Retrospection and Prophecy in the

Structure of Mad Love

Roger Bellin
Princeton University

Andr Bretons Mad Love deserves more attention both as a literary narrative and
as a set of theoretical propositions about art and politics. This article studies its narrative time-structure and examines its arguments, and asks what each of these aspects of
the text can tell us about the other. Bretons theoretical claims are put in conversation
with some key texts of later Marxist thought, and Mad Loves story of prophecy and
self-interpretation is read as a way of thinking about time.
Keywords: Andr Breton / Mad Love (Lamour fou) / narrative / temporality /
Marxism

ndr Bretons Mad Love is an intricately constructed book which projects

the initial appearance of a shambles, a book whose structure becomes
clear only in retrospect and in rereading. Though it is sometimes now
called Bretons masterpiece, on first reading this slim 1937 book appears merely
to be a memoir or a self-analysis, a series of reminiscences loosely arranged in
chapters and haphazardly interleaved with theoretical proclamations. Breton
casts a glance back over key moments of his recently concluded affair with
Jacqueline Lamba, and comments on these moments with some of his earlier
thoughts about love, revolution, and surrealism; the book gives us his theories of
chance and convulsive beauty, and then recounts in sequence the couples initial
meeting, the growth of their love, their marriage, and the birth of their daughter
Aube. Its plot appears episodic and sequential, especially when abstracted this
way; on the first reading, some initial effort is required merely to assemble the
story, given the books apparently digressive style. But almost all the texts time



Journal of Modern Literature

is spent in retrospective reinterpretation, and scarcely a sentence is narrated

in the simple present or past of a conventional story. Rather than a narrative,
what the text presents is a series of fragments beginning from, and returning to,
moments in a narrated life which exists primarily as a point of departure, as an
implicit structure behind them. The exact structure of this departure varies from
chapter to chapter. In most of the books chapters a single episode is repeatedly
returned to and reinterpreted: it begins with an allegorical dream whose meaning is expounded after it is told (Chapter 1); tells the story of an encounter with
suddenly meaningful found objects (Chapter 3); and it crucially reinterprets
Sunflower, a poem written more than a decade earlier (Chapter 4). But parallel stories also develop, unrecounted, occluded behind the texts digressions:
over the course of Chapter 5 Breton ascends Mount Teide on Tenerife, and
over the course of Mad Love the life of Breton unfolds along with a structuring
metaphoric movement from night to dawn. These stories come to its readers
first through the books self-interpretation. The prophecy around which Mad
Loves plot centers takes place in interpretive time; the book narrates, in its true
plot, a prophetic structure of interpretation. It departs from narrative life to
anticipate a future from which it can reflect upon itself in a retrospective glance.
Constant self-reflection, then, is the texts formal method. The structure of the
story of Mad Love is inseparable from its conceptual work. Though the book
is, as it claims, a contribution within a tradition of modernist and Marxist
thought about time and history, the novelty of its theoretical contribution can
only be assessed by reading that theory through the texts narrative form. The
theoretical, aesthetic, and political status of the time-structure of Mad Love, in
fact, must be the central concern of any reading of this text.
Mad Loves formal novelty has produced its symptoms in criticism, most
obviously in critics abiding uncertainty over its genre. While there is general
critical agreement that Mad Love is not a novel in any conventional sense
(Balakian 107), most criticism has ventured only negative comments about
the genre of Mad Love, noting Bretons stated anti-aesthetic goal of refusing
all genres. Maurice Blanchot summarizes: In refusing, on the one hand, the
genre of the novel ... and, on the other hand, refusing every other genre, ... it
is not to an aesthetic concern that Andr Breton wishes to respond; it is rather
a much more decisive mutation he has in view (412). On Blanchots insightful
reading, the texts radical novelty is located in the structure of the encounter
with the unknown which it diagrams, and in the refusal of existing forms that
this encounter required. However, this reading takes Bretons position on form
at its word, and leaves the problem of the texts genre underspecified.
Other critics have generally tended, implicitly, to consider Mad Love either
as a theoretical tract (the text does more than once describe itself as theoretical), a kind of misshapen, personalized appendage to Bretons Surrealist
manifestoes, or as a memoir or autobiographyor indeed, as both manifesto

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

and memoir at once (following the opinion that the aesthetic of surrealism ...
is in no way separable from life [Ades 183]). But the conclusion that the text
is considerably more complex than thismore than a collection of theoretical reflections interwoven with reminiscencesis suggested by its thematic
unity, by its precisely choreographed recurrences of ideas and vocabulary, by
the formal intricacy of each chapters structure and the connections between
the formally diverse chapters which structure the book as a whole. It is difficult to separate theory from story, argument from plot, even at the level of
the sentence. The voice of the texts narration dwells only briefly, momentarily,
in each of its modes before shifting, unremarked, into another; the impersonal
theoretical voice drifts into personal recollection, recounting or analyzing an
interior experience, a memory or a dream, and back into abstraction.
The narrator himself is elusive; though he is commonly assumed uncomplicatedly to be Breton, the texts narrator cannot simply be the man. He must
rather be a voice of Bretons, an aspect, created by selection from the plurality
of his life, just as Mad Love argues the aspect of the beloved is chosen successively (78). Once we note that, even read as biography, Mad Love is composed
of a very partial selection from elements of Bretons lifein particular, that
Jacqueline Lamba had separated from Breton before the composition of the
books closing letter, though the text nowhere notes thisthe narrators status
becomes necessarily more complex. Nor is this question sufficiently addressed
by simply reading Bretons biography into the text, as though it were there, as
do some of its most eminent and sympathetic readers:
[T]his is the story of Mad Love, which can be told now. The first five parts are
written ... Suddenly, on September 6 [1936], there is a blow-up, and Jacqueline
leaves Breton ... When he finishes the last part of Mad Love, ... he does not know
if she will return. The grave tone of the letter, its wish for his daughter to be madly
loved, rings all the more solemnly. (Caws 5758)

Here, the importation of Bretons life into the narration of the text has led to
a complete misrecognition of the tone of its final chapter. The letter to Aube,
which is suffused with hope for the future, has been distorted into a funereal
note of graveness and solemnity by a reading which takes Bretons actual,
biographical life as invisibly present in the story of Mad Love. But the text
has obviously excluded from its story this part of his lifes story, though it does
contain a love narrative which shares many other features with the biographical romance of Breton and Lamba. The story of Mad Love is told by Mad
Love, not discovered later as a portion of Bretons biography. There can be no
question of simply collapsing this text into a story of Bretons life, or of seeing
it only as a documentary record of his attempt to live his life as art. We might
look to Leon Trotsky for a statement of this principle, noting that Breton was
sympathetic enough to Trotskys politics and theory that he later chose exile in



Journal of Modern Literature

Mexico in order to be with Trotsky (Balakian 170), founding an independent

revolutionary artists group there in 1938 (Collier 48).1 In his Literature and
Revolution (first published in 1922, more than a decade before Mad Love),
Trotsky criticized the error of the Lef group of Russian futurists:
The error ... appears to us in its most generalized form, when they make an ultimatum for the fusion of art with life. ... [O]ne must have a little historic vision, at
least, to understand that between our present-day economic and cultural poverty
and the time of the fusion of art with life, that is, between the time when life
will reach such proportions that it will be entirely formed by art, more than one
generation will have come and gone. (136137)

If we accept this critique as one to which Breton would have been sympathetic,2
there can be no question of reading Mad Love as a simply autobiographical
work, nor as a diary of a life experienced immediately as though it were art.
We must instead consider it as a textperhaps it is a text whose project is to
imagine a new mode of personal experience, perhaps a conjecture of the viewpoint of this distant future with a little historic vision, but it is not a simple
record of one life. The text creates its Andr Breton, and does not simply
merge with him.
A new reading of Mad Love might, then, begin here: what is the narrators
status in this text? Critics have found the text everything from deeply personal
and individual (Caws calls its narrator Andr Breton the man [53]) to purely
collective and universalizing, in its dramatization of the uncanny (Cohen
109) or the experience of love.3 But a more complicated relation between the
narrative voice and the character Bretonbetween the text and its subject in
both sensesis in evidence from the first pages of the text. Even as Mad Love
begins, already in a scene of self-interpretation as Breton reflects on a vision
or dream, Breton is, in his relation to himself, at least as much a third-person
character as a first-person narrator:
Its because Im absolutely forbidden [formellement interdit] to imagine, in such
a case, the behavior of any man at allas long as he is a cowardthis man in
whose place I have so often been, that I cant think of anything more pathetic. He
scarcely is at all, this living man who would hoist himself up on this treacherous
trapeze of time. He would be unable even to exist without forgetfulness ... (6)

The formal structure of this dream-drama disjoins Breton the narrator; its
injunction of simultaneity breaks his past selves into an indefinite group of
nameless figures whom he confronts as external texts to be interpreted. The
I against whom the dreams formal interdiction is set can only encounter itself
apart from itself, as this man ... this living man who cannot exist without forgetting all of his other incarnations. Bretons reflexive self-interpretation cannot
be satisfied in the singular: he asks, or wishes, who will teach us to decant the

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

joy of memory? (6); but the questions form itself suggests this lesson can only
be learned at the price of a self-multiplication into the first person plural. That
is, memory itself is a self-alienating act of interpretation; one cannot remember
and exist at once. The narrator, in becoming a faithful human document
(39), is separated from himself, and Breton from the narrator, by this interpretive (and temporal) distance. The fleeting present of existence, which scarcely
is, is not the focus of the texts descriptive effort, though, so much as the
ceaseless retrospection of the interpretation of what has passed.
This initial dream scene anticipates and figures the texts design: Mad Love
will disjoin and pluralize the putative present of its narration, this place I have
so often been, into brief, episodic segments, each of which scarcely is at all
before it has been. The text will try to assemble these lovers I shall have
been, moments which are always already from the past, and recount them in
an impossible simultaneous co-presence. There will be, as Breton writes, too
many, a surplus of, reasons to mingle into the tale all the tenses of the verb
to be (51). Still, the future perfect will have been the tense of this book from
the beginning: it always, habitually (5), imagines a retrospective viewpoint
on its own narration.
The texts work will be to conjecture a redemption of this past by remembering, by recounting, and by interpreting it; to imagine the time of each moment
from the standpoint of the dawning future (metonymically represented by the
absent addressee of the final chapter, Bretons daughter Aube [116119]). The
movement toward a future dawn which is the underlying structure of the text
might even be called a plot as much as the half-occluded biographical story
of Bretons affair with Jacqueline Lamba and the birth of his daughter. The
coming of the dawn, Bretons attempt to conjure a future after me (116), his
brand of negative utopianism, all recall Theodor Adornos famous passage on
the conjectured, retrospective light of hope:
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the
attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the
standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world
by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be
fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and
crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact
with objectsthis alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things.
... But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint
removed, even though by a hairs breadth, from the scope of existence. (247)

Though it was never so intended, this is a precise account of the work attempted
in Mad Love: it is structured by the same metaphor, calling for the revealing
messianic light of a dawn which must remain in an uncertain future. Adornos



Journal of Modern Literature

conclusion, in its epiphanic version of enlightenment, calls for a newly objective

approach to knowledge which Breton had, in his own way, tried to enact.4
Adornos unwilled felt contact with objects, the estranging objectivity
which stands with the image against the abolition of the particular (140) and
the death sentence on the subject (141), is echoed in the revelatory objective
stance of Mad Love. Found objects compel an uncanny objectivity of thought
to Breton: they imposed with themselves this abnormally prolonged sensorial
contact, induced us to think ceaselessly of their concrete existence, offering to
us certain very unexpected prolongations from their life (30). Breton returns
many times to the signal character of this encounter with the object, to its
unexpectedness and its surprise; his later interpretation will try to exhaust the
content of the encounter, but there may always remain a residue of uninterpreted fact. Such an objectivity has a revelatory, redemptive quality for both
Breton and Giacometti, once its interpretation is begun:
The finding of an object serves here exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the
sense that it frees the individual from paralyzing affective scruples, comforts him and
makes him understand that the obstacle he might have thought insurmountable is
cleared. (32)

Breton emphasizes this entire sentence; it has, for Mad Love, the status of a
principle or an axiom, an imposition from the theoretical code (and here again
the principle is formulated in retrospect, after the narration of the encounter
with the object). The prefix of insurmountable is significant here: the insurmountable obstacle is precisely the real whose transcendence the Surrealist
hopes to stage. Uncannily active, objects impose freedom on the subject
by their very particularity, by their uniqueness: Bretons objective contemplationwhich brings the comfort of an imagined future, of a solution
to the intractable, the insurmountableis a kind of love. The unique and
startling uncertainties (81) of the beloved are precisely alike in this: the surreal and transcendent is achieved in Mad Love only through perfect objective
contemplation of the real object (of description or desire).
But contemplative redemption, which is one of the meanings of the love
the text works to define, seems at first blush not to sit well with Bretons avowed
materialism, nor with his revolutionary politics; there is a residual appearance
of Hegelianism about it, a teleological certainty. Of course, the questions of
teleology and transcendence, viewed through the lenses of subjective experience and the theory of love, are a large part of the explicit content of the book.
And along with its development of a surrealist objectivity and attention to the
particular, the idea of love developed in the text is also an idea of time.
Bretons love is a careful attempt at compromise between hindsight
and foresight, fulfillment and prophecy, retrospection and futurity. The timestructure of the text itself bears on this problem, and so does its place in Bretons

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

work: Mad Love is the final part of what can be constructed retrospectively
as a trilogy of Bretons works, beginning with Nadja and Communicating Vessels (Balakian 102104). It is a group of texts based not only on formal and
thematic homogeneity, but material continuity: Mad Love explicitly revisits
both of the preceding works,5 reinterpreting and retrospectively altering their
material in a manner quite unlike its treatment of its other references (apart,
of course, from the pivotal rereading of the Sunflower poem). The trilogy
chronicles what might be called Bretons philosophy of love. Bretons is an idea
of love staged in the terms of revolutionary politics, a love which does not so
much combine the personal with the political as ignore any distinction between
them. But the degree of Mad Loves complicity withor its use ofthe long
history of the literary love trope is difficult to assess; Bretons spirited defense
of notions like forever (114) and the fairytale (84) leaves itself open, perhaps
necessarily, to a transcendent idealist interpretation.
Without question, the text works in close proximity to received ideas of
love which seem frankly to contradict the complex conjectural structure of
Bretons future. As Anna Balakian writes, they lived happily ever after is the
fiction perpetuated by the fantastic world of idealism, against which these three
volumes are a prolonged protest (122); but we may wonder whether the text
protests too much. And if we recall the disjunction between the circumstances
of Bretons actual affair with Jacqueline Lamba during its composition and the
tone of the books closing letter, the question of happy endings, of their possibility in life and fiction, and of their falsification, becomes prominent.6 The
text is emphatic enough about its distance from fictional, romantic, or idealist
notions of love that it occasionally appears defensive in the Freudian mode of
denial. Bretons introductory passage which argues for the experienced uniqueness of the beloved begins with a series of exculpatory disclaimers, of a type
often repeated in Mad Love, and ends with another:
Making due allowance for the use of any means needed to transform the world
and notably to suppress these social obstacles, it is nevertheless perhaps not useless to persuade ourselves that this idea of a unique love comes from a mystic
attitudewhich doesnt mean it cant be nourished by contemporary society for
its own dubious ends. All the same I think I see a possible synthesis of this idea
and its negation. ... I am saying that here as elsewhere this notion, being the fruit
of a collective judgement tried and proved, appears fortunately to correct another
one emerging from one of those innumerable idealistic pretensions which have
proved themselves intolerable in the long run. (78)

What distinguishes the authentic collective judgement from the idealistic

pretensions? How does Breton mean to tell the true fruit from the false one
nourished by contemporary society? Here the text provides little to guide a
reading, beyond its own confidence in the difference. It only asserts that the



Journal of Modern Literature

idea of the uniqueness of the beloved behind her apparent multiplicity is mystic and collective rather than transcendent and idealist. The two ideasthe
idealist fiction and the mystic material fact which Breton says he has perceived
behind itare coupled so tightly as to be almost indistinguishable. And the
passage from one to the other conception of the beloved is achieved by making due allowance for the use of any means needed to transform the world and
... suppress these social obstacles. The casually, playfully proleptic gesture
of making due allowance makes his notion a transplant from the imagined
future, a conjectured attribute of a utopia whose arrival is by no means certain.
It is an anticipation of what may be impossible.
This tendency toward anticipation was criticized by Trotsky (in the same
passage in which he opposed the Futurists fusion of art and life) as
Utopian sectarianism. ... [T]he theorists of Lef anticipate history and contrast
their scheme or their prescription with that which is. They thus have no bridge
to the future .... To tear out of the future that which can only develop as an
inseparable part of it, and to hurriedly materialize this partial anticipation in the
present-day dearth and before the cold footlights, is only to make an impression
of provincial dilettantism. (134135)

He continues:
The effort to reason out such a [future] style from the nature of the proletariat,
from its collectivism, activism, atheism, and so forth, is the purest idealism, and
will give nothing but an ingenious expression of ones ego, an arbitrary allegorism,
and the same old provincial dilettantism. (136)

Despite the two mens later agreement, and despite Bretons apparent understanding of Trotskys critique of the fusion of art and life, these critical passages
bear directly on Bretons text. Mad Love might, in fact, be seen as attempting to
save the objects of Trotskys criticism from an excessively pragmatist revolutionary aesthetic. We can easily read Breton as a defiant composer of an ingenious
expression of ones ego, an arbitrary allegorism; Mad Love can even be taken
as a reclamation of the revolutionary virtue of these modes. This is clearly the
gist of Bretons embrace of Raymond Roussels technical discovery (80): the
use of the preposition to link nouns. Breton calls this a vehicle to transport
the image:7 it is enough to link in that way no matter what noun to no matter
what other one for a world of new representations to surge up immediately
(80). Bretons text, then, is a direct defense of an arbitrary allegorism (or what
Octavio Paz has called universal analogy [100]) as a means of reconciling
particularly well the pleasure principle with the reality principle by means of
the inexhaustible natural generosity of language (80). Roussels allegorical
device, his machine for creating meaning, allows access to the childlike realm
of desire itself; this is Bretons claim, and the plenitude of meaning endangers

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

a morality based on labor and effort, which Breton sees as Wasted for games,
wasted for love (80). A parallelism which structures the entire book is revealed
here: games and love, chance and desire, are the complementary elements of
Mad Loves implicit theoretical program, the two intertwined ways of thinking
about the encounter with the future which is at the center of the text.
The spirit of play, the gamesmanship of language, is a key part of the surplus which Breton attributes to love, a surplus which is accessible only through
an anticipation, a conjecture of the future in which he will be free to pursue it.
And the conjecture is itself a game, played out in and by Bretons text:
What is strangest is inseparable from love, presiding over its revelation in individual as well as collective terms. ... Once the problem of human material life is
supposedly resolved, as I am playing at believing it resolved within this framework
[comme je joue le croire rsolu dans ce cadre], I immediately run into these startling
uncertainties, and for an instant I want to look at them only. My love for you has
only increased since the first day. ... Because you are unique, you cant help being
for me always another, another you [une autre, une autre toi-mme]. (81)

Utopia here is something which Breton can play at, a notion which can be
supposed, conjectured, anticipated in a text, and whose possibilities can be
explored by following the rules of its game. The startling uncertainties and
true uniqueness of the beloved can only be encountered by the indirection of
this speculative future. The time of this glance at the unknown, when it takes
place immediately ... for an instant in Bretons text, is an impossible present
tense. It is an imagined instant, divided by a hairs breadth from any present
of narration, possible only within the game of writing. Not a Utopian sectarianism, in Trotskys terms, but a utopian mysticism, in the play of Bretons
game, opens the possibility of understanding on the individual subjective level
the prophecys implicit encounter with chance (which would be revolution on
the collective level) and producing an inexhaustible surplus (My love ... has
only increased). As Blanchot describes it:
Play: a word designating the only seriousness of any worth. Play is the provocation
by which the unknown, allowing itself to be caught up in the game, can come
into relation. One plays with the unknown, that is to say, with the unknown as
the stakes. ... The aleatory introduces into thought as well as into the world, into
the real of thought as into exterior reality, what is not found, what is encountered
only through encounter. Automatic writing, then, is the infallibility of the improbable: what by definition does not cease coming about and yet comes about only
exceptionally, in uncertainty and outside every promise: at all times but in a time
impossible to determine, that of surprise. (412)

This reading neatly unites the prophetic structure of Bretons text with encounter, promise, and thus with all of the terms in which Blanchot and Derrida

10

Journal of Modern Literature

describe the future as that which is to come. Bretons defense of Rousselian

arbitrary allegorism can be seen, through Blanchots reading of automatic
writing, as an attempt to understand the unpredictable under the sign of perfect, infallible prediction: it is a defense of overinterpretation which Breton
once calls the paranoiac way of looking (87). This is the reason behind the
texts ceaseless retrospection, its repeated self-interpretation: an understanding
of time which insists on perfect prophecy must find that prophecy in retrospect.
And the only way to think about prediction in such a structure is to conjecture
a retrospective glance from a nonexistent, perhaps impossible, conjured future
(One of Bretons most frequent expressions is until further notice or a day
will come, a projection of the dream into future events [Balakian 118]).
But the texts proclaimed certainty in its assessment of the politics of this
way of thinking about time can easily be doubted. The politics of Nadjas future
is the source of Benjamins political disappointment with that text, as Adam
Woodruff perceives: if the surrealist movement is to be true to its professed
affinity with historical materialism, it must not place itself at the mercy of a
speculative future but must help shape a revolutionary future latent in its own
practices (200). Rather than exploring the problem of Mad Loves particular
futurity, criticism has tended instead to take the text at its word on this question.
Balakian summarizes the issue pellucidly, without assessing the claim:
The social revolution cannot, in [Bretons] opinion, be effective unless the dream is
spelled into action; and since the dream has by its nature an individual character,
the whole problem of the individuals role in social transformation is put into
question. ... Political revolution, then, is viewed in the context of a new metaphysics; in extricating from the dream the prejudicial element of mystery and unavailability, Breton proposes it as an agent of revelation, utilizable in the field of action.
... In this way the cult of self takes on social proportions. (117118)

To look at the issue another way: the novelty of Bretons new metaphysics is
not beyond question. There is an unmistakable tinge of Hegelianism, a shade
of historicism, to the texts complete retrospective confidence in its prophetic
interpretation of the past. Mad Love does occasionally slide into an idealist
vocabulary which it has elsewhere disclaimed, as when Breton describes the
actually existing social conditions which render absolute love impossible as
error (92), importing a Hegelian collective subject and causality precisely
in its political moment, or in its literalist misunderstanding of innocence as
absolute nonguilt (93); in its eagerness to reject apparent transcendence, the
texts call for a salvation through simple inversion ends up simply importing the
transcendent character to the absolute negative. But the residue of transcendent idealism is most apparent in Bretons discussion of interpretation itself:8

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

11

I have insisted ... on the fact that self-analysis alone is, in many cases, capable of
exhausting the content of dreams, and that this analysis, if it is thorough enough,
leaves none of the residue that might permit us to attribute a transcendental character to oneiric activity. On the other hand, it seems to me that I have cut off all
too quickly when I had to explain that, similarly, self-analysis could sometimes
exhaust the content of real events, to the point of making them depend entirely
on the least conscious prior activity of the mind [lesprit]. The concern I had, on
the revolutionary level, for not cutting myself off from practical action, perhaps
kept me from pushing my thoughts to their limits, given the difficulty of making
most of the revolutionaries of that period share such a dialectically rigorous point
of view. Not having been able to pass over to practical action, I feel today no
scruples in returning to it ...
I say that there isnt anything in this poem of 1923 that did not announce the
most important thing to happen to me in 1934. Were there to be any doubt about
the future necessity of the dedication of the poem, that doubt [would] evaporate
[svanouirait], as we will see. (6465)

This is the central statement of Mad Loves theory of interpretation, and an

extremely complex passage in tone and tense as well as argument. It passes from
a retrospective return in self-interpretation to a future promise of revelation,
through the single present of the I say, which itself asserts the prophetic
character of the sunflower poem. Among its defensive claims of dialectical
rigor and revolutionary virtue and its protestations of self-doubt (including
the dissimulated hesitancy, the apparent overcoming of past obstacles to the
presentand again retrospectiverevelation), it works toward a materialist,
antitranscendent notion of prophecy. The word exhaustion, representing the
goal and completion of interpretation, recurs elsewhere in the text; here it carries the implication that an uninterpretable residue would necessarily require a
transcendental explanation (this is a controvertible assumption in itself, but we
can leave this concern aside for the moment). A prophecy or premonition, then,
would remain unexhausted, apparently bearing a transcendental, inexplicable
residue, until its fulfillment; then its interpretation could be completed. On
this account, the retrospective vantage of a future necessity is a requisite for
complete interpretation.
Again, apart from Bretons claim of dialectical rigor (which is notably
ambiguous, as Hegel, too, had a dialectic9), it is difficult to see how this theory
of prophecy is antitranscendent. This structure of interpretive time appears
almost classically Hegelian: the truth of a moment is only achieved in its transcendence, the exhaustion of its essential truth, by the future. Making real
events depend entirely on the least conscious prior activity of the spirit does
not immediately appear to be a goal of materialism, to be sure (this is no less

12

Journal of Modern Literature

contradictory though the glaring Hegelianism of spirit has disappeared in

translation). And indeed, Bretons aesthetic and political project in Mad Love
has often been critically described in terms better suited for Feuerbach, or a
left-Hegelian humanism, than for Marx: he works, we are told, to show ...
that indeed psychic reality is a part, and the better part, of material reality, that
it is the inherent reservoir of magic. ... [to] resituate the notion of the sacred
within the scope of human experience. ... the enormous task of giving back
to man what man has for so long attributed to God (Balakian 104105). If
this were an accurate and exhaustive description of the project of Mad Love,
its readers would be justified in ignoring the texts protestations to the contrary and treating its prophetic structure as an outgrowth of a transcendentalidealist conception of time. We could then see Bretons preoccupation with
the retrospective interpretation of prophecy as an ultimately fruitless paradox, itself belatedly patterned after Hegels difficulty accounting for the prophetic character of the great men. For on the Hegelian model anticipation is
impossible, as
nothing can run ahead of its time. ... However far philosophy goes it can never
escape the bounds of this absolute horizon: even if it takes wing at dusk, it still
belongs to the day, to the today, it is still merely the present reflecting on itself,
reflecting on the presence of the concept with itselftomorrow is in essence
forbidden it.
And that is why the ontological category of the present prevents any anticipation of historical time, any conscious anticipation of the future development of
the concept, any knowledge of the future. This explains the theoretical difficulty
Hegel experienced in dealing with the existence of great men, whose role in his
reflection is therefore that of paradoxical witnesses to an impossible conscious
historical forecast. Great men neither perceive nor know the future: they divine
it as a presentiment. Great men are only clairvoyants who have a presentiment
of but can never know the imminence of tomorrows essence. ... That is why no
Hegelian politics is possible strictly speaking. (Althusser 95)

It is easy to recognize a description of Mad Love in this: the texts time-structure

can be seen in the concern with writing a dawning tomorrow into a nocturnal
present which cannot yet see it, and the figure of Breton can be recognized
writing himself into the role of the great man as paradoxical, clairvoyant
witness to an impossible conscious historical forecast. And there may be no
better explanation than this one for the drift away from concrete revolutionary
politics which many critics have perceived in Bretons later work.
However, a residue of uncertainty remains; the interpretation of Mad Love
itself is not so quickly exhausted. In the pages following the cogent critique
above of what he describes as a still-living Hegelianism, Althusser moves his
theoretical program toward a disjunctive idea of time. He develops an account

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

13

of the existence of disjoint but articulated historical times in each moment,

proposing that there exist a philosophical time, a political time, an aesthetic
time, a scientific time, each with its own internal structure and laws, each
wedded structurally to the others but acting with relative independence. It is,
at the least, possible to read Bretons text as complementary to this materialist
program. Such a reading would recall, first, the persistence of an element of the
aleatory, of surprise, as a central component of its materialism; then it would
complicate the Hegelian interpretation of the texts time-structure, seeing
Bretons mode of self-interpretation as an attempt to think the conjunction of
these different temporal chains. Such a model of the time of Mad Love can be
read, obscurely, in Bretons protest on the utopian character of fairy stories:
[Anti-Surrealists] are saying ... that the world has nothing strange to offer where
we are, are claiming it just changed like the voice of a young boy; they object lugubriously that the time of fairy stories is over. Over for them! If I want the world
to change, if I even mean to consecrate part of my own life to its changing in its
social aspect, it is not in the vain hope of returning to the time of these stories,
but of course, in the hope of helping the time to come when they will no longer
just be stories. Surprise must be sought for itself, unconditionally. It exists only in
the interweaving in a single object of the natural and the supernatural. ... To see
natural necessity opposing human or logical necessity, no longer to try desperately
to reconcile them, to deny in love the persistence of falling in love and, in life, the
perfect continuity of the impossible and the possiblethese are tantamount to
acknowledging the loss of what I maintain is the only state of grace. (84)

In the first sentence quoted, Breton unambiguously condemns the simply

Hegelian version of historical time with which he has elsewhere seemed very
close to agreeing. He then proposes a different model, and this involves a
present interweaving multiple heterogeneous times. The past time of fairy
stories, which has ended, did not involve any literal truth of their magic: it
was merely caught up in a history of aesthetics, culminating in the present
incredulity toward magic. In contrast, the realm of future possibilitythe
time to come when they will no longer be just storiesis enchanted: it holds
open the possibility of their impossible literal enactment, as an example of the
unknowable which must be sought as surprise. And this existsthat is,
it can be understoodonly as the interweaving, the connection and interpenetration, of heterogeneous chains of necessity. These strands of causality,
connecting past and future, can only be tied to each other in the continuous
attempt to render them continuous, to regain a state of grace which must
always be strived for and never wholly attained.
Here, at least, Mad Love can be read as an attempt to think a hope beyond
the mere coercive progression of time. The perfect continuity of the impossible
and the possible presents the superficial appearance of a Hegelian paradox of

14

Journal of Modern Literature

foresight; but here it can be read, instead, as a reorientation of human historical

possibility. Breton would direct possibility toward what must first be imagined
humanly possible, then thought logically possible, then made naturaltoward
a conjunction of the heterogeneous causal series he has catalogued, toward
their desperate reconciliation like that of lovers. Only such a future would
exhaust the meaning of this passage; only then would Bretons prophecy be
completed. This may only be a residue, a trace, of Bretons revolutionary politics,
much of which may be accounted for in a transcendental reading; but the text
does not yield itself so completely to any idealist interpretation as to explain
the persistent surplus of its love. The love of Mad Love persists exactly in its
inexhaustibility to any present; its future remains incomplete in order that its
love will also remain infinite.

Notes
1. Arturo Schwarzs Andr Breton, Leone Trotskij gives a useful account of the friendship between the
two. For more on Bretons politics and Trotskys Literature and Revolution, see Peter Colliers article;
Caws also has some discussion of their relationship and Bretons politics (610).
2. The importance of Trotskys essay on the Lef (Novyi Lef) groups futurism in thinking about the
politics of Surrealism was, of course, already recognized in Walter Benjamins famous essay of 1929.
Some illuminating affinities between Benjamin and Breton are described by Adam Woodruff in a recent
article. It is possible that Trotskys essay, instead, marks a point of disagreement between Marxist politics
and surrealism, as Octavio Paz reads it: Certainly, the transformation of Lenins workers State into an
immense and effective bureaucracy precipitated the split [between Surrealism and Communism], but
that was not its cause. With Trotsky in power the difficulties would not have been completely different. It suffices to read Literature and Revolution to see that for Trotsky the freedom of art had certain
limits ... (58; my trans.).
3. Benjamin, in his reading of Nadja, inclines to the personal reading, finding it an intoxication,
a moral exhibitionism and the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman clef
(209). But for Benjamin, this forswearing of privacy is also a political act in much the same way Breton
described: To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence (209).
4. Benjamins stress on materialistic ... inspiration or profane illumination (209), which he believed
the Surrealists fitfully capable of achieving, provides a historical connection between Bretons future
dawn and Adornos, but this is less compelling than the conceptual similarities.
5. The references tying Mad Love to the earlier texts take a variety of forms. Breton left footnotes
instructing readers Cf. Les Vases communicants (126n4) and See Nadja (127n1). The text insists on
continuity of setting with its predecessors, giving us the Flea Market, described in Nadja (this repetition
of the setting is excused by the constant and deep transformation of the place) (2526). And it creates
a similar continuity of character across the three texts: one of these people, whom I lost sight of years
ago, is none other than the one to whom the last pages of Nadja are addressed, and who is designated
by the letter X in Les Vases communicants (38). Further, the texts theoretical voice assumes a continuity
of argument with the preceding volumes: I have insisted, especially in Les Vases communicants, on the
fact that self-analysis alone is, in many cases, capable of exhausting the content of dreams (64). And,
most obliquely, the texts self-interpretive work itself is apparently continuous with the foregoing works:
Throughout this book I have had the chance to examine ... an encounter. ... I think I was able to do
it only because of my determination to adjust progressively to this light of the anomaly whose trace is
found in my preceding books (24).

Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love

15

6. Benjamin called pessimism and mistrust in all reconciliation the Communist answer (216217)
toward which he saw Surrealism tending in 1929, though of course he was primarily referring to political, not romantic, reconciliation. Still, Mad Loves trust in reconciliation on the level of the individual
might well have disappointed his hopes in the same way as did Nadjas continued interest in spiritualism
(209) and the romantic prejudices (216) which he called obstacles to its task.
7. The technicality of Bretons allegorical vehicle, which in Roussel was unmistakably that of a
machine, transposes an orthodox-Marxist technological determinism metaphorically into the realm of
poetry.
8. This passage discusses the reinterpretation of Sunflower, a poem composed using automatic writing (Mad Love xii) by Breton in the summer of 1923, as an accurate prophecy of Bretons encounter
with Lamba. Sunflower was published in Bretons Clair de terre in 1923, and is included in the English
edition (Earthlight) as well as the bilingual Poems of Andr Breton.
9. In a late interview, Breton was asked to comment on his use of antinomies in the Second Manifesto
of Surrealism. He answered with enthusiasm for the Hegelian dialectic: When Hegelian dialectic ceases
to function, for me there is no thought, no hope of truth (Conversations 118).

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Verso, 1974.
Althusser, Louis, and tienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Verso, 1970.
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Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of
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. Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Paragon
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Timms and Peter Collier. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

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Paz, Octavio. Estrella de Tres Puntas: Andr Breton y el Surrealismo. Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Vuelta,
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