich Grabbe, Xavier Forneret, Al fred Jarry, Facteur Cheval ,
Arnol d Bockl i n, Monsu Des i deri o, Al brecht Al tdorfer, Ni col as
Manuel Deutsch, Urs Graf, Jean Mesl i er, Pierre- FraOoi s Lacenai re,
Paracelsus, Basi l Val enti ne, Achi m von Arni m, Lewi s Carroll , Edward
Lear, lichtenberg, Bl ake, Charles Robert Maturi n, Monk Lewi s,
Adol f Wol fl i , Jean-Pi erre Bri sset, Douani er Rousseau, Betti na, "the
Portuguese Nun", Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vache, Lotus de Pa'ni , and
many more.
The influence of Freud, whom Breton vi si ted i n t 92 t , was appar
ent from the very begi nni ng. When the "Bureau de Recherches
Surreal i stes" opened at t 5 rue de Grenel l e, on t t October t 924, i ts
stated ai m was to acquai nt the general public wi th those psychoana
lytical methods whereby anyone coul d attai n better knowledge of
thei r darker si de and thei r hi dden possi bi l i ti es. Once rid of i ts dusty
therapeutic pretenti ons, the art of psychoanalysi s, along wi th the
psychoanalysis of an art made by al l , woul d be capable, accordi ng to
the Surreal ists, of laying the groundwork for a radi cally di fferent form
of social behaviour. The fai lure of thi s project even before it had been
thoroughly clarified was to put the Surreal ists at a distinct di sadvan
tage i n their attempt to make common cause wi th the Communist
Party. The notion di d not disappear enti rely, however, for i n t 945 we
find Gherasim Luca, i n hi s Lnventeur de ramour [The I nventor of Love],
proposi ng a "l i mi tless eroticization of the orol etariat" as a general
organi zi ng tool and hol di ng it as a sel f-evi dent truth that the di s
mantl i ng of the i ni ti al Oedi pal posi ti on must faci l itate the qual i tative
transfonation of l ove i nto a uni versal lever of revoluti on.
Freud also i nspi red the Surreal i sts i n thei r hosti l i ty to the psy
chi atrists, to the i nventors of the very noti on of madness, to all who
held sway over the worl d of chi ldren (those whom Jules Celma
would l ater call "educastrators") . Breton evoked a chi l dhood i n
whi ch "everythi ng, after al l , ought t o favour the effective and guar
anteed possessi on of onesel f" , addi ng hopeful l y that "thanks to
56
Surrealism, it seems as if those conditions may be restored". 'The lib
eration of children"-Roger-Gilbert Lecomte would later exclaim
"why, that would be even finer than opening the madhouses! " And
here again is Breton, in Nadja : "But as I see it, all confinements are
arbitrary. I still cannot see why a human being should be deprived of
freedom. " These are ideas that have since made headway: even if
Celma was met with police repression, even if Rene Vienet was
unable to obtain from the Sorbonne Assembly in May 1 968 that a
call be issued for the release of all those held in asylums, it is incon
ceivable that revolutionary movements of the future will fail to place
such demands high on the agenda.
In the case of the Surrealists, it was the absence, again, of a
practice concordant with the ideas held by the group that effec
tively downgraded the beginnings of a genuine psychoanalytically
grounded social campaign-along the lines, perhaps, of that con
ducted by Wilhelm Reich, of whom incidentally the Surrealists
knew nothing-to a mere technique of revelation and to mere cul
tural agitation.
This backtracking is already discernible in the Maniesto of 1 924.
In his "encyclopaedic" comment on Surrealism, Breton writes:
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the
omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to rin once and for all all other psychic mecha
nisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the prin
cipal problems of life.
The adjacent "dictionary definition" rns as follows:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by
which one proposes to express-verbally, by means of the
written word, or in any other manner-the actual func
tioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of
any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic
or moral concern.
57
The importance the Surrealists attributed to automatic writing
does little to offset the impression one often gets on readi ng even
their finest texts that the movement gravely misjudged its own poten
tial riches. By and large the practice of automatism, restricted to writ
ing, failed to lead to any analysis of the ego, any uncovering of fan
tasies or strange drives, or any critique of language as a form of alien
ation. In short, it never got beyond Breton's original set of directions:
After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as
possi ble to the concentration of your mind upon itself,
have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as
passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget
about your genius, your talents, and the talents of every
one else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of
the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly,
without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you
will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to
reread what you have written. The first sentence will come
spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every
passi ng second there is a sentence unknown to our
consci ousness which is only crying out to be heard. It is
somewhat of a problem to form an opinion about the next
sentence; it doubtless partakes both of our conscious activ
i ty and of the other, if one agrees that the fact of having
written the first involves the minimum of perception. This
should be of no importance to you, however; to a large
extent, this is what is most interesti ng and intrigui ng about
the urrealist game. The fact still remains that punctuation
no doubt resists the absolute continuity of the flow with
which we are concerned, although it may seem as neces
sary as the arrangement of knots in a vibrating cord. Go on
as long as you like. Put your trust in the inexhaustible
nature of the murmur. . . .
What was being proposed, in other words, was a means of renewing
the artistic style, which had been in free fall since Apollinaire, and
which Dada had turned into spare parts.
58
THE UNDERWORLD OF DREAMS AND PARESTHAESI AS
Dreams do indeed constitute that marvel l ous and unitary worl d
whose immanence the Surrealists hymned. The Surrealists' theory of
dreams, however, never progressed to a degree commensurate with
the amount of attention they paid to the subject. Just as they l eft it
to the "communists" to advance the cause of revolution, so l ikewise
even their best contributions in this area (those of Breton, in
Communicating Vessels and Mad Love, or those of Michel Leiris) were
simpl y appl ications of Freud's arguments in The Interpretation of Dreams.
La Revolution Surreal iste was content merely to publish accounts of
dreams, but it soon became apparent that oneiric inspiration al so
qUickly turned into a literary technique. True, the occasional inter
pretation would endeavour to show how the beauty of an image can
arise from a dream's short- circuiting of meaning, how the poetic
spark may spring from a sudden condensation of different emotion
al significances that the dream contradictorily combines, how the
il lusion of premonition fol l ows a particular dream pathway, and
how, once the space- time of the dream has become identical with
the space- time of myth, the signs of past, present and future may
come to correspond to one another. Yet here too the absence of any
impl ications of a practical kind took its tol l , in this case a retreat
into the ideology of "the great transparent ones" and hidden mean
ings . Confusedly aware, nonetheless, that mastery of dreams woul d
imply mastery of life, and that meanwhile those who control sur
vival, who run the government and the spectacl e, need al so to be
the guardians of dreams, the Surrealists achieved their most con
crete defence of the dream when they targeted the psychiatrists and
al ienists, psychoanalytical reformism, the technicians of social con
ditioning and al l the watchdogs of the mental real m. The hal f
cocked nature of this campaign, however, meant that they never
effectively demanded a society in which the fantasy worl d of
dreams woul d have at its disposal, for the purpose of its material
actual ization, the entire technical armamentarium which under pre-
59
sent condi ti ons serves only to destroy those prospects. The
Surreali sts were content to mi ne dreams in order to renew the
i mages whose interplay so i nterested them; they fai led to appreci
ate that thi s was another way for the dream to be co-opted by the
domi nant mechanisms of decepti on and fasci nation (as in the pil
lagi ng of dreams by the admen and the manufacturers of "si lent
majori ti es" ) .
Much the same may be said in connection wi th forms of behav
iour stigmatized as mad by the logic of profi t, by the rationality of
the commodi ty system: the contempt which the Surrealists heaped
on torturers in white coats did not inoculate them against a tempta
ti on to co-opt attitudes usually treated clinically for purely artistic
purposes. Thus, Dalf defined his "paranoiac-criti cal" technique as "a
spontaneous method of i rrational knowledge based on the interpre
tative-critical association of delusional phenomena", and he appli ed
it notably to Violette Nozi eres, paronymic variati ons on whose
name-"nazi ere" , "Nazi", "Dinazo", "Nez"-inspi red his drawing of a
long-nosed fi gure the sexual symbolism of which evoked both the
charm of the young woman and her father's attempt to rape her.
Si mi larly, an attempt was made to achieve a general rehabilita
tion of certain tendencies judged to be pathologi cal. In 1 928, to
commemorate the fifti eth annj verary of the i nvention of hysteria,
Number 1 1 of La Revolution Surrea/iste publi shed a beautiful series of
photographs of female hysteri CS under the ti tle "Passi onate
Attitudes, 1 878". Breton and
A
rr gon commfntfn
Hysteria is a more or less irreducible mental state charac
terized by the overturning of the relations that obtai n
between the subject and a moral world to which, i n a prac
ti cal sense, and in the absence of any delusional system, he
considers himself to belong. Thi s mental state answers to
the requi rements of a reciprocal seduction which accounts
for the hastily accepted miracles of medical suggesti on (or
counter-suggestion) . Hysteri a is not a pathological phe
nomenon, and i t may justi fi ably be deemed, in ever sense,
a supreme form of expression.
60
In The Immaculate Conception ( 1 930) , Breton and Eluard composed
texts based on the simulation of various types of mental i l l ness.
Knowledge of the wi l d and repressed aspects of man also came
from some who were less preoccupied wi th the reconstruction of art,
among them Michel Leiris and other of Surrealism's fellow travel l ers,
notably Georges Batai I l e and Maurice Hei ne.
Hei ne i n particular ( the first person clearly to hai l the l i berato
ry spirit of the pedagogical de Sade of Philosophy in the Bedroom) was a
methodical explorer of the frontiers of human possi bi l i ty. Better than
anyone else, he grasped the hope that Surrealism held out for a real
total i ty and a total freedom. Hi s article i n Minotaure, Number 8
( 1 936) , "Regard sur I'enfer anthropoclasique" [A Look at Anthropo
clastic HeI l ], i n a sort of contrapuntal echo to the ol d Surreal ist
i nquiry i nto SUici de, sets forth an i magi nary discussi on between
de Sade, Jack the Ri pper, the Comte de Mesanges and Professor
Brouardel on human bei ngs as the obj ects of a long series of refi ned
destructive measures and on the pleasure to be derived from thei r
progressi ve and systematic degradati on. I l lustrated wi th pho
tographs by the forensi c surgeon Lacassagne from Annales d'hygiene
publique et de medecine legale [Annals of Publ i c Health and Legal
Medici ne] , the text contrasts the transformati on of man i nto an
object, as promoted by a hi erarchical social organizati on, with hi s
destructi on i n the name of human passions. As the negation of sl ow
rei ficati on, Hei ne proposes the project of the total man, a universe i n
which humani ty would paradoxicaIly be reborn from i ts paroxysti c
anni hi l ati on i n the relationship between torturer and victi m. The
presumption i s that this conscious ni hi l ism, which is the ni hi l ism of
the great kiI lers, wi l l precipi tate the transcendence of al l the ol d
worl d's negativi ty.
The same ni hi l istic perspective governs "Notes sur un c1assement
psycho-bi ologique des paresthesies sexuel les" [Notes on the Psycho
Biological Cl assi ficati on of Sexual Paresthaesias], where Heine seeks
to rid the scienti fic obserati on of man of the last vesti ges of ethical
and rel i gi ous prejudice. He adopts the term "paresthaesi a" i n order to
elimi nate the false distinction between normal and abnormal and
6 1
apprehend direct experience as a unity despite all its contradictions.
Heine's writings-among which "Confessions et obserations psycho
sexuelles" also deseres mention-opened a line of inquiry which
Bataille was to pursue but on which most Surrealists quickly turned
their backs.
Dalf, however, was well aware of the potential for provocation
in any attribution of aesthetic value to acts condemned by puritani
cal laws. For example, in the second issue of Le Surra/ isme au Service de
la REvo/ution , he elected to celebrate a non-destructive and perfectly
banal paresthaesia, namely exhibitionism:
Last May, between Cambronne and Glaciere on the metro,
a man about thirty, who was seated opposite a very beauti
ful young girl, cleverly parted the pages of a magazine that
he was affecting to read, so arranging things that his sex,
fully and magnificently erect, was exposed to her view, and
to her view only. No sooner had another passenger, an idiot,
become aware of this act of exhibitionism, which had
plunged the girl into an enormous but delightful state of
embarassment, though without eliciting the slightest
protest from her, than the mass of travellers fell upon the
exhibitionist, hitting him and throwing him out of the car
riage. We must cry out in utmost indignation and express
our utter contempt for such an abominable way of treating
one of the purest and most disinterested acts of which any
man is capable in this effete and morally degenerate age.
However sympathetic one might find this attitude, it was cer
tainly never extended to a general defence of paresthaesias; at best it
was subsumed by black humour, at worst incorporated into the stock
of images which Dalf used, only slightly in advance of sexually ori
entated advertiSing, to test the shock effect of representations of
erection, masturbation or defecation.
Similar themes inspired Eluard to produce genuinely charm
ing verse:
62
In a corer agile incest
Circles around the virginity of a sweet little dress
But even had aesthetic co- optation not dominated the Surreali sts'
concerns, their lack of the sense of totality that moved Maurice
Heine and no doubt also Georges Batai lle would have sufficed to
reduce any fresh ethical demands on their part-any i nvocati on of a
right to free l ove, i ncest, exhibitionism or homosexual i ty-to the
rol e of a mere stimul ant to the regeneration of the ol d order of
things. Andre Thirion had cl early grasped this paradoxical truth
when, i n Le Grand Ordinaire, he offered a jocular demonstration of
how i ncest can serve to buttress the stabi l i ty of the family:
"Our miseries are due to the fact that we have forgotten the
ol d ways, " decl ared our fri end Moscheles i n grave tones as
he was getti ng his circumcised member sucked by hi s
youngest daughter Sarah, who was barely thirteen. "Modern
l i fe has devalued the pure j oys of home and hearth, and
every day the practice of sports takes children a l i ttle further
away from their parents, and exposes them to a thousand
temptati ons. ( No, Sarah! Work on the head-how many
times do I have to tell you! And for goodness sake don' t be
afraid to use your tongue as much as you can! ) One only
needs think of the extreme freedom of manners, i n fact the
sheer l icence, that permits the horri fyi ng way couples dress
at bal l s, in the street or in public parks. As for the l atest,
campi ng hol i days, they encourage a quite i ndecent promi s
cui ty, i ndeed I can' t see how campi ng di ffers from vagrancy
pure and si mpl e. And have you ever read the columns i n
some of the women's weekl ies? They actual l y recommend
l ove affairs! Adultery i s supposed to be a good thing! Sarah,
come on, girl ! Don't go to sleep on the j ob! "
63
CHAPTER 3
TRANS F ORMI NG
THE WORLD
REVOLUTI ONARY I DEOLOGY
The fail ure of the Barres tri al , as of al l other efforts to equi p Dada
with a social and poli ti cal consciousness, led to the adopti on of
Marxi sm, as revised and corrected by Leni n, and to the abandon
ment of Dada's two great enterprises-the quest for total negati on
and the proj ect of a col l ective poetry. The latter, had i t succeeded,
woul d have evolved i nto a critical theor i n search of i ts practi cal
self-real i zati on through the overthrow of all the condi ti ons present
ly i mposed on the worl d and on everyday l i fe. As we have noted, the
Surreali st group at i ts very i nception-unsurpri si ngly, i n vi ew of the
artistic preoccupations of i ts founders-already bore the traces of
thi s twofol d renunci ati on. Thi s was the root, furthermore, of a gUi l ty
consci ence whose persi stence throughout the enti re histor of the
movement mani fested i tself as a fundamental and unshakeabl e
despair and a continual hankeri ng, i n consequence, for sel f-justi fi ca
tions and exorci sms. Thi s despair of the ego, whi ch i n time devel
oped existenti al overtones, was Simul taneously contai ned and com
bated by the Surreal ists' l eftism. Unti l their break wi th the
Communi st Party, they accepted a functi onal rol e i n the pol i ti cal
realm; thereafter that rol e became a caricature, and remai ned so unti l
the advent of a compl etely new offi ci al leftism i n 1968.
The words that occur most frequently i n Surreal ist i deology are
"revolution" and "Iove", and i t must be said that, no matter how con
fusedly and abstractly they may be used, certai nly no i nfamy attach
es to these words-no bl oodstains i ntel lectual or otherwise. There i s
i ndeed somethi ng very touchi ng about Peret and Breton's ti rel ess
efforts to keep their ideol ogy pure-or, as Breton so l oved to say,
"immacul ate"-especi al ly si nce, qua i deol ogy, it was i mpure by defi
ni ti on. Frequently thi s mi x of ri gour and naIvety, produced in a con
text of pragmatism or tactical manoeuvri ng, would acquire the poet
ic aspect of a chi l di sh vi rtue ("chi ldi sh" bei ng understood i n the pos
i tive sense that i t had for Fourier) . Here, for i nstance, i s Breton
speaki ng at the Barcel ona Ateneo on 17 November 1922:
67
There is onl y one thing that can get us out, if only for a
moment, of the horrible cage in which we are trapped. That
thing is revol ution-any revol ution, no matter how
bloody-and to this day I cal l for it with al l my might I am
sorry if Dada did not turn out to be that revolution, but you
have to understand that nothing else much matters to me.
Breton made himsel f even cl earer in the collective manifesto "La
Revol ution d'abord et toujours" [ Revolution First and Forever]'
reprinted in Number 4 of La Revolution Surrealiste ( 1 5 October 1 925) ,
asserting that "the idea of Revolution i s t he safeguard of everything
that is best and most effective in the individual ". We may reasonably
take this libertarian sentiment, to which Breton and Peret woul d
always remain l oyal ( even if Breton occasional l y failed to live up to
it in practice), as embodying precisely that element of "innocence"
which kept Surrealism at arm's l ength from Bolshevism and ul timately
meant that the movement's heyday woul d be remembered for its
attempt (quite rare in history) to create an innocent ideology.
This attitude al so accounts for the charming lyricism which
compensated for Surrealism's l ack of analysis: "I move through a
l andscape," wrote Rene Char in Le Surrealisme au Service de la Reolution,
Number 3, "where Revolution and Love together il l uminate amazing
perspectives and del iver shattering disqUisitions. "
The very confusion that enveloped the notion of revolution
al l owed it to encompass the daydreams of subjectivity, the human pas
sions, the "i ll tv l ive, the vi ulence or i ndividual demands-indeed
everything that tended to resist being reduced and manipulated by
bureaucratic revolutions. But this "everthing", sad to say, was just
what Surrealism could apprehend only in bits and pieces, in fragments
which in their fagmentariness were inevitably inconsequential .
To begin with, sincerity and anger still took precedence over
concern wi th the poetic image. Thus Desnos's "La Revolution, c'est
a- dire la Terreur" [Revolution, That Is To Say, Terror], in LA Revolution
Surrealiste, Number 3 , was able to recapture the finest libertarian
cadences of an earlier day:
68
But what a rel i ef it would be to witness a methodi cal purge
from the popul ati on of all founders of fami l i es, all doers of
good works ( chari ty i s a mark of degeneracy) , al l pri ests
and pastors ( l et us not forget that crew) , all sol di ery, al l
those peopl e who, i f they fi nd a wallet i n the street, wi l l
i mmedi ately return i t to i ts rightful owner, al l fathers I l a
Cornei l l e, al l mothers of exempl arily l arge fami l i es, al l
deposi tors i n savi ngs banks (worse than t he capi tal i sts ) ,
the pol i ce a s a body, men a nd women of letters, i nventors
of serums agai nst epi demi cs, "benefactors of humani ty",
di spensers and reci pi ents of compassion-i f onl y al l thi s
rabbl e woul d just di sappear! The greatest Revol uti ons are
born of strict adherence to a si ngle pri nci pl e; the moti ve
for the Revol uti on that i s comi ng wi l l be the pri nci pl e of
absolute freedom.
I n this admirable l ast sentence Desnos unequivocally defends a
genui ne col l ecti ve poetry agai nst the appropri ati on of the
Revolution of 1 9 1 7 by the Bolsheviks and their State. As much can
not be sai d of Eluard's ambi guous comments i n L Revolution Surreal is te,
Number 4 (5 July 1 925) , apropos of a publi c decl aration by the
Philosophies group:
The opti mi sm of t he Clarte people shone i n al l i ts glory
beneath the hammer- and-si ckle sun of a medi ocre regi me
founded, just l ike the capi tali st regi me, on the faci l e and
repugnant reign of work. Truth to tel l , i t barel y matters to
those who are born revoluti onaries that the i nequality of
cl asses i s unjust.
That El uard could thus quite rightly condemn the reign of
work, and then i n the very next breath, with unparal l eled stupi di ty,
di sparage the class struggl e, gives us some clue as to how it was that
the Surreal ists ( always thought of as cl owns by even the most pri
mary and l east cultivated of Marxists) were able for a ti me to accept
the role of faithful disci pl es, first to the Communi st Party and l ater
to Trotsky.
69
Three months later, however,
E
luard had cl early made progress,
for he si gned the joi nt Surrealist- Clare mani festo L Riolution d'abord et
toujours , which i ncluded the pronouncement: "We are not Utopians:
we conceive of the comi ng Revolution as strictly social in character. "
Unfortunately, the social character i n questi on was that of soci al
oppressi on, as per the Bolshevi k model . Breton, i n Le Surrealisme au
Service de l a Revolution, Number 2, concl uded a discussi on of "The
Rel ati onship between Brai n Work and Capi tal" wi th a proto-Maoi st
exhortati on:
there is no need to give house- room to speci fical ly i ntel l ec
tual pleadi ngs which, i nasmuch as they have any justi fi ca
ti on at al l , have no busi ness mani festi ng themselves i n the
form of vain corporati st campai gns but ought far rather to
persuade those who suffer in thi s way in the present order
of thi ngs to serve the prol etariat's admi rable cause unre
servedly, and treat that cause just as if it were thei r own.
The notion of i ntel lectuals servi ng the people ( a watered-down
versi on of Blanqui's theory) was one of the most laughable i deas that
the Surreal ists ever espoused. Dada had poi nted out the congeni tal
impotence of i ntel l ectuals as such, condemned as they were to reign
over a dead planet and i ssue decrees wi th no force i n law unti l such
time as the State's real laws assigned these ghosts a role i n the general
system of appearances and l i es. A worl d away from Dada's radical -
woul d come l ater) which the Communi st Party coul d turn on and off
l i ke a tap. The scandal at the Closerie des Li l as i n July 1 925 aptly
foreshadowed the Red Guards' "storm in a teacup of piss".
Surrealism's leftist cri ti que was not al ways wi thout merit: an
exhi bi ti on called 'The Truth About the Col oni es" (September 1 93 t )
was a case i n poi nt. But i f the Surreal i sts occasi onal l y became the
cri ti cal consciousness of the Communi st Party, the Communi sts
never gave a hoot for these butterfl i es and thei r fasci nati on wi th that
great proletari at- crushi ng machi ne, the Party bureaucracy.
70
I n Legitime deense [Sel f- Defence, 1 926], Breton wri tes: "Upon
reflecti on, I do not know why I should abstai n any l onger from say
i ng that L'Humaniti-hi l di sh, decl amatory, unnecessarily cretin ising
i s an unreadable newspaper, utterly unworthy of the rol e of prol e
tari an educati on i t cl ai ms to assume. " " I cannot understand, " he goes
on, "that on the road of revolt there should be a right and a l eft . " "I
say that the revoluti onary fl ame burns where it l i sts, and that i t i s not
up to a smal l band of men, in the period of trnsition we are living through,
to decree that i t can burn only here or there. " Conspi cuously absent
from al l thi s discussi on i s the prol etariat, and Rene Daumal i s ri ght
to direct his i rony at the supposed Marxists of the Party and the l eft
wi ng sects, whose "total fai l ure to comprehend the di alecti c makes
them i nfi ni tely more i gnorant than absolutely any revoluti onary
worker, for whom the very least that may be said is that he lives the
dialectic" .
Needless to say, merely by imagi ni ng that the masses mi ght be
reached via the Communi st Party, Surrealism automatically prevented
itsel f-quite asi de from the grotesque nature of such an i l l usi on
from speaki ng the l anguage of revolution or from ever devel opi ng a
radical discourse. The i dea of a poetry made by al l , had it ever been
properly analysed and carried to its l ogical conclusi on, woul d have
been found to embody the revolutionary theory of general i zed sel f
management-that "i nvi si bl e ray", to borrow Breton's descri pti on of
the surreal , "whi ch wi l l make i t possible for us one day to rout our
adversaries".
As I have tried to show above, Surrealism di d have a theory,
al bei t a l atent, fragmentar one, qUickly swal l owed up by i deol ogy.
It was concerned with privileged moments of l i fe and the quest for
such moments, wi th l ove and its subversive potenti al in everyday
l i fe, wi th the analysis of the quotidian and i ts al i enati ons. It never
rose to the l evel of a cri ti que of Bolshevism, even though Breton was
capabl e, bel atedly, of offeri ng an implicit correcti on to hi s appal l i ng
juxtaposi ti on, i n a sentence such as the fol l owi ng, of the author of
Poisies and the author of What Is To Be Dono: "Surreal i sm i s part of a
71
vast undertaking, of that reconstructi on of the universe to which
both Lautreamont and Leni n commi tted themselves utterly. "
When polemics broke out between the Surreal i sts and thei r ol d
fri end Pi erre Navi l l e, the opposi ti on between cul ture and soci al
organi zation was addressed by nei ther si de. "Quarrel s of the i ntel
l ect" , wrote Navi l l e i n La Reolution e t les intellectuels ( 1 926) , "are
absolutely vai n in face of this one uni fied condi ti on [ wage- l abour] . "
A few pages earl i er, however, he had al ready exposed the l i mi ts of
hi s own intellect and of hi s thesi s, once agai n bri ngi ng up a di l em
ma that had haunted the Surreal i sts ever si nce their fai lure to under
stand Dada: "00 the Surreal ists bel i eve in a l i berati on of the mi nd
pri or to the abol i ti on of bourgeoi s condi ti ons of material l i fe, or do
they thi nk that a revolutionary mi nd can onl y come i nto existence
i n the wake of a successsfully compl eted revol uti on?"
Everyone stuck to thei r own posi ti on, and no criti que of social
separati ons was ever broached by any of the parti es. Thus Breton
held that revolution must concern the facts and the mi nd, Navi l l e that
i t must affect the facts before it can affect the mi nd, while Artaud held
out for the primacy of the mi nd i n the genesis of revoluti on.
I t was not l ong before the Stal i ni st vi rus made i ts appearance.
No one bl i nked when Georges Sadoul , as part of a denunci ati on of
the French police i n the December 1 929 i ssue of L Repo/ution
Surrealiste, stated flatly that he would l i ke "to take thi s opportunity to
hai l the GPU, a counter- pol i ce i n the serice of the prol etari at, ever
bit as necessary to the Russi an Revol uti on as the Red Army" . Ann
barely a murmur was heard when Aragon, i n "Red Front" ( 1 93 1 ) ,
famously cried "Long l ive the GPU, dialectical fi gure of heroi sm".
Only Roland de Renevi l l e, then cl ose to the Grand Jeu group, ven
tured to point out that Aragon's poem "ends with a hymn to the GPU
whi ch, seen from the prophetic standpoi nt of the mind, becomes
simply a hymn to the pol ice" .
Later, after the brak with the Stal i ni sts, Breton turned more
unequivocally towards Trotsky. With Trotsky he col l aborated on the
mani festo "For an I ndependent Revolutionary Art" ( 1 93 8) . (At
72
Totsky's request, Diego Rivera co-si gned with Breton i n hi s stead. )
Before l ong, however, Breton was admi tti ng his astonishment that
Trotsky could i nvoke the ol d Jesui t precept that "the end justi fi es the
means", and he cal l ed i mmediately for "a thoroughgoi ng criti que of
certai n aspects of the thought of Leni n and even of Marx". He hi m
sel f never fol l owed up on thi s.
After the Second Worl d War the pol itical acti on of Surreal i sm
was i ntermi ttent and scattershot. The discovery of Fourier mi ght
perhaps have underpi nned an overal l recasti ng of the movement, but
Breton woul d always prefer Fourier the vi si onary, Fourier the poet of
anal ogy, to Fourier the theorist of a radically new soci ety.
Peret and Breton's l ast successors took Cuba i nstead of the USSR
as the object of thei r enthusiasm. Echoi ng the someti me si ni ster
good faith of a Sadoul , Jean Schuster would write, in Batai lles pour
Ie surrealisme:
What coul d possi bl y be more legiti mate than that a revol u
ti onary soci ety, i n the process of constructi ng social i sm,
should fi nd itsel f obl i ged, as Cuba does today, to requi re a
surplus of labour from i ts members, thus ensuri ng that work
be as fairly shared and equally remunerated as possi bl e?
73
AN I NFORAL ORGANI ZATI ON
Spurred by i ts own i nternati onal i sm and ai ded by the cri si s condi
ti ons i n al l i ndustri al i zed countri es, Surreal i sm swarmed far and
wi de. Groups model l ed on the French one sprang up i n Rumani a,
Yugosl avi a, Czechosl ovaki a, Scandi navi a, Bel gi um, I taly, South
Ameri ca, the Canary I sl ands, Mexi co, Japan, Hai ti . Di rect contacts
general l y accompani ed the establ i shment of rel ati ons between
groups. The French group set the tone-which meant, most often,
that Breton set the tone.
The basis of recrui tment, i ndeed the basis of the group, had
much to do, no doubt, wi th Breton's claim in Les Pas perdus that "One
publ i shes to fi nd peopl e, and for no other reason"-an ambi guous
statement i ndeed i f one consi ders how generous, yet at the same
time how authoritari an, the author of Nadja could be. Breton was a
bri l l i ant thi nker, but he was less radi cal than Peret. The ardour he
brought to fri endships whether transi ent or enduri ng was such as to
pl unge hi m now i nto bl i nd fai th, now i nto wi l d rage. Even though
he was as fond of i mposi ng his views as others were to obl i ge hi m i n
thi s, the fact remai ns that the Surreal i st group never devel oped any
but the most flui d of hi erarchi es. Deeper probi ng would doubtless
assign Benj ami n Peret a more i mportant rol e, for, so far from bei ng
the second- i n- command, the fai thful l i eutenant that an obtuse view
of thi ngs has portrayed, Peret was in fact the most i ndependent and
1 t brtari an member of the mcvcmnt. I t V3S thJnks to hi tli , i n all
likelihood, that nearly al l the group's deci si ons were arri ved at in a
l argely democratic way.
Breton was the centre, certai nly, but thi s al so made hi m i nto
a target , and those whom he al l owed hi msel f to treat as fri ends ,
j ust as much as those who al l owed themsel ves to put up wi t h hi m
as a fri end, rarely l os t an opportuni ty to mock hi s seri ousness, hi s
l ack of humour, hi s tantrums , hi s tendency to choose peopl e's
aperi ti fs for them. The most seri ous charges, no doubt, were
made by Desnos:
74
Andre Breton detests Eluard and hi s poetry. I have seen
Breton throw Eluard's books i nto the fi re. Admi ttedly, i t was
on a day when the author of LAmour La Poe;e had refused to
loan him ten thousand francs-that is, unl ess Breton was
prepared to sign a bill of exchange. So why does Breton
conti nue to si ng the prai ses of Eluard and hi s work? Because
Paul Eluard, as Communist as he claims to be, i s a property
speculator, and the money he gets from sel l i ng swampland
lots to workers i s used for buyi ng the pi ctures and Afri can
art i n which the pai r of them deal .
Andre Breton detests Aragon, and never tires of recount
i ng hi s i nfami es . Why then does he show hi m any consi d
erati on? Because he is afrai d of hi m, and he knows that a
break wi th Aragon would spell disaster for himself.
Andre Breton once broke off with Tristan T zara for the
very preci se reason that when we attended Tzara's "Eveni ng
of the Bearded Heart", the Dada- i n-chi ef had us arrested.
Breton knows thi s very wel l . He saw and heard T zara
denounci ng us to the pol icemen just as clearly as I did. Why
i s he now reconci led with T zara? Because Tri stan T zara
buys Negro feti sh obj ects and pai nti ngs and Andre Breton
sells them.
I II an article of hi s on pai nti ng, Andre Breton takes Joan
Mi r6 to task for havi ng made a l i ttle money al ong the way.
But it was he, Breton, who, havi ng bought the pai nti ng
"Pl oughed Land" for fi ve hunded francs, turned around and
sold it for si x or ei ght thousand. So Mi r6 may have come
across a l i ttle money along the way, but i t was Breton who
stuffed his pockets wi th i t.
As seri ous as a pope, as digni fied as a magus, as pure as
El i aki m, Andre Breton i s the author of Surrealism and Painting.
I t is a curious fact, however, that the only painters who find
unconditional favour i n his eyes are those with whom he
can do busi ness.
What Desnos rightly condemns here, albeit after the fact, is
i ndicative at the ver least of a malaise in the Surrealists' interpersonal
rel ationships. What is this concern with the art market, repressed
75
or conceal ed behi nd the fi rmament of i deas, if not hi story's know
i ng wi nk i n the di recti on of those who have been payi ng i t no heed?
The basic fraud perpetrated by Surreal i sm thus emerges quite clearly
on the factual pl ane: the ideology of an art that seres l i fe cannot l ong
prevail over the reality of art and surival bei ng pressed i nto the ser
vice of a spectacular soci ety founded on the commodi ty system.
In the 1 9 October 1924 issue of hi s revi ew 3 9 1 , Picabi a
described Surreal i sm as "nothi ng but Dada i n the travesti ed form of
an adverti si ng bal l oon for Breton and Co. " Surreal i sm i ndeed gave
the appearance of bei ng above al l a scheme whereby Breton sought
to establ i sh an objective basi s for his subjective choi ces, tastes or
passi ons. That he shoul d also make busi ness deals under cover of the
movement was i n the order of thi ngs-part of the shameful aspect of
all i deol ogy. But si mply to denounce Breton was not enough: what
needed closer scruti ny was Surreal i sm's unheal thy and suspect
defence of the work of art (poetry, pai nti ng, object or i mage) .
As soon as art was rei nvested wi th val ue, the natural arrivisme of
the arti st, compl ete wi th the desire to make a name and promote an
oeuvre, was bound to foll ow. This tendency, though offi ci al ly con
demned by Surreal i sm, existed wi thi n the group i tself. Breton may
have written, in Pleine marge [ Wi de Margi n] ( t 940), that "I am not for
adepts"; the fact remai ns that, except for Artaud and Peret, he was
never to have anythi ng but adepts, and i ndeed he took very good
care of thei r proper i ni ti ati on, so as never to be surrounded by any
thi ng but discreet approbation
I t i s i n the shadow of thi s parti cularly di stressi ng ki nd of behav
i our that the question of breaks and expul si ons has to be consi dered.
"Wi thout bei ng obsessed by personal rancour and refusi ng to derive
our private angui sh on every occasi on from the soci al condi ti ons
i mposed upon us, we are obl i ged to turn around at every moment,
and to hate"-thus Breton i n Legitime de1ense. There is no denyi ng that
expul si ons and the breaki ng off of rel ati ons are the only arms avai l
abl e to an i ntel l ectual group. The probl em i n the case of the
Surreal i sts was that the struggle agai nst compromi se was waged from
76
the standpoi nt of an i deology, that is to say, from the standpoi nt of
an i ni ti al compromi se struck wi th the rul i ng order.
The Surreal i st group expelled quite a few notori ous i diots who
had been admi tted i n the first pl ace out of misplaced i ndulgence.
Joseph Del tei l , author of a l i fe of Joan of Are, and Maxime
Alexandre, who would later convert to Catholici sm under the aus
pi ces of Paul Claudel , are cases i n point, and there were others. This
by no means prevented the Surrealists from maki ng common cause
with such mediocrities as Camus and I onesco, or, especially in the
post-war peri od, from keepi ng company with some truly pathetic
characters.
There were expul si ons, too, that were utterly well founded:
expulsi ons for pol i tical reasons, or on the grounds of i rreconci l able
di fferences ( as wi th Artaud) , or for atti tudes that were repugnant
(Aragon, Sadoul , Eluard, Dal l) . And fi nal ly there were expulsi ons, at
once the most si gni fi cant and the most questi onable ones-and the
most i ndicative of the movement's malaise and its need to exorcise
i t-of artists or wri ters seduced by the appeal of money and accl ai m.
Surreal i sm demanded of i ts exponents that they not parti ci pate
in the spectacular and commodity- driven system of which the move
ment i tsel f partook wi l ly- ni l ly. When Breton threw Phi l i ppe
Soupault and Robert Desnos out, accusi ng them of l i terary coquetry,
he would have done well to heed the already resonant cauti onary
words of Rene Daumal : "Beware, Andre Breton, lest you fi gure i n
future textbooks of l i terary history, remember that the only disti nc
ti on we ever aspi red to was to go down i n the annals of cataclysms. "
The fact i s that Surrealism accepted compromi se-up to a poi nt.
I t was acceptable to deal i n works of art, or to achi eve disti ncti on by
produci ng such works, but only to a certai n degree. And in Breton's
eyes the gaugi ng of that degree was hi s prerogative. "I t has often
struck me", noted Victor Crastre in his Le Drme du surrea!isme, "that
active spi rits were rare in the group. All decisions were taken by a
small directorate comprised of Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Desnos, Peret
and Leiris, then accepted wi thout further di scussi on. Critical reac-
77
ti ons were voiced as i nfrequently among the Surreal i sts as in any
hi ghl y organized party. "
How coul d a group with such a passive atti tude towards real
struggles i n the outsi de worl d condemn passi vi ty i n i ts own mem
bers? How could a group accepti ng of hi erarchi es oppose ambi ti on
and opportuni sm? And how coul d a group whose i nsti ncts were
essenti al l y cultural be expected to wi thstand the co- optive mecha
ni sms of a cul ture that was i nexorably fal l i ng under the sway of the
economy and i ts representati ons?
78
CHAPTE R 4
PROMOTI NG THE
I MAGE
AS OBJ E CT
LANGUAGE AND ITS SUBVERSION
The adventure of the arts ( pai nti ng, sculpture, poetry, l i terature,
musi c) passes i n i ts decl i ne through three essential phases; a phase of
sel-liquidation ( Mal evich's "white square", MuttlDuchamp's uri nal
rebaptized "Fountai n", Dadai st word-coll ages, Finnegans Wake, certai n
composi ti ons by Varese) ; a phase of sel-parody ( Sati e, Pi cabi a,
Duchamp) ; and a phase of sel-transcendence, exemplified i n the directly
l ived poetry of revoluti onary moments, in theory as i t takes hol d of
the masses, or i n this notice posted on Saragossa Cathedral by
Ascaso and DUIUti , and fol lowed up by the acti on announced;
"Havi ng learnt that i njustice reigns i n Saragossa, Ascaso and Durruti
have come here to shoot the Archbishop. "
Surrealism partook of each of these three tendencies but gave
itself over to none of them; on the contrary, it deformed them to the
benefit of the same separate art and separate thought whose demise
they were i ntended to embody. Hence the real conflict was trans
muted i nto i deology, i nto a system of i deas which was cut off from
real i ty, simultaneously conceali ng and distorti ng i t. On the moral
plane this process created a confrontati on between an ethic of puri
ty and a surrender to compromise; on the aesthetic pl ane, submi ssi on
to the rul i ng l anguage of words, si gns or art stood opposed to the
refusal of that l anguage, i ts redirection, subversi on, and replacement
by the magic of i mages and objects drawn from the adventure of
everyday l i fe.
True to Dada, Franci s Picabia passed defi ni tive j udgement on art
when he described it as "a pharmaceutical product for imbeci l es".
And here i s Artaud, as l ate as 1 927, i n Le Pese-ner [The Nervometer l
"All wri ti ng is pi g-swi l l . People who come down from their cl ouds to
try and say anythi ng at al l about what is goi ng on in their heads are
pi gs. All l i terati are pi gs, especi al ly those of the present time. "
But i t was not i n the same spirit as Picabia or Artaud that
Surrealism rejected art and writing. Its rejection concerned the wri t
i ng only of an Andre Gi de, an Anatole France or a Paul C1audel , the
8 1
art onl y of the Cubists, the Abstracti oni sts or the Salon pai nters.
Even i n 1 952, speaki ng on Ode, Breton still fel t compel l ed to assai l
what he cal l ed a "marvel l ous speci men of a species that we Surreal i sts
have ever wished exti nct, that of the professi onal littirteur, the i ndi
vi dual perpetually gnawed by the need to wri te, to publ i sh, to be
read, transl ated, commented upon-the type of person who is sure
that he wi l l "hook" us, and that he wi l l "hook" posterity too, through
the sheer quanti ty of his producti on, just so l ong as thi s i s not
attai ned at the expense of styl e. "
Unfortunately the di sti ncti on i mpl i ed i s a completely false one,
and i ndeed al l ows the very worst varieties of l i terature to escape
rebuke. For proof of thi s, were proof needed, one has only to re- read
al l the l i terary testi moni al s, all the effusi ve prefaces, al l the
backscratchi ng puffery that the Surreal i sts al l owed themselves to
produce as favours to fri ends; al ternatively, one has onl y to contem
plate the unspeakable exercises i n style publ i shed i n t he Surreal i st
peri odi cals of the postwar peri od.
At the same ti me, however, thei r creative experi mentati on
brought the Surreal i sts face to face wi th the redoubtabl e l anguage
whi ch is not merel y the i di om of Gi dean l i terature but, far more
broadly, the domi nant mode of al l communi cati on, all expresssi on.
They were thus very <oon deal i ng wi t h t wo correlati ons: that
between thi s domi nant l anguage and the forces of repressi on and
decepti on, and that between l i vi ng speech and revol t. I n Legitime
defense Breton ri diculed Henri Barhl !<<f, the Part i ntellectual , who
was cal l i ng for arti sti c renewal , in the fol l owi ng terms: "What does
this artistic renaissance matter to us? Long l ive the social revol uti on,
and i t al one! We have a serious account to settle wi th the mi nd, we
are too uncomfortable i n our thought . . . . "
Peret al so took ai m at the al i enati ng character of detached
thought and of the prevai l i ng use of l anguage: 'There are certai n
sentences that completely prevent me from maki ng l ove. " I mpl i ed
here, of course, i s the existence of a l anguage (understood broadly
enough to i nclude attitudes, songs, gestures, speech, and so on)
82
whi ch on the contrary encourages us to make love, and i ndeed to
make revol uti on. Surreal i sm, though it may not have overl ooked
such a l anguage compl etel y, cannot be sai d to have come very cl ose
to i t. The movement's confi nement withi n cul ture l i mi ted i t to devel
opi ng and experi menti ng wi th a mere shadow of the revol uti on of
l anguage, and this under strictly isol ated conditions: the Surreal i sts
champi oned an emanci pati on of words and i mages that mi stook a
certai n autonomy for real freedom and chance abstract associ ati ons
for real gauntl ets thrown down to the ol d worl d.
Sti l l , the more radical fel t the temptation to i denti fy poetry, as
the mai n counter- l anguage, wi th revoluti onary theory, whi ch
detaches itsel f from the real struggles of the proletari at, then rej oi ns
them i n the shape of a radi cal i zi ng practice. Thus Andre Thiri on and
Pi erre Yoyotte di d produce a number of fine Marxi st analyses, even
if critical thought was not si gni ficantly advanced thereby. The
noti on that the true l anguage of poetry governs acti on and con
tributes to i ts ful fi l ment must i n fact be sought elsewhere. Certai nl y
such a l anguage has nothi ng i n common with the verbi age and the
Stal i ni zi ng gul l i bi l i ty of Aragon's "Red Front". Nor does i t j i be wi th
i nsults and sarcasm ( as i n "Jean Cassou, Dog-Savant; Marcel Arl and,
the Town Sewer; Albert Thibaudet, Fri end to Tooth Decay; Maurice
Maeterl inck, Featherless Bi rd; Paul Valery, Natural - Born Cl own;
Cocteau the Sti nki ng Beast", etc. , etc. ) , unl ess such i nsults follow or
announce events cal l i ng for an i mmediate scandal ous or vi ol ent
response. A case i n poi nt i s the pamphlet A Corse, publ ished on the
occasi on of the death of Anatole France ( 1 924) . I n sharp contrast to
the ordinary use of the l i terary i nsul t, A Corse broke wi th the con
venti on accordi ng to whi ch no i l l shoul d be spoken of the dead, and
effectively rehabi l i tated desecrati on; words here were not separate
from acti on, i ndeed thei r role was to occasi on acti on, and to estab
l i sh a precedent.
Si mi l arly, a genui nel y poetic functi on i s met by the fol l owi ng
l i nes, publ ished upon the death of Joffre, but three years before that
of Poi ncare:
83
Marshal Joffre
Marshal Foch
Georges Clemenceau
and President Poincare
will ever endure in our memor
Peret and Eluard strove to bri dge the gap between poetry and
the act envisaged, but i t has to be said that their call to murder i n the
fol lowi ng passage l ies open to the charge which revolutionary tac
ti cs must perforce level at any gratuitous terrorism:
In France our own shithouse Mussol i ni has once more crawled
out of the sewer. Poincare presides as the "average Frenchman"
over banal events and rotting straw men. How much longer
can he stay the obviously willing hand of the assassin?
As a rle i t was Peret who unerri ngly found the sensual l anguage
of the true cry of rage and execrati on. His Je ne mange pas de ce pain-Ii
puts one in mind of the chants i ntoned by ancient Welsh bards,
which accordi ng to Jul ius Caesar struck such terror i nto enemies that
they had been known to fal l dead on the spot. Rarely has the power
of contempt, in the struggle agai nst the oppressiveness and stupidity
of authority, attai ned such an i ntensi ty ot raw el oquence. The hero
ism of the patriot will remai n a dead letter unti l we forget the words:
Rot Cundami;ii de fa Tour
Rot you spineless shit.
And great leader will have to ponder their weight in history so long as
little children conti nue to recite Peret's ditty about "Tger" Clemenceau:
He has croaked
Eat him maggots "to the last ditch"
Devour this corpse
And let his bones whistle up the revolution.
84
When it came to the l anguage of practi ce, however, Peret deal t
merely wi th i ts most di rectly emotional and immediate dimensi on .
Like al l the Surreali sts , whose real practice was more artistic than
revoluti onary, he never tested radical theory, redUci ng i t i nstead to a
challenge to the rul i ng i deological l angage that was i tself couched
i n i deological terms.
Breton i s on the way to a serious analysis of the l anguage of the
domi nant ideol ogy i n "I ntroduction to the Di scourse on the Pauci ty
of Real i ty", when he notes that "words tend to group themselves
accordi ng to speci fic affi ni ti es whose general result i s to recreate the
same old worl d over and over agai n". But he fai l s to grasp that such
a language i s si mply the most hi ghly sophisticated and persuasive
form of the i deological system which power (that of the rul i ng cl ass
or caste) uses to assert i tsel f. Thus when he goes on, apropos of
words, "I t is enough that we di rect our criticism at the l aws that gov
ern thei r assembly", he refuses to understand that only the l anguage
of total subversi on-only radical theory or practical poetry-an
successfully destroy both the domi nant language and the old worl d.
By contrast, to assert that "words pl ay, words make l ove" is to cl ai m
to be combati ng the l anguage of power whi le actually renewi ng and
moderni zi ng that l anguage and givi ng i t a fresh appearance of l i fe.
The most lucid tendencies withi n Surrealist ideology were forever
seeki ng to retrieve the repressed radical moment of Dada's final period,
and i ndeed several such tendencies (paralleling differi ng attitudes
towards art) are clearly disti nguishable, i ncludi ng self-parody, the hope
for transcendence, the will to destrction, and the l iterar opti on.
The subversive nature of Dadai sm's word-collages was i nherited
by the Surreali sts i n i ts pl ayful aspect only. I t i s true that Marcel
Duchamp's dall i ance wi th i nfectious phonetic puns and wordpl ay
retai ned a certai n demysti fyi ng power:
Le systeme metrite par UI temps blel0rrhagieux
The metritic system [ not the metric system] during blenorrhagic
[as opposed to orageux, or stormy] weather
85
Du dos de la cuiller au cui de la douri riere
From the back of the spoon to the arse of the dowager
La bagarre d'Austerlitz
The dust-up [not the Bataille, and not the Gare] of Austerl i tz
Rrose Se1avy trouve qu'un insecticide doit coucher avec sa mere avant de la tuer
Rrose Sel avy feels that an i nsecti ci de ought to sleep wi th its
mother before ki l l i ng her
Les punaises sont de rigueur
Fleas are required
Mi chel Leiris uses a si mi l ar method to i l l umi nate the mysterious
anal ogies thrown up by the reveries of subjectivi ty, by the secret
agencies of the mi nd, as wi tness these two pl ays on words from hi s
"Glossai re: j'y serre mes gloses" [ Gl ossary: Where I Keep My Glosses}
Epaves: dies pavent la mer
Wrecks : they pave the sea
Fantome: enfant! par les heaumes
Ghost: somethi ng born of hel mets
The second "dtfi ni tion" here contai nc ; rnvprt reference to the fan. -
tastic scene in Horace Walpol e's The Castle of Otranto where a gigan
ti c hel met appears i n the castl e yard.
Whereas Lei ri s sought to uncover a l anguage whose flui di ty
al l owed it to express the vi ci ssitudes of subjectivi ty, whose reso
nances referred us to the i nner l ife of the i ndivi dual (several of
Lei ri s's books analyse l anguage as the receptacl e of a personal
mythology) , Breton for hi s part fostered bel i ef i n an objective
counter- language in which the connecti ons between words coul d
escape the control of the domi nant l anguage and i ts rati onal i ty. The
86
Surreali sts cl early bel i eved that the reigni ng language-in-itself coul d be
successful l y contested by means of an abstract form of language-or
itself. That there is such a thi ng as l anguage- for- i tsel f is ampl y demon
strated by the l anguage of revoluti onary moments. The si gns of that
l anguage are many and various, and they al l tend towards uni ficati on
i n a general i nsurrecti onal movement, i n a global transcendence.
Leiris showed thi s tendency at work i n the i ndividual ; the art of chi l
dren and the art of the mad exempl i fi ed i t in a parti al way. But it was
onl y i n such fragmented or epiphenomenal mani festati ons, unfortu
nately, that l anguage- for- i tself was perceived by Surreal i sm.
The Surreal i sts conceived of a counter- language-whi ch to
begin wi th never answered to anythi ng beyond a need to get out of
the rut of tradi ti onal poetry, to wri te a di fferent ki nd of poetry-as
an i mmedi ate given. Thi s enti rely l i terary requirement gave ri se to
research of two ki nds : research i nto the autonomy of the rel ati on
shi ps between words a nd research i nto the psychoanalytical uni ty of
those rel ati onshi ps.
Lautreamont's evocati on of "the chance encounter of a sewi ng
machi ne and an umbrel l a on a dissecti ng table" was the start i ng
poi nt for the Surreal ists' laboratory experi ments wi th l anguage. The
game of Exqui si te Corpse was based above all on the pri nci pl e of
obj ective chance. I t i s defi ned i n Breton and
E
luard's Dictionnaire abrege
du surreal isme [Abri dged Di cti onary of Surreal i sm, 1 938J as follows :
A folded-paper game in which sentences or pi ctures are cre
ated by several people, none of whom can tell what the con
tributi on of any precedi ng pl ayer may have been. The clas
si c exampl e, whi ch supplied the name of the game, is the
first sentence ever obtained in this way: "The exqui si te
corpse shal l dri nk the new wi ne. "
Breton proceeded, i n Communicating Vessels, to try and i denti fy an
i nternal l ogic common to al l sentences thus generated. The model,
once agai n, was Lautreamont's phrase:
87
Anyone who contemplates the extraordi nary power that
can be exerted upon the reader's mi nd by Lautreamont's cel
ebrated formulation, "as beauti ful . . . as the chance encounter
of a sewi ng machi ne and an umbrel l a on a dissecting table",
and who i s wi l l i ng to consult a key to the si mpl est of sexu
al symbol s, must quickly concede that thi s power derives
from the fact that the umbrel l a here can stand onl y for a
man, the sewi ng machi ne only for a woman ( thi s woul d be
true, moreover, for almost al l machi nes, a rei nforci ng factor
in this case bei ng that sewi ng machi nes, as i s well known,
are often put to onanistic uses by women) , and the dissect
ing table onl y for a bed-which i s itself the common mea
sure between l i fe and death.
When one compares Breton's observati ons wi th Lei ri s's
approach, the di fference is quite stri ki ng. Lei ri s sought to ci rcum
scribe the l anguage of deSire, whereas Breton wanted to establ i sh
and expl icate a new ki nd of beauty-to promote, i n short, a more
human aesthetic. Breton had one foot i n l i terature and the other i n
real i ty as directly experi enced. Hi s enti re work bears the traces of hi s
resul ti ng discomfort, even though he had the wi t to transform thi s
hobbl ed state i nto a thought of great el egance.
To the pol iti cal right of Breton, the l i terary opti on carried the
day. In the case of
E
luard, tor i nstance, that choi ce was unmi stakabl e:
"Lovers are not necessarily the authors of the most beautiful love
poems, and even when they are they do not make thei r l ove respon
SI ble for i t . " Here direct experI ence i s deemed less i mportant than its
representation, than its i mage-a perfect epi tome of the al i enati on
of l i fe by culture.
To Breton's l eft , meanwhi l e-i f we except Lei ri s, whose
research, though of genui ne i nterest, di d not l ead to any social prac
ti ce, and so degenerated i nto positivism-the memory of a possi ble
transcendence shaped two contrasti ng traj ectori es, that of Peret and
that of Artaud.
Apart from that portion of hi s work in whi ch he sought to push
poetic i nvective as far as i t woul d go ( notably J ne mange pas de ce pail-
88
Il) , Benjami n Peret devoted hi s energies to the constructi on of a ki nd
of l i ngui sti c Chateau de Si l l i ng whereby, much as de Sade aspired t o
produce an exhaustive catal ogue of sexual fantasi es, he strove t o
i nventory every conceivable metaphorical combi nati on. Peret was
undoubtedly the onl y person ever to create a counter- l i ngui sti c
worl d, a world directly accessible to al l chi l dren and i mpeni tent
dreamers, and a worl d whi ch cries out for soci al revol uti on as the
only natural means of exposi ng i ts profound banal i ty to al l :
I t was a great rage-the great rage of a faded flower tossed
upon a church roof-that now shook Nestor. "Just thi nk, "
America had tol d hi m, "I am Wurtemberg. " And when
Nestor had repl i ed that New York was not i n Wurtemberg,
America had retorted angri ly that New York had i ndeed
been the capi tal of Wurtemberg ever si nce the sea- l egged
squi d had dragged i nto its pi ncers, known as tentacles,
a chi l d hangi ng from a branch on Fourteenth Avenue l i ke a
cherry from an ol ive tree. Nestor, sure that he was in the
right, l i t up a pi pe that he had previously l oaded with pearl
oyster shel l s, whi ch al l owed him to say with pride, "I smoke
onl y pearl s. " lighti ng a pi pe is not enough, though-you
also have to smoke i t. Nestor soon found out that thi s was
an i mpossi bi l i ty. His pi pe was smoki ng but he was not.
( from La Brebis galante [The Amorous Ewe] )
The discovery of automatic wri ti ng compensated for the lack of
consistency in Dada's negativity, but i t meant that the aspi rati on to
a l anguage of the total i ty was now abandoned in favour of the search
for a merely l i ngui sti c total i ty. Automatic wri ti ng was Artaud's start
i ng- poi nt too, but he took the opposite tack to Peret, di recti ng his
attenti on to the i nner l i fe of the mi nd, to the drama of al i enated con
sci ousness. Though j ust as far removed as the other Surreal i sts from
the historical di mensi on of the antagoni sm between spontaneous
verbal associ ati ons and l anguage- i n- itself, Artaud did succeed in i so
l ati ng thi s contradi cti on and treati ng it as an ontol ogi cal mal ady, as
the curse of bei ng (whence hi s conti nual casting about for exorci sms
89
of one ki nd or another) . A manuscri pt of hi s pi npoi nts the ori gi n of
that osci l l ati on wi thi n whi ch he si tuated hi msel f, somewhere
between the disaster of wri ti ng on the one hand and spi ri tual and
physi cal disaster on the other:
In the realm of the determi nate, only those phrases whi ch
flow directly from the unconscious can ever reach ful l
flower. But i f perchance my consci ous mi nd awakes, ei ther
because [lacuna in manuscript], or because of an external
event, then I become aware of the obstacles that stand in
the way of the ful fi l ment of my thought. Such obstacles are
always of the same order: i deas are stri pped of thei r mean
i ng, of thei r neuronal or affective content, at whatever poi nt
i n thei r formati on or materi al i zati on one apprehends them,
at whatever pOi nt one becomes aware of thei r degenerati on,
thei r deflati on-and i n whatever sense one chooses to
understand the term "i deas". A ki nd of amnesi a i s i nvolved
here, but i t i s a physical amnesi a, an i nhi bi ti on of the cur
rent that bears expressi on al ong. A sudden upset or bl ock
age occurs, the lucid state produced by the active exerci se
of the mi nd i s brutally dispel l ed, and i deas are thrown i nto
turmoil because they cease bei ng grasped, because of the
di ssi pati on and di spersal of who knows what vi tal magnet
i sm. We enter a state of major confusi on whi ch we are
tempted to blame on a chaos of the mi nd, that i s, to treat
the mi nd as a great unregul ated mass, whereas in real i ty it is
si mpl y a void, and to seek remedy for what we assume to be
a transi ent rcntal pO\er1e5snesf i IIIUmenlary stumbi i ng
bl ock that can swi ftly be corrected for by the psyche's cen
tral functi on. We try changi ng the object of our i ntel l ectu
al activi ty, imagi ni ng that such a change i n ori entati on, by
bringi ng the mind to bear on a new and better chosen
real m, must perforce restore i ts vi tal i ty, but we are pl unged
i nstead i nto an atrocious despai r, a despai r rendered al l the
more fri ghtful i n that i t centres on nothi ng, i n that i t is no
l onger connected to the general desi ccati on of the i nner l i fe
of the emoti ons; a despai r, too, that is truly absolute,
because we perceive that it is the organ of i ntel lectual activ-
90
i ty i tself that has suffered a trauma, that thought is degen
erati ng, that the i mpulse to think has been prejudiced, that
our ani mal magnetism i s escapi ng i n every directi on, fai l i ng
to overcome the obstacles i n i ts path, peteri ng out at i ts
source, weakeni ng wi th every renewed effort. What i s more,
although a belated analysi s of our state of confusi on and
exacerbated weakness may be withi n our means, we are per
fectly i ncapable of descri bi ng the dysfunctions i t provokes
or of showi ng how every component of the personal i ty is
drawn i nto the debacl e, how even the ver feel i ng of the
ego's existence is overwhelmed by this despai r of the ego
and its possi bi l i ti es.
Somethi ng that Artaud and Peret had i n common was a bel i ef i n
archetypes. For both of them the impossi bi l ity of attai ni ng total
being or of accedi ng to the total i ty of language underlay a meta
physics i n whi ch a boundless sol i psi sm al l owed i tself to be satisfied
with enti ti es pre- exi stent to all real i ty whose discovery and defi ni
ti on, and the modi fi cati on of whose signs, are possi hl e onl y by way
of acts of cl ai rvoyance. Thus Artaud's analysi s of the hi dden mean
i ngs to be found i n rock formations, in hi s Voyage au pays des
Tarahumaras [Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras]
'
has a parallel
i n Perer's discusssi on of the pai nter Wil fedo Lam (al though Peret
does feel the need for some ki nd of materi al underpi nni ng) :
The true mi ssi on of the artist, whether pai nter or poet, has
always been to rediscover withi n himself the archetypes
that underpi n poeti c thought, and to rei nvest that thought
wi th a fresh emoti onal charge so that between hi msel f and
hi s peers a current of energy mi ght be set in moti on which
will be al l the more i ntense i nasmuch as these reactivated
archetypes emerge as the clearest and newest expressi on of
the determi ni ng factors in his background.
Mi dway between Artaud and Peret, and given to vOi ci ng reser
vati ons about strai ghtforward l iterary or pictori al work precisely
9 1
because hi s de facto posi ti ons tended to justify them, Breton devot
ed a great deal of hi s attenti on to the metaphor as such, that is, to
the metaphor as an aesthetic factor.
An anti - aesthetic aesthete, Breton was often content to revive the
worm- eaten attractions of modern art's graveyards . Hi s famous sl o
gan, "Beauty wi l l be convul sive or wi l l not be at al l ", is more valuable
in i tself than any of the examples he offers in support of it. Perhaps
at some future hi gh poi nt i n the fi nal struggle this sl ogan wi l l i ndeed
become the watchword, but i n the context of Surreal i sm i tself i t was
never more than a gl i tteri ng trace of subjectivi ty and of everyday
adventure i nscribed on the tattered fabric of the rul i ng l anguage.
The first Maniesto procl ai med: "The marvel l ous is always beauti
ful , anythi ng marvell ous i s beauti ful , i n fact onl y the marel l ous i s
beauti ful . " We were already i n the l and of Fantomas versus Lafcadi o,
Nerval versus Lamarti ne, Jarry versus Zol a-the l and, i n short, of
everythi ng that now consti tutes l eft- wi ng cul ture: cl earer i deas i n the
servi ce of a more general i di ocy.
In Breton's mi nd the marvel l ous was al so the foundati on of the
cul t of the metaphor, casti ng beauty in a new l i ght. Metaphors, of
whi ch the whole of Surreal i st poetry (i n the narrow sense) is a many
spl endored cel ebrati on, combi ne two sparks: the spark, produced by
the i nteracti on of contrasti ng assembl ages, whi ch destroys cun
geal ed l anguage, and the spark, produced by the cl ash of subjective
symbol s, which creates a new l anguage. The two become one in the
l i ght of the mftphor, ! ! the con'/u! slvcnes: of beut.
The system of metaphor and i mage in pai nti ng thus consti tuted
an i deol ogical ruse whereby Surreal i sm managed for a ti me to avoi d
the fal l out of cul tural fragments generated by the explosi on of 19 15-
1920. This was what kept the movement apart from mai nstream l i t
erary and arti stic producti on, which was condemned, in a pi ti ful l y
regi mented way, to the rehashi ng of the end of the novel after Joyce,
the end of pai nti ng after Mal evich, the end of sculpture after
Duchamp, and the end of everythi ng after Dada. It was also the
means whereby Surreal i sm successful l y concealed both the bankruptcy
92
of cul ture as a separate and al ienating sphere and the coroIl ary need
to advance from the archai c noti on of a l iving art to the real i ty of an
art of li vi ng.
Metaphor and i mage are self-suffi ci ent. They are the basi s of a
cul tural closed ci rcuit whose seemi ng emanci pati on from the sway
of cul ture is nothing but a mask for the fact that, so far from threat
eni ng culture's hegemony, i t actuaIly rei nforces it. Qui te apart from
the contributi on of the art of fasci nati ng images to the growi ng
voyeurism that attends the expansi on of an economy of over
consumpti on which must di splay what i t has to "offer" and can sel l
onl y what i t di spl ays, i t i s worth poi nti ng out that appeal i ng t o the
marveI l ousness of the metaphor system would be meani ngless out
si de the context of an i deol ogy taki ng on more and more esoteri c
overtones and tendi ng to become i ndi sti nguishable from a hermeti c
doctri ne.
Paradoxically ( and rather as alchemy discovered sulphuric aci d
i n a purely serendi pi tous way) , the shi ft from the magi c of l anguage
to the l anguage of magic produced a genuine tool of demysti ficati on,
namely the techni que of diversi on, or detourement. Admi ttedly Breton
never defi ned thi s techni que as precisely as the Si tuati oni sts di d
l ater, as for exampl e i n Interationale Situationni ste, Numher 3
(December 1 959) :
The two basic pri nci ples of detourement are the l oss of impor
tance, and in the extreme case the complete disappearance,
of the origi nal meani ng of each i ndependent diverted el e
menti and, si multaneously, the organi zi ng of another mean
i ngful whole which confers a new signi ficance upon each of
those elements.
Breton merely observed-i n Point du jour [Break of Day, 1 934J-that
"Al l thi ngs are bound to be put to uses for which they are not usual
ly desti ned" , but he certai nly applied the principle of detourement , as
for i nstance in "Notes on Poetry", written in collaborati on with Paul
Eluard (L Revolution Surrealiste, Number 1 2, 1 929) . Valery had wri t-
93
ten, "A poem must be a feast of the i ntel l ect" , and "Poetry is a sur
vival ". These edicts now became: "A poem must be a di saster of the
i ntel l ect" and "Poetry i s a pi pe". It i s al so worth recal l i ng the humor
ous use made of detourement by Rene Magri tte when he replaced the
fi gures in classical pai nti ngs by coffi ns. I n the absence of a global cri
ti que, the tactic was never expl ored further or appl i ed to the revolu
ti onary struggl e. Detourement was one of the weapons Surreal i sm left
behi nd for its heirs to put to as good a use as they coul d.
94
THE SAVAGE EYE AND THE CIVI LIZATI ON
OF THE I MAGE
There were two reasons for Breton's violent reacti on to Pi erre
Navi l l e, when, as editor of La Revolution Surrealiste, the latter defended
the i dea that there could be no such thing as Surreali st pai nti ng: the
requirement that the metaphor thesi s be i nternally consistent, and
the money that several of t he Surreal ists made by deal i ng i n art. I f
Surreal i st pai nti ng wished t o demonstrate a commi tment to radi cal
posi ti ons or to revolutionary vi ol ence, i t coul d not poi nt, as poetry
could, to a cri tical or mordant discourse of i ts own. On the other
hand i t was readi ly compati bl e wi th the same i deol ogy as the
metaphor, for, j ust l ike the metaphor's, i ts effect on the fl ow of di s
crete symbols and vei l ed Wi shes, as on the chance encounters of
obj ective forms, was to produce condensations. And, unl ike poeti c
wri ti ng, i t had a market. Breton was wel l aware of thi s, and, whi l e he
i nvari ably condemned the ostentati ous pursui t of fame or weal t h, he
never made so bold as to defi ne pai nti ng quite si mply as a poeti c
occupati on. Rather, he justified the Surrealist approach to the pi cto
ri al wi th the same arguments that he had used i n connection wi th
metaphor: just as words pl ayed and made love, so the eye "exi sted i n
i t s savage state" (Surrealism and Painting, 1928).
To procl ai m the i nnocence of art i n a period when art coul d be
i nnocent onl y i f i t were transcended, only i f i t were real i zed, was to
mi sapprehend the si gni ficance of Dada and to underestimate the
feti shi sm of the commodity. The proposi ti on that "the eye exi sts i n
i ts savage state" was self- glori fyi ng i n two equally unjustified ways.
I n the first pl ace, thi s was a time when adverti si ng and the news
media ( not to mention the fasci st "happeni ngs" of the moment)
already knew perfectly wel l how to mani pulate clashi ng images, how
to mi l k "free" representations for all they were worth; i t was there
fore qui te predictable that the rul i ng system woul d co- opt t he new
way of looki ng that Surreal i sm was so busily promoti ng. Secondly, i t
shoul d have been pl ai n-to any avant- garde worth the name at
95
least-that the organi zation of social passivity, i n its concern to mi n
i mize the recourse to poli ce and army, was bound to foster the con
sumption of i ncreasi ngly l i fel ike and i ncreasi ngly personal ized
i mages, the ai m being that the proletariat should move only to the
extent required for the contempl ati on of its own i nert contentment,
that it should be rendered so passive as to be i ncapable of anythi ng
beyond i nfatuati on wi th varied representati ons of its dreams.
Painting was a privileged sector of Surreal i st activity; it was also
the sector most thoroughly co-opted by what the sociol ogists, in
thei r eagerness to avoi d any analysi s of the spectacle and the com
modity system, l i ke to call "the civi l i zation of the i mage". Thus, for
all its appeal, Breton's statement of 1929, accordi ng to which
"Onei ri c values are cl early now preponderant, and I insi st that any
one should be treated as an idiot i f they sti l l refuse, for i nstance, to
see a horse gal l opi ng across a tomato", must be pl aced i n the context
of the i mage-as-object disti l l i ng the commodity's power to attract,
conceal i ng the al i enating rel ati onshi ps that the commodity entai l s,
and reproduci ng the commodity as pure ideological appearance.
There can be no doubt that by the end of the 19205 Surrealism
had al ready unresistingly accepted the i nfl ated value placed on
vision. "Every day, " said Man Ray, "we are the reci pi ents of open con
fidences; our eye can trai n i tel f to comprehend them without preju
dice or constrai nt. " And here i s the Czech Ji ndrich Styrsky: "My eyes
are forever demanding that food be thrown their way. They swallow
it wi th brutal eagerness . And at ni ght ? ! deep they digc:t i t. "
Marx used to say to Engel s, as they strol l ed about London,
'That's their Westmi nster, that's thei r Parl i ament", and so on. How i s
it that the Surreali sts never real i zed that by pai nti ng "their" bui l di ngs
( even had they devastated them with i mages of desi re-somethi ng
whi ch they never did, there bei ng in Surreal ist pai nti ng nothi ng
remotely comparable to Peret's Je ne man
g
e pas de ce pain-la) , that by
pai nti ng "their" parks and coveri ng "thei r" decors wi th faces out of
dreams, they were just redOi ng the fa<ade of the old worl d. Of
course, thi s reproach would have no force whatsoever had not
96
Surreali sm l onged so passi onately to be revolutionary.
When not repressed enti rely by the Surreal ists, the memory of
Dada's radi cal i sm mani fested itself less i n the form of scandalous
i mages than i n the form of techni ques that pl aced pai nti ng wi thi n
everyone's grasp. Thi s i s how Max Ernst described hi s discovery of
"frottage" i n 1925:
Starti ng from a chi ldhood memory . . . i n which a fake
mahogany panel opposi te my bed had served as an optical
catalyst for a vi si on while half-asleep, and now fi ndi ng
mysel f at a seaside hotel on a rai ny day, I was struck by the
obsessive fasci nati on that the floor, its cracks accentuated
by uncounted scrubbi ngs, was able to exercise upon my dis
tracted gaze. I resolved to i nvestigate the symbol i c meani ng
of thi s obsessi on, and to assi st my capaci ty for medi tation
and hal l uci nati on I made a set of rubbi ngs of the floor
boards, posi ti oni ng sheets of paper on them at random and
usi ng graphi te to bring up the pattern. When I careful ly
i nspected the resul ts, some areas of which were qui te dark
whi l e others were but l i ghtly shaded, I was taken aback by
a sudden i ntensi fication of my vi si onary facul ti es, and by a
halluci natory sequence of contradictory images, each super
i mposed upon its predecessor with the persi stence and
speed that one associ ates with memories of love.
Curi ous, i ndeed enthral led, I ended up usi ng the same
method to expl ore al l sorts of materi als that happened to
enter my vi sual field: l eaves and their vei ns, the frayed edges
of sackcl oth, the brushstrokes of some "modern" pai nter,
thread unravel l ed from a bobbi n, and so forth. My eyes then
perceived human heads, various animals, a battle that ended
up as a kiss ( The Fiancee of the Wind) , some rocks, The Sea and
the Rain, earthquakes, the Sphynx in its stabl e, some Little
Tables Around the Earth, Caesar' Palette, some False Positions, a
Shawl with Frost-Covered Flowers, the Pampas, etc.
Thus in a sense frottage became the equival ent of automatic
writing. "It i s as a spectator" , Ernst adds, "that the creator, whether
97
i ndi fferently or passionately, wi tnesses the bi rth of his work and
observes the stages of hi s own devel opment. " I nstead, then, of
emphasi zi ng the possibi l i ty of a techni que of thi s ki nd bei ng used by
al l , Ernst stressed the painter's transformati on i nto a passive spectator,
i nsi sti ng on the joy of contempl ati on and not on the j oy of creati on.
I t i s hard not to conclude that the Surreali st pai nters fel t threatened
by any tendency to treat art as a game, and that, as pai nti ng and
scul pture acknowledged thei r affi ni ty wi th the world of chi l dhood
and were secul arized by a spirit of pl ayful ness, these artists suddenly
sensed a chal l enge to thei r digni ty-the di gni ty of honours and prof
it-and fel t obl iged to move heaven and earth i f need be to make sure
their products did not l ose the aura of the sacrosanct.
Breton's descri ption ( 1 936) of decal comani a, i nvented by Oscar
Domi nguez, betrays the same urge to reduce the technical rel ics of
Dada's di ssolution to a Surreal i st "magical art" :
Chi l dren have tradi ti onal l y enj oyed fol di ng sheets of paper
after bl otti ng them wi th wet i nk so as to produce the i l l u
si on of ani mal or vegetable enti ti es or growths, but the el e
mentary techni que of whi ch chi l dren are capabl e i s far
from exhausti ng the resources of such a procedure. In par
ti cul ar the use of undi l uted ink excludes any surprises in
terms of "substance" and l i mi ts the resul t to a contoured
deSi gn which suffers from a certai n monotony resul ti ng
from the repeti ti on of symmetrical forms on ei ther si de of
an axi s. Certai n wash-draWi ngs by Vi ctor Hugo seem to
provide evidence of systemati c expl orati ons i n the di rec
ti on whi ch concerns us here; certai nly an extraordi nary
power of suggesti on is obviously expected to emanate from
the entirely i nvoluntary mechani cal detai l s whi ch predom
i nate, but the results are mostly l i mi ted to Chi nese shadows
and cloudy appariti ons. Oscar Domi nguez's discovery
bri ngs preci ous advice on the method to fol l ow in obtai n
i ng i deal fi el ds of i nterpretati on. Here we can rediscover i n
al l thei r purity the rocks and wi l l ows of Arthur Rackham
which enchanted us when we were about to l eave chi l d
hood behi nd. Once agai n, we are offered a reci pe within
98
everbody' grsp, a reci pe which demands to be i ncluded
among the "Secrets of the magical surreal i st art" and which
may be formulated as fol l ows:
In order to open ones window at will upon
the most beautiul landscapes in this or any other world
With a brad brush, spread some black gouache, more or less diluted
in pl aces, on a sheet of white gl azed paper and then cover this immedi
ately with a similar sheet which you will press down lightly with the
back of your hand. Take this upper sheet by one edge and peel it of slow
ly as you would do with an ordinar transfer, then continue to reapply
it and l it it away again until the colour is almost dr. What you have
in your hands now is perhaps nothing more than Leonardo' paranoiac
ancient wall, but it is this wal l perfected. All you need do now is study
the resulting image long enough for you to find a title that conveys the
reality you have discovered in it, and you can be quite sure of having
expressed yoursel in the most completely personal and valid manner.
The techni que of detourement was l i kewise i ncorporated i nto the
alchemy of Surreal i sm's pi ctori al ists, and thus rendered "occul t"
i nstead of bei ng populari zed in every form, as by rights it should
have been.
The pai nters' cl i que i n Surreal ism was much prone to apol i ti ci sm
i n the strict sense, and together wi th the neo-litterateurs constituted
the right- l eani ng fracti on of the movement. Asi de from a handful of
mediocre camp- fol l owers, most of the Surreal ist pai nters "succeed
ed"; few among them di spl ayed any scruples as to how their success
was achieved, and many had no hesitation about qui tti ng the group
as soon as they were l aunched-or as soon as the l ackeys of the ol d
worl d tossed them a bone.
I nasmuch as Surreal i sm di d i ndeed i nherit from Dada the proj ect
of the transcendence of art (and even i f i t deal t with thi s i nheritance
solely on an abstract pl ane) , i t i s to two non-Surreal i st pai nters,
Giorgi o de Chi ri co and Paul Klee, that credit shoul d go for convey
ing the unconsci ous memory which made the agoni zi ng decor of our
99
rei fi cati on and the return to the sources of creativity i nto essenti al
aspects of Surreal ism's most i mportant arti sti c works. No one better
than de Chi ri co ( though he soon retreated i nto seni l i ty l i ke Ri mbaud
fleei ng to Harar) has perceived the i nvasi on of things, the prol i fera
ti on of stucco, the spread of human absence, the di sappearance of
faces, and the i ncreased burden of anxi ety borne by the cheap goods
and theatri cal props that crowd around us. No one better than Klee,
wi th hi s ever Vigi l ant i ntel l i gence, has captured the movement of
creati vi ty i n i ts ful l freshness and spontaneousness; hi s work may
well one day serve, just l i ke Peret's, as one of the fi nest avenues open
to future generati ons wi shi ng to understand the culture of the past.
Surreal i st pai nti ng pi tched i ts tent between the two pi nnacl es
represented by de Chi rico and Klee on the one hand and the Dadaist
abyss on the other. Max Ernst decked de Chi ri co's angst wi th hi s
characteri stic mi neral concreti ons and luxuri ant vegetati on; Mi r6
redi d Kl ee in a fake- chi l di sh and more sophi sti cated manner; and
Magri tte, the pai nter most concerned wi th the i mage as poetic
metaphor, offered the best response to the i dea of a wi ndow open
i ng at every i nstant onto a strange everydayness and i ts objects
obj ects which every human dreams of humani zi ng.
Among the "litteateurs", Pi casso, a ti rel ess and tedious creator of
gi mcrackery who eventual l y i ndeed "hooked us by sheer quanti ty",
stands el bow to elbow wi th the canny DaH, whose work, dedi cated
to the greater glory of the moroni c, the del i quescent and the i mpo
tent, resonated remarkably wel l wi th the softeni ng-up techni ques of
the soci ety of the spectacl e, and as a corol lary ensured Dal f support
from the most hi ghl y pl aced cul tural and medi a functi onari es.
There i s a sense i n whi ch Dal f epi tomi zes both the fai lure and
the success of Surreal i sm: on the one hand the derai l i ng of creati vi ty
as a revolutionary force, on the other a seamless i ntegration i nto the
old world. Never opting firmly ei ther for a poetry made by al l or for
the venal i ty of the rul i ng system, Surreal i sm took somethi ng of both
and produced an i mpoveri shed cul tural hodgepodge. The move
ment's enti re di scourse is one l ong sel f-consol ati on whose growi ng
1 00
pathos, accompani ed by an ever more pressing appeal to the mists of
magi c, becomes onl y too comprehensible when we hear Breton con
demni ng the dictatorshi p of the rati onal and cal l i ng i nstead for
"machi nes of most i ngeni ous design desti ned for no particular use" ( a
cal l which Tnguely, for one, woul d answer, constructi ng just such
machi nes without, however, remotely affecting the ever ti ghter gri p
of the rati onal i ty of things); or, agai n, when we find Jean Schuster, i n
1 969, quite wi l l i ng to write that "All images are dangerous, because
they facil i tate the ci rcul ati on of i deas. "
As for Surreal i st fi l ms, there i s not much to be sai d, save perhaps
that the movement's two masterpieces, Un Chien andalou and rAge d'or,
had a profound i nfluence on the ci nema. (Dreams Tat Mone Can Buy,
by Man Ray, Hans Richter and Max Ernst, is a fil m that deserves to
be better known i n France. ) rAe d'or embodied a viol ence, al bei t one
cl oaked i n aestheti ci sm, that seemed at the time to presage a later
devel opment i n which the Surreal i st fi l m, by taki ng i ts di stance from
the pi ctori al perspective, would achieve formi dabl e agitati onal and
demysti ficator power. But everyone knows what became of Dal f;
and Bufuel became what one mi ght have feared for anyone who
takes pri de i n bei ng cal l ed a cineaste.
1 0 1
CHAP TE R 5
CONVERTI NG
TO MYS TI CI S M
RECONSECRTION
No sooner had ascendant bourgeois power, thanks to the ars of crit
icism and criticism by arms, successfully shattered the unity of the ol d
social and rel i gious myth, than the new rulers felt the urgent need t o
rei nstitute an organi zation of appearances-a universal representtion of
the i ndividual freedoms so essential to the conduct of busi ness-that
could provide a justification for thei r function as an expl oiting class.
The tentacular expansion of the economy-nere-centre of the bour
geoisie just as it would later be of the rul i ng caste of the soci al i st
State-was not easily reconciled, however, with recourse to a god, to
a mysterious uni ty which the new conditions of social atomization
could not i n any case ei ther resuscitate or maintai n.
By the begi nni ng of the twentieth century art had been effec
tively annexed by the general system of the economy, and no choice
remai ned to i t save that between self- transcendence, which i s to say
i ts actual i zation as a mode of l i fe i n a society without hi erarchi es,
and a slow agony. Dada had an awareness of the negative but not of
the necessi ty of such a transcendence; Surrealism was aware of the
necessity of transcendence but not of the necessity of negativi ty. I n
both cases the dice were l oaded, but only Surrealism must be hel d to
account by hi story for its reactionary attempt to restore to art a l i fe
that it no l onger had, a l i fe whose very memor was already l ost to
i t. (We have already noted the great store that Surrealist art set by
great names and great moments of the past, by their l ivi ng rel evance
and by the need for them to be remembered. )
Li ttl e by l i ttl e, as the dream of revolution broke up on the reefs
of nascent Stal i ni sm, but also as the soci ety of the spectacle and of
the commodity system i nevitably co-opted anythi ng that could be
called artistic, Surreal i sm retreated to the heights of pure mi nd. From
a fortress open to every wind blowi ng i n from the ol d worl d, it
began-after the fashi on of the Romantics reinventi ng an i dyl l i c
Mi ddle Ages, complete wi th val iant kni ghts, in the very shadow of
the stock exchanges, banks and factories-to entertai n the fantasy of
1 05
a powerful myth, stripped of any rel i gi ous overtones, that woul d
combat the poverty of the spectacle and that woul d draw i ts strength
from a reconsecrati on of human rel ati onshi ps model l ed on the
reconsecrati on of art .
It would be hard to outdo thi s as sheer contempt for hi story. Not
that such a project could absolutely never be made i nto real i ty for a
ti me: after al l , the Nazi s launched a comparabl e operati on, al bei t one
orientated i n a diametri cal l y opposed directi on, when they sought to
return to the reign of myth by reconsecrati ng everythi ng that the
Surreal i sts shat upon from the greatest hei ght: the Fatherl and, the
Army, the Fuhrer, the State, etc. As confused as they may have been,
the Surreali sts remai ned commi tted i n the pre- war period to the
destrcti on of capital i sm in both i ts private and i ts State versi ons;
they had not renounced the hopes they pl aced i n the "fi nal struggl e",
and they threw down the gauntl et i n al l si ncerity to whatever served
to sustai n and moderni ze the expl oi tati on of the prol etari at.
The position of Surrealism after the Second Worl d War flowed
from a despairing view of hi stor. Thi s view was based on the succes
sive defeats of a workers' movement whose revol uti on the Surreal ists
had awai ted passively i n the expectation that it woul d resolve their
own problems. Breton hi mself offers a clear account of this in
"Prolegomena to a Thi rd Surrealist Mani festo or Not" ( t 942) He
begins by evoki ng the failure of supposedly "emanci patory" systems:
Though I am only too l ikely to demand everythi ng of a
creature I consi der beauti ful , I am far from granti ng the
same credi t to those abstract constructi ons that go by the
name of systems . When faced wi th them my ardour cool s,
and i t i s cl ear that l ove no l onger spurs me on. I have been
seduced, of course, but never to the extent of hi di ng from
mysel f theJallible poi nt in what a man like me hol ds to be true.
Thi s fal l i bl e poi nt, even though i t is not necessari ly si tuated
on the l i ne traced for me by the ori gi nal teacher duri ng hi s
l i feti me, always appears to me to be l ocated somewhere fur
ther along this l i ne as extended through others .
1 06
This fai l ure is expl ai ned wi thout the sl i ghtest al lusi on to the cri ti que
of hierarchy, wi thout ever addressi ng the questi on of the mecha
ni sms of co- optati on:
The greater the power of thi s man, the more he i s l i mited
by the i nertia resul ti ng from the veneration that he wi l l
i nspi re i n some and by the tireless activity of others who
will empl oy the most devious means to rui n him. Aside from
these two causes of degenerati on, there is also the fact that
every great i dea i s perhaps subject to being seri ously al tered
the i nstant that it enters i nto contact with the mass of
humani ty, where i t i s made to come to terms wi th mi nds of
a compl etely di fferent stature than that of the mi nd i t came
from origi nal ly.
There is al so the unrel i abi l i ty of comrades- i n- arms to be considered:
The evi l s that are always the price of favour, of renown, l i e i n
wai t even for Sureali sm, though it has been i n existence for
twenty years. The precautions taken to safegard the i nner
integrit of this movement-which generally are regarded as
bei ng much too severe-have not precluded the raving false
witness of an Aragon, nor the picaresque brand of i mposture
of that neo- Falangist bedsi de- table Avi da Dollars.
And Breton i s galled by the general al i enati on of the movement:
Surreal i sm i s al ready far from bei ng able to cover everythi ng
that i s undertaken i n its name, openly or not, from the most
obscure teashops of Tokyo to the rai n- streaked wi ndows of
Fi fth Avenue, even though Japan and America are at war.
What is being done in any given directi on bears l i ttle resem
bl ance to what was wanted. Even the most outstandi ng men
must put up wi th passing away not so much wi th a halo as
with a great cl oud of dust trai l i ng behi nd them.
Breton's di sarray of 1 942 sti l l embodi es much of the despai r fel t
by Artaud i n 1 925. I n Le Drame du surrealisme, Victor Crastre presents
t o7
a somewhat caval i er expl anati on of Artaud's lack of enthusiasm for
meeti ng the Clarte peopl e: "Hi s unheal thy passi on for bei ng tor
mented, his taste for fai l ure, even for catastrophe, prohi bi ted hi m
from searchi ng for a social form of revolt, from conceiving of any
opti mi sti c plan for the transformation of the worl d. " I t would
doubtless have been more to the poi nt to i nqui re whether Artaud's
vocati on for fai l ure di d not stem rather from an i nsti nctive rej ecti on
of hi story at a time when hi stor gave every appearance of havi ng
been monopol i zed by the Bol sheviks. I n vi ew of thi s halt i mposed
on human emanci pation i n the name of the prol etariat i tself, i t is
not hard to understand that a luci d but i solated mi nd, and one i n
any case cut of f from whatever l eft-wi ng opposi ti on t o Bolshevism
still exi sted, should have apprehended hi storical consci ousness as a
consci ousness of a voi d and as the utter negation of any i ndi vi dual
hi story.
Artaud proceeded, al one, al ong a path that Breton would later
i mpose on the Surreali st movement under much less dire ci rcum
stances. The tragic myth that Artaud constructed i n order to cope
wi th hi s state of sel f- divisi on was somethi ng whi ch i n that early
period he had to confront wi thout the backi ng even of what
Surreal i sm would eventual l y achi eve, namely a real histor whi ch,
as al i enated as i t may have been, di d contrive to be at once collec
tive and i ndi vi dual . Artaud's deci si on i s registered i n his Le Pese-ners ,
where he talks of "bri ngi ng mysel f face to face wi th the metaphysics
that I have created for mycel f on the basi s of thi s nothi ngness that
I carry wi thi n me", and, when he writes in the third issue of L
Revolution Surreal iste that "Through the rents in what is henceforward
an unl iveable real i ty speaks a wi l fully sibyl l i ne world", there is a
cl ear i nti mati on that he i ntends to devote hi s l i fe to the deci pher
ing of that "worl d" .
Not long afterwards, the Grand Jeu group woul d briefly
embrace the same anguished hope for a renewal of myth before suc
cumbi ng to the charms of esoteri ci sm, Zen, and Gurdj i eff. When it
came Surreal i sm's turn to tread the path of mystical retreat, i t has to
1 08
be said that i t was better armed for i t-armed, as i t were, by a hi gh
er tal l y of fai lures . . . .
Fi rst of al l , Surreal i sm, i n i ts attempt to salvage art, had al ready
experi enced the call of the sacred, the attraction of magic, the taste
for the mysterious and the temptati ons of the hermetic tradi ti on. It
had pursued all of them to a degree, while conti nui ng to focus most
of i ts attenti on on the adventure of l ove, the exploration of dreams,
creative activity, everday l i fe, and revoluti on.
Compromi se with Communism certai nly threatened the ver
soul of Surreal i sm. So much so, i n fact, that Breton fel t obl i ged ( i n
1929) t o wri te:
I fai l to see, whatever certai n narrow-mi nded revolutionaries
may think, why we should refrai n from addressi ng the ques
tions of l ove, dreams, madness, and so on-provi ded always
that we pl ace them in the same perspective as that from
which they (and i ndeed we too) envisage the revoluti on.
One of Surreal i sm's chi ef faul ts, and one for whi ch even the move
ment's basi cally ideological character cannot be bl amed, i s that it
handed over all responsi bi l i ty for the universal revolutionary project
to Bolshevi sm, which, hewi ng fast to the logic of Leni n's work, had
never done anythi ng but undermi ne that project.
Although Breton di d not concede any part of what he rightly con
sidered to be fundamental , he could not help feel i ng that the break
with the orthodox Communists represented a moving away from the
historical possibi l ities opened up at "privileged" moments of ever
d
y
l i fe. Thi s was truly an i nstant when ideology came i nto play in the most
striki ng manner, with all its power to tum the world on i ts head: the
demands of subjectivi ty, never yet made the basis of the actual revolu
tionary movement, were now transformed i nto the abstract underin
ni ngs of an ideology which the critical -cum-practical action of real his
tor would have utterly dispelled, but which Lni no- Stal i ni sm merely
dbbed a "solipsistic ideolog", and excluded on that basis fom its own
pseudo- revolutionary practice ( i . e. , the practice of the bureaucrats) .
1 09
The revolutionary feels despair when confronted by the trans
formati on of real historical movement i nto i deol ogy. The Surrealists
despaired on two counts: as would-be revoluti onaries, they had an
i nkl i ng of the revolutionary's despair; at the same time they fel t the
despair of the i deol ogues they were at bei ng excluded from the rul
i ng revolutionary i deol ogy ( the Bolshevism of the 1 930s) . Little
wonder that they saw no other way forward than resolutely to
embrace a mysti cism founded on their earl ier but since repressed
commi tments.
Surreal ism thus plumped for a mystique of l i fe, and of the l i fti ng
of repression, just when Nazism, at the cul mi nati on of a period dur
i ng which the German people had demonstrated their own i ncl i na
ti on to l eap i nto unreal i ty, was promoti ng a mystique of death and
repressi on.
Georges Batai l l e was cl early aware of thi s when he called for the
l i vi ng forces of Surrealism to be thrown si mul taneously i nto the
struggl e against fascism and i nto the struggle against the Stal i ni st
run anti fascist fronts. This idea, i n any case somewhat dubious, was
a nonstarter.
The time had come, so far as the Surreal ists were concerned, to
l i sten to Artaud's words from an earl ier day:
Enough l anguage games, enough syntactical tri cks, enough
word-juggl i ng and phrase-making! We must now seek the
great Law of the heart, that Law which i s not a Law, not a
pri un, but a gUi de ror the Mi nd iost in i ts own l abyri nth.
Surreali sm's turn to metaphysics, however, was not just a response to
i ndividual confusions or to a particular set of ci rcumstances. The
pai nters' lobby, never much i nterested in the pol i tical debate, was
much rel ieved to see the movement taki ng a mystical tack. Al ready
attached to the notion of the magic of the creative act, this tenden
cy had everthi ng to gai n from a revital i zati on of myth centred on
the i dea of beauty and on art as a mi rror of the marel l ous. Such a
perspective woul d al l ow the pai nters to devote themselves entirely
I t O
to matters aesthetic whi le loudly denyi ng any concession to aes
theticism. Thei r i nfluence on Surrealism's change of course was cer
tainly not negl i gi bl e.
At al l events, the appearance of "Prolegomena to a Thi rd
Surreali st Mani festo or Not", in 1 942, clearly marks the shi ft to a
purely metaphysical posi ti on. The conclusion of thi s text, in parti c
ular/ gives the measure of the new orientation; i t also exposes the
close ki nshi p between that orientation and the goal s earlier set for
hi msel f by Artaud. Under the headi ng "The Great Transparent
Ones", Breton writes:
Man i s perhaps not the center, the cynosure of the uni
verse. One can go so far as to believe that there exist above
hi m, on the ani mal scale, bei ngs whose behavior is as
strange to him as hi s may be to the mayfly or the whale .
Nothi ng necessarily stands i n the way of these creatures/
bei ng able to completely escape man/s sensory system of
references through a camouflage of whatever sort one cares
to i magi ne, though the possi bi l i ty of such a camouflage is
posi ted only by the theor of fors and the study of mi meti c
ani mal s. There i s no doubt that there is ampl e room for
speculati on here, even though this i dea tends to pl ace man
i n the same modest conditions of i nterpretation of hi s own
universe as the child who i s pleased to form his conception
of an ant from its underside just after he has kicked over an
anthil l . I n consi deri ng disturbances such as cyclones, i n face
of which man i s powerless to be anythi ng but a victim or a
witness, or those such as wart notori ously i nadequate ver
sions of which are set forth, i t woul d not be i mpossible, i n
the course of a vast work over which the most dari ng sort of
i nducti on should never cease t o preside, t o approximate the
structure and the constitution of such hypothetical bei ngs
(which mysteriously reveal themselves to us when we are
afrai d and when we are conscious of the workings of
chance) to the poi nt where they become credi bl e.
I thi nk i t necessary to poi nt out that I am not departi ng
appreciably from Novali s/s testimony: "I n real i ty we l ive i n
1 1 1
an animal whose parasites we are. The consti tuti on of this
ani mal determi nes ours and vice versa, " and that I am only
agreeing with a thought of Wi l l i am James's: "Who knows
whether, i n nature, we do not occupy just as smal l a pl ace
al ongsi de bei ngs whose existence we do not suspect as our
cats and dogs that live with us in our homes?" Even l earned
men do not all contradict this view of thi ngs: "Perhaps there
ci rcl e round about us bei ngs bui l t on the same pl an as we
are, but di fferent, men for exampl e whose al bumi ns are
strai ght, " said Emi l e Duclaux, a former director of the
Pasteur I nsti tute ( 1 840- 1 904) .
A new myth; Must these bei ngs be convi nced that they
result from a mi rage or must they be given a chance to show
themselves;
As fantastic as Breton's hypothesi s may appear at first si ght, it
casts an unbl i nki ng eye on the posture of Surreal i sm in i ts final peri
od. It flows from the same judgement as that made by the Ni etzsche
who exhorted us to embrace an amor Jati-to l ove our fate. I t postu
l ates that we have to choose between submi ssi on to the wretched
vi ci ssi tudes of everyday l i fe and a vow of feal ty to mysterious forces
that i ntervene i n the gui se of luck or ill luck i n the enterpri ses of the
i ndi vi dual wi l l . These forces ( and i t i s easy to see how dupl i ci tously
i ndi vi dual subj ectivity, once deprived of i ts materi al and histori cal
prospects of self-real i zati on, wi l l i nvent, whi l e fei gni ng to discover
them) do not supposedly requi re us to reconci l e ourselves with them
by means of reiigi ous or magical rites; rather, our task is to provoke
thei r emergence through a pati ent decanti ng of all our faculti es, al l
our senses. This i s an alchemical procedure, i n fact, i ts goal the goal
once sought by the hermetic tradi ti on; and, sure enough, from this
poi nt on the hermetic thinkers would be i nducted in force i nto the
Surreal i st pantheon.
The most cursory reading l eaves us i n no doubt that Breton i s
i mpl i ci tly posi ti ng the permanence of human al i enati on, asserti ng
that there i s no way of ever disentangl i ng ourselves from its thral l .
And upon thi s basis he proceeds t o set up an opposi ti on, and a con-
1 1 2
f1 ict, between the presumed positivity of a sacrosanct al i enati on and
the negativity of the al i enation of the present, al i enati on as an
i mmedi ate datum of our current state of survival under the rl e of the
spectacle.
Thus the Surreal i sts took up the defence of myth, at a ti me when
myth no l onger existed, against the spectacle, whi ch was every
where. They were Don Quixotes tilting against housi ng proj ects; no
one i n that ti me of change so much resembled the Cervantes char
acter as these latterday kni ghts wanderi ng between the devil of total
freedom and the death of cul ture.
To these agei ng men, sclerotic from so many defeats yet sti l l
ani mated by an unshakeable enthusiasm, the paral l el and mental l y
accessible universe of gods and heroes of myth and legend hel d out
the prospect of i ntel l ectual adventure via the concrete activity of
the creator and discoverer of meani ngs, via the i nventi on and cel e
brati on of obscure gui des, via the athanor of all the Great Works of
the possibl e.
The best anal ogy here is not hard to fi nd, for i t l i es i n the epi c
and worl d of the Celts, for whom the Surrealists now conceived a
most vi gorous admi ration, as wi tness Jean Markale's account of
LEpopee celtique en Bretagne [The Celtic Epi c i n Brittany l
Fi rst there is the Quest, that is to say the search ( i n every
sphere, but most especially with respect to Man's equil ibri
um and happi ness) for complete harmony with nature. But
happi ness i s achi eved only after a whole series of trials-the
trials of l i fe itself, vi olent, hard, and bloody; only then does
Man come to know, does he learn the miraculous formula
that al lows him to face hi s destiny, for thi s mi raculous
power can be taught by no one: only he hi msel f has the
abi l i ty to make i t out, piece by piece, along the roads he
travel s, in battles haunted by death, i n the victory that he
hol ds in his hands.
Then there i s the quest for Woman, the Chosen One,
who at ti mes takes on a di fferent countenance the better to
l ead Man astray, the better to make him prove hi s worth,
1 1 3
the better to metamorphose hi m. For the woman of the
Breton epic is necessarily a fai ry, a goddess: she has powers
that no man can snatch away from her, al though she may
bestow them, i f she so wi shes, upon a man of her choosi ng.
For Woman i s ever soverei gn, whether she i s a mere serant
girl or one of those mysteri ous mai dens who so often make
thei r appearance i n some castle l oomi ng from the shadows
of the ni ght only to vanish come morni ng i nto the mi sts
of memory.
There is also what is cal l ed the Quest in the Other
World, the search for the treasures hi dden i n that World,
whi ch cannot be very far away, si nce i t i s everywhere pre
sent-at every twi st i n the road, i n a val l ey domi nated by a
castle, in a forest cleari ng, or on a mound blasted betimes by
storms whose wi ld l i ghtni ng flashes transform the l and
scape. Thi s is a permanent descent i nto hel l , i nto Man's
deepest core, i nto the shadowi est l ands of hi s conscious
ness, hi s imagi ni ngs and hi s dreams. But we al ways return,
for mi nd always triumphs over matter. Death i tsel f does not
exi st: i t i s deni ed. Arthur sl umbers yet on the I sl e of Aval on
or i n some cavern beneath the earth: he wi l l return.
Al l the characteristic themes of Cel ti c l i terature suppl i ed the
base materi al out of which post-war Surreal i sm dreamt of construct
ing a new mythical i magery. These themes had of course been pre
sent i n Surrealism from the begi nni ng, compl ete wi th thei r sacred
aspect. The turn towards the Beyond, towards the i mmanence of the
myth- to- be- l ived, meant a return to love, dreams, madness, chi l d
hood, the savage eye, mi neral coi nci dences, the alchemi cal tradi
ti on, the art of the South Seas, of the I ndi ans, of the Celts, mediu
mi sti c experi mentati on, automati sm, etc. And al l of them were now
flung together i n a veritable whi rl wi nd of consol i dati on.
When he discovered Fouri er's work, Breton saw it pri mari ly as
a "hi eroglyphi c i nterpretati on of the worl d based on the anal ogy
between the human passi ons and the products of the three real ms
of nature. : ' I n l i On Surreal i sm i n I ts Livi ng Works" ( 1953) , he was
more speci fi c:
1 1 4
The mi nd then proves to i tself, fragmentarily of course, but
at the least by itsel that "everythi ng above is like everythi ng
below" and everythi ng i nsi de is l ike everythi ng outsi de. The
world thereupon seems to be l ike a cryptogram which
remai ns i ndeci pherable only so long as one i s not thor
oughl y fami l iar with the gymnastics that permi t one to pass
at will from one pi ece of apparatus to another.
I n the general conversi on of Surrealist values, which was gov
erned by the hope of i nsti tuting a mythical edifice capable of foster
ing new forms of acti on, the importance of l anguage remained car
di nal , particul arly the i mportance of poetic i ntuiti on, which,
fi nally unleashed by Surrealism, seeks not only to assi mi
l ate al l known forms but also bol dly to create new forms
that i s to say, to be i n a position to embrace all the struc
tures of the worl d, mani fested or not. It alone proVi des the
thread that can put us back on the road of Gnosi s as knowl
edge of suprasensi bl e Real i ty, "i nvisibly visible i n an eternal
mystery" .
Prevented by i ts i deol ogical nature from accedi ng to a critical
use of l anguage, and at the same time decl i ni ng to engage i n any
effective criti que of the ruli ng language, Surrealism ended up defi n
i ng itsel f as a quest for the original , magical kernel of things , for
what mi ght be called the l anguage of the gods. As Breton put i t, "The
whole poi nt, for Surreal i sm, was to convi nce ourselves that we had
got our hands on the ' prime matter' ( i n the alchemical sense) of l an
guage"-i n other words, l anguage i n i ts primi tive form, as it existed
prior to any disti ncti on between speech and di scourse. As for the
kind of i ntel l igence that made such a return "possi bl e, and even con
ceivable", i t was, i n Breton's view, "none other than that which has
always moved occult phi losophy".
I n the 1 940s the pai nter Wol fgang Paalen came to a similar con
clusi on wi th respect to pi ctorial language. Aski ng "What to pai nt?",
Paalen suggested that artists should attempt the "direct visualization
1 1 5
of the forces that move us, both physical l y and emotional l y". He
cal l ed this approach a "plastic cosmogony".
The texts that Desnos and Crevel had dictated whi l e plunged
i nto mediumistic trances back around 1 92 5 were now seen as oper
ating in very much the same way as the manuals of the alchemists.
For Surreal ism, this was evi dence of the movement's kinshi p with the
hermetic tradi ti on. Mythically restored, the uni ty of l anguage and
world meant that different ki nds of phenomena could now be put on
the same plane and so become subject to associations and cor
respondences . The sharpest attenti on was pai d, however, to premo
ni ti ons, objective chance and the various forms of occultism for
which Surreal ism had always had a l atent affi ni ty.
Breton had already been struck (as he recounts at l ength i n Mad
Love) by the accuracy with which hi s poem "Sunfl ower" ( 1 92 3 ) fore
tol d the ci rcumstances of an especi al l y si gni ficant romanti c
encounter of hi s:
The traveler passing through the Hailes at summeral l
Was walking on her tiptoes
Despair was swirling its great lovely calla lilies in the sky
And in the handbag was my dream that fask oj sal ts
Only God' godmother had breathed
Torpor spread like mist
At the Smoking Dog CaN
Were the pro and the con had just come in
Te young woman could scarcely be seen by them, and only askance
Was I speaking with the ambassadress oj saltpeter
Or oj the white cure on black ground that we cal l thought
Breton ci tes several other disconcerti ng coi ncidences, among
them de Chirico's circl ing of Apoll i nai re's temple in a portrai t done
long before the poet, after being trepanned, was obl i ged to cover the
spot wi th a l eather patch; or, agai n, the l arge number of canvases i n
which Victor Brauner recorded a haunti ng obsessi on with ocular
muti l ati on just shortly before an accident that cost him an eye. All
1 1 6
such events would now constitute a whole for the Surreali sts-a
whole nowhere better exempl i fied than in the dream.
Recounted or analysed, dreams now became ei ther l i terary
objects or the subjects of common- or-garden Freudian i nterpreta
tion. Asi de from their admiration for Ferdi nand Cheval , who had
wel l and truly set about real i zi ng hi s dream i n the shape of hi s I deal
Palace, the Surrealists never developed the perspective of the prac
tical real ization of dreams much beyond vaguely prophetic edicts:
"The poet of the future", accordi ng to Breton and El uard's
Dictiolnaire abreg{ du surrealisme ( t 938) , "wi l l surmount the depressi ng
i dea of an unbridgeable gap between actions and dreams. " The turn
to mysticism resolved thi s tension solely on the pl ane of an abstract
coherence. In the fi rst pl ace, the dream was the marel lous in
microcosm, l yi ng wi thi n everyone's reach. As Paracl esus recom
mended, "Let al l exami ne thei r own dreams, for each is hi s own
i nterpreter. " Here was the i ndivi dual's way of i nitiation i nto the
"practice" of myth, a way whi ch opened (and thi s i s the second
point) onto a panopti cal prospect, i n accordance, once agai n, wi th
Paracel sus: "For I tel l you, it is possible to see everthing through
the mi nd" (Philosophia occulta ) . Myth was thus the i deal precondition
for the expansi on of the dream universe, the unreal real i ty of a fun
damental uni ty of sel f and worl d-that state which Karl Phi l i pp
Mori tz had descri bed i n hi s Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines
Geistersehers [ournal of a Visionary, t 787] as "the i neffable joy of
finding mysel f outsi de mysel f . . . . I had lost all sense of pl ace-I was
nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I felt del ivered from the
order of things, or thrust out of it, and I no l onger had any need
of space. "
I t was perhaps, once agai n, Benj amin Peret who offered the most
ominous account of this dream system, at the same time putting his
finger on its point of potential self- transcendence, its i nternal need for
objective realizati on: "Heard in the morning on 20 May last, in a half
slumber punctuated by confusing images of the Aragon front, which I
had l eft thre weeks earl ier, the fol l owing sentence shook me sudden-
t t 7
Iy awake: Durrti' egg will hatch " There can be no doubt at all that i n
Peret's mi nd every possible measure had to be taken to fulfil (or to
ensure that others would someday ful fi l ) this dream-borne prophecy.
The Surrealist explorati on of human l i mi ts and potenti al i ties
l ikewi se felt the i mpact of the change to a mystical vi si on of thi ngs.
The experimental approach to the human was repl aced by a puri fi
cati on of the ego by vi rtue of the al chemi cal Great Work. Concrete
problems of subjectivity became problems of bei ng. Thi s ontologi
cal shi ft impl ied a movement from i nternal to external and evoked a
cosmi c uni ty divested of all anthropocentrism where the forces of
the mi neral , vegetable and human worl ds all had their parts to
pl ay-a universe where, in Rene Guenon's formulati on, as approved
by Breton, "hi storical facts have no value save as symbols of spi ri tu
al real i ties" . This view, which tended towards an absolute objective
i deal i sm, was to find its poet in Malcolm de Chazal , whose sensi ti ve
analytical powers and master of general metaphors are displayed i n
hi s Sens plastiquf ( 1 947) .
Lastly ( though this does not exhaust the avenues pursued by the
Surreali st "quest") , we must note the metamorphosi s of the passi on
of l ove i nto a veritable cult of Woman. I n thi s connecti on a passage
from Mi chel Leiris's Le Point cardinal ( 1 925) clearly foreshadowed
what was to come:
Then I saw that the I ngenue, her eyel i ds sti l l l owered, was
drawi ng my attenti on by means of an obscene moti on of her
hand to the portal ot her thighs. I concluded from this ges
ture that I was bei ng shown the onl y way out of the bed
room that remai ned open to me.
For mad love, with the possi bi l i ty of i ts actual i zati on blocked by
hi storical upheaval , and consi deri ng the di sgust it i mpl i ed for what
Breton called "the amorous i deal of pseudo-couples ruled by resi g
nati on and cynicism and hence embodyi ng the pri nci ple of thei r
own di si ntegration"-for mad l ove, the only way out was a mutati on
i nto subl i me love, based on a consecrati on of the female geni tals
1 1 8
(which myth lost no time i nvesting with the meani ngs of l i fe and
death, of penetration and of chthonian depths, of the visible and the
hi dden, of air and earth, and so forth) .
Thus Breton's hymn t o the glo
r
of Melusi na, i n Arcanum 1 7,
betokens an abandonment of the love celebrated in [Amour Iou:
Love, only love that you are, carnal love, I adore, I have
never ceased to adore, your lethal shadow, your mortal
shadow. A day wi l l come when man wi l l be able to recog
nize you for his only master, honoring you even i n the mys
terious perersi ons you surround him with.
That l ove gives way, though with no expl icit acknowledgement, to
the mystery of Woman, lost only to be found once more, uni ti ng i n
her person al l the contradictions of the worl d:
Melusi na after the scream, Melusina below the bust, I see
her scales mi rrored i n the autumn sky. Her radiant coi l twists
three times around a wooded hil l , which undulates in waves
that follow a score where all the harmonies are tuned to, and
reverberate with, those of the nasturtium i n bloom . . . .
Melusi na below the bust i s gil ded by all the reflections of
the sun off the fal l fol iage. The snakes of her legs dance to
the beat of the tambouri ne, the fish of her legs dive and
thei r heads reappear elsewhere as i f hanging from the words
of that priest who preached among the scorpion grass, the
bi rds of her legs drape her with airy netting. Melusi na half
reclaimed by pani c-stricken l i fe, Melusina with l ower joi nts
of broken stones or aquatic plants or the down of a nest,
she's the one I i nvoke, she' s the only one I can see who could
redeem thi s savage epoch.
The monogamous incl i nation of most of the Surreal ists was
herewith offered a transcendent justification far better suited to it
than an anti - l ibertine ethic which had occasi onally taken on an
unpleasant authoritari anism and often turned i nto a hypocri tical
glori fication of fidel i ty, and by extension of jealousy. Respondi ng to
t t 9
Peret's i njunction, in hi s Anthologie de ramour sublime, to "hai l woman as
the object of all veneration", Breton wrote:
It is solely on this conditi on, accordi ng to hi m, that l ove can
come to be i ncarnated in a si ngl e bei ng. I t seems to me per
sonally that such a process cannot be ful ly concluded unl ess
the veneration of which the woman is the object is not
shared at all , because that woul d amount for her to a ki nd of
frustrati on.
Some day the dubious aspect of restri cti ons of thi s sort wi l l need
to be cl ari fied i n the li ght of the notion of sacri fice-the pillar of all
rel i gi ons, and most especi al ly of the Christian one. The fact is that
Breton never attacked this noti on, i ndeed on occasi on he embraced
it wi th a wi l l .
1 20
AN ANTI - CHRI STIAN ECUMENI SM
One question must have arisen very soon for those seeki ng the con
secration of Surreali st values i n the attempt to reconstruct a new
mythic uni ty: how were the very notions of the sacred and the myth
i cal to be separated out from rel igious systems? The boundaries are
certainly di fficult to fix, and perhaps when all is said and done it
scarcely matters whether reference is made to Celtic heroes, or to
the virtues extolled in the Sagas, rather than to Jesus Christ. Be that
as i t may, Surrealism, which is hardly open to the charge of i ndul
gence towards Chri stiani ty, cannot, simply by preferri ng the here
below to the Beyond, evade the reproach, which i t ought to have
addressed to itself, that by plunging into the mists of the transcen
dent i t was at the very least abandoni ng all hope of changi ng l i fe
and, concomitantly, transformi ng the world-a hope that it had
always previ ously sustai ned, even i f the movement's ideological
nature precluded any genuine practical pursuit of i t. I t is not possi
ble for myth to operate today: there is only the spectacl e, and the
spectacle alone rules. Placed now i n a perspective so strongly
i ncl i ned to put soci o- economi c condi ti ons in brackets, the
Surreal ists' opposition to religion was bound to l ose much of the
force it had had i n Ie Surrealisme au Serice de l a Revolution, or for Peret,
and i t soon took on the ambiguous character of an anti - rel i gi ous
ecumeni sm.
I n December 1 945, in his Supplement aux Lctr de Rodez, Artaud
proclaimed: "As for me, Artaud, I have no use for God, and I refuse
to countenance anyone's founding a rel igion on my backbone or on
my brai n. " Thi s pronouncement di d not prevent a few rumour- mon
gers from putti ng i t about that Artaud had undergone a conversi on.
I t was agai nst this calumny, the model for which Paul Claude! had
supplied with hi s attempt to co-opt Rimbaud, and versions of which
had recently been directed i n an equally outrageous manner at de
Sade and Nietzsche, that the Surrealist pamphlet of 1 948, A la niche
les glapisseurs de Dieu! [Back to the Kennel with God's Yappi ng Dogs! ]
1 2 1
was a wel l -justi fied protest. But what is one to thi nk of the fact that
onl y shortly afterwards Breton and his fri ends went along wi th a bla
tant attempt to co- opt Surreal i sm by the Chri sti an Mi chel
Carrouges, with whom they eventual ly broke off sol el y on the basi s
of i nternal disagreements?
The same ki nd of uncertai nty was displayed by the Surrealists
with respect to two essentially desacral i zi ng strategies, namely the
ludic mode and black humour. The ol der Surreal i sm grew, the more
seriously it took itsel f. A pl ayful spi rit sti l l often presided over the
creati on of works of art, but care was al ways taken that this spi ri t
should never, as woul d have been consi stent with its own l ogi c, go
so far as to destroy such works, to destroy their value by changi ng
the rul es of the game. Likewi se, bl ack humour, i n essence a corrosive
and negative force, as when i t i nformed the behavi our of an Arthur
Cravan, a Jacques Vache or a Jacques Ri gaut, now became nothing
more than a critical aspect of a particular work. As negative and crit
ical as i t mi ght be i n that i ntegrated rol e, i t was never al l owed to
chal l enge art i tsel f. I ndeed Breton went much further i n thi s direc
ti on, i nti mating in his Anthologie de I 'humour noir that there was such a
thi ng as an "art" of black humour. Let us be cl ear, however: the texts
assembled by Breton in his anthol ogy, and thus made avai l abl e to al l ,
were undoubtedly of a highly explosive nature, and the Vichy gov
ernment was quite right to ban the book; but treati ng bl ack humour
as nothing more than an aesthetic category was i n effect to suppress
the i nstructions for the proper use of these texts and to obscure their
true character, for they were the foam of a rage buil t up over the cen
turies against al l forms of oppressi on, a rage that must i n the end be
unleashed, otherwise every kind of conformi sm would be able to
drape itself in the robes of the extraordi nary, and welcome subver
sive l aughter with open arms.
From a mystical viewpoi nt, pl ay i s ritual and black humour
resembles the devi lish fi gres that the Church was cunni ng enough
to retai n in i ts archi tecture, even goi ng so far as to carve them on the
capitals supporting church roofs.
1 22
Is thi s to say, then, that Surreali sm emerged from the Second
World War as a purely specul ative system? Yes and no. Paradoxi cal l y,
the more successful Breton and Peret were in givi ng thei r movement
the aspect of a mythic construct that had somehow strayed i nto the
present, the more they helped nourish a certai n sense of l i fe, a sense
that was repeatedly redi scovered duri ng the series of revoluti onary
outbursts that began i n 1 968. In this way the eruption of l i fe that had
characterized Surreal i sm's earliest days, and then faci l i tated the
movement's own erupti on i nto cul tural surival, now once more
came to the fore in i ts origi nal form, at once hasteni ng the demi se of
cul ture as a separate sphere and hel pi ng to topple the mythi c system
of Surreal i sm itself. Thi s coll apse had to wait on the disappearance
of Breton and Peret, however, for so long as they l ived they were
able, thanks to the authenti ci ty of their own odyssey and thanks to
thei r determi nati on to fix their system firmly in pl ace as a sort of
centre of effort for all eterity, to i nfuse Surrealism wi th an appearance
of l i fe and turn it i nto an effective vei l over reality.
I f we bother to trace such resurgences of l i fe through their various
i nverted mani festations i n art and l i terature, we find that they flag and
conserve all the diverse experiences whose more or less vivid traces
humani ty has left i n its various cultures. I t was as though Surreal ism,
on the eve of upheavals i n which the will to l ive would throw the
corpse of culture onto a joyful pyre, had wanted to save everythi ng
from past cul ture that was worthy of rei ncarnation i n new forms of
existence. The movement's attempt at synthesis, inciting us as i t does
to retrieve every si ngle passionate bizarrerie of i ntellect or custom, must
surely count as one of the greatest legacies of this centry.
I f there is any trth to the notion that the drowni ng see thei r
whole l i fe repl ayed befor thei r eyes i n a few short seconds, Surreali sm
mi ght well be described as the last dram of a founderi ng culture.
Ami dst the profusi on of riches thus left in our care by
Surreal i sm, the contributi on of Lotus de Paini has the merit of goi ng
further back i n ti me than any other. Her hal f-i ntui tive, hal f-reasoned
analyses seek to ascertai n what pri mi tive mankind's structure of " feel -
1 2 3
i ngs"-meani ng a uni ty of thought, sensati on, emoti on and action
must have been, this on the basis of cave pai nti ngs whose very exis
tence already betokens the breaki ng up of that uni ty. I t was surel y
not by chance that this search for "knowledge of the soul of those far
di stant from us" was conducted at a time when the necessity for a
new "structure of feel i ng", for a multi di mensi onal and uni tary l i fe,
was maki ng itself acutely fel t. A strange figre, who never partici
pated di rectly i n thei r movement but whom the Surreali sts discovered
and hai led, Lotus de Pa'ini seems to qui t the paths of the i magi nation
i n order to offer the revolution the poetic totalit of the old worl d.
1 24
CHAPTER 6
NOW
Today Surreal i sm is all around us in its co- opted forms-as con
sumer goods, art works, advertisi ng techniques, ali enati ng i mages,
cul t objects, rel i gious paraphernal ia and what have you. As much at
odds as some of these multi farious forms may seem to be with the
spi rit of Surreal i sm, what I have been seeki ng to convey i s that
Surreali sm i ndeed "contained" them all from the begi nni ng, just as
Bolshevism was "fated" to generate the Stali ni st state. Surreal i sm's
curse was its i deological nature, and it was forever condemned to try
and exorcise thi s curse, even goi ng so far as to repl ay it on the pri
vate and mystical stage of the myth of ol d, duly exhumed from the
depths of hi story.
Surreali sm had the luci dity of its passi ons, but it never con
ceived a passi on for lucidity. Somewhere between the arti ficial par
adises of capitalism and soci al i sm's pie in the sky, i t created a space
time of uncomfortabl e detachment and blunted aggressiveness
which the commodity system and its spectacle, spanni ng as they do
both these aspects of the old world, have swi ftly gnawed to the bone.
All we can do now, therefore, is to search in Surreal i sm, as we might
i n any culture, for the radioactive radical nucleus that i t contai ns.
The occupati ons movement of 1 96
8
di d precisely that, rei nvok
i ng the vi olence of Surreali sm's profoundest impulses. This appl i es
even to the anachronistic and longwinded diatribes of the Surreal i st
review LArcbibras, whi ch, i n June 1 96
8
, could still wri te:
Let us conti nue to profane the war memorials and turn them
i nto monuments of i ngrati tude. (It must be said that only a
nation of pi gs could have had the i dea of honouri ng the
unknown soldier-let us hope that he was a German desert
er!-by pl aci ng his tomb beneath a grotesque triumphal
arch, which, with its four legs spread, seems for all the
worl d to be shi tti ng on that poor devi l sent one snowy day
to shed his red blood for the blue l i ne of the Vosges. )
I t also applies to the i ncendiary rant, fully worthy of Peret, i ssued by
a "Surreali st Liberati on Group":
1 27
If you are in despai r, if you are sui ci dal from boredom, it i s
ti me to stop acti ng agai nst yourselves. Tme to turn your
anger agai nst those who are really to bl ame for your
predi cament. Burn down the churches, the barracks, the
pol ice stati ons! Loot the department stores! Bl ow up the
stock exchange! Shoot all j udges, bosses, trade- uni on
potentates, cops, and slave- drivers! Wreak vengeance at last
on those who take their revenge on you for thei r own i mpo
tence and servi l i ty!
But i t was no doubt outsi de Surreal i sm, and in large measure
thanks to those who defined themselves i n contradisti ncti on to i t,
that that i rreduci bl e kernel of freedom whi ch Surreal i sm had so
fai thful l y yet so mal adroi tly champi oned was most effectively reaf
fi rmed. Returni ng for the fi rst ti me to the movement's roots, and
vi ewi ng i t clearly i n the context of today's hi storical condi ti ons,
these opponents of Surreal i sm readdressed a problem that had been
alternately l ost and found i n the ebb and fl ow of the Surreal i st ti de:
the problem of the total human bei ng's sel f- real i zation under the
si gn of freedom. Seen from the standpoi nt of thi s aspi rati on, the
Surreal i sts may surely be sai d to have been what Breton wanted
them to be, namel y, that mi nori ty whom he descri bed, i n
"Prolegomena t o a Thi rd Mani festo of Surreal i sm Or Not", as "those
who rise wi th every new program which promotes the greater eman
ci pati on of manki nd but whi ch has not yet been put to the test o
f
real i ty" . To these Breton gr;nted the gracf of a perpetual abi l i ty to
start afresh:
I n view of the hi storical process, where as we wel l know
truth mani fests itself only as a knowi ng chuckle, and i s
never really grasped, I must at least decl are my al legiance to
thi s mi nori ty, who are endlessly renewable and who always
act as a l ever: my greatest ambi ti on woul d be
f
ulfi lled i f I
could somehow ensure the never- endi ng transmi ssi bi l i ty o
f
thei r theoretical contributi on after I am gone.
128
TRANSLATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many, many thanks to those fri ends who generously read al l or part
of the translati on and gave me the benefit of their advice ( even if I
did not always follow i t ) : Ji m Brook, Bruce Elwel l , Paul Hammond,
Cathy Pozzo di Borgo, Fl orence Sebasti ani , and John Si mmons. On
the desi gn and producti on fronts, I am most grateful to Marha
Slomowitz, the AK col l ective, Freddie Baer, and above al l to Anne
Cordel l . Thanks too, once agai n, to Mi a Rublowska for al l ki nds of
vital hel p.
I n handl i ng quoted material I have rel i ed on the exi sti ng trans
l ati ons l i sted below (though I have occasionally made changes) .
I gratefully acknowledge my debt to the transl ators and publ i shers
concerned. Al l other transl ati ons of quoted materi al are my own.
Breton, Arcanum 1 7, translated by Zack Rogow ( Los Angeles: Sun and
Moon Press, 1994)
Breton, "Introduction to the Di scourse on the Paucity of Real i ty",
transl ated by Richard Si eburth and Jenni fer Gordon, October 69
( Summer 1994)
Breton, "Legi timate Defence", translated by Richard Howard, i n
Frankl i n Rosemont, ed. , What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings ( Chi cago:
Monad Press, 1978)
Breton, Md Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws ( Li ncoln and London:
Universi ty of Nebraska Press, 1987) , i ncludi ng Breton's poem
"Sunflower", translated by Caws and Jean-Pier Cauvi n
Breton, Maniestoes of Surrealism, transl ated by Richard Seaver and Hel en
R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969)
Breton, Nadja, transl ated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press,
1960)
Breton, Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor
( London: Macdonald, 1972)
Jose Pierre, ed. , Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1 928-1 932, trans
lated by Malcolm I mri e ( London: Verso, 1992)
1 3 1
"I there is an truth to the notion that the drwning see their
whole lie replayed before their eyes in a few short seconds,
Surrealism may well be described as the last dream of a
foundering culture. II
A Cavalier Histor of Surrealism offers an unequivocal answer to
the question "What was living and what was dead in
Surrealism?" Though blistering in its criticism of
Surrealism's artistic and political aporias, the book identifies
the "radioactive fragment of radicalism" that the movement
never quite managed to shed. Packed with quotations that
still shock after so many years, Vaneigem's pseudonymous
primer summarizes the views of the Situationists on their
celebrated forerunners.
Raoul Vaneigem was born in 1934 in Lessines, Belgium. From
1961 until 1970 he was a leading light in the Situationist
International. Of his main writings, the following have been
translated into English: The Rwo/utioll of Everday Life (1967), The
Book of Pleasures (1979), and Te Movement of the Free Spirit ( 1986).
US $9.95
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