Andre Breton &

Surrealism

The Son of Man & Attempting the Impossible, Rene Magritte

 Surrealism is an elision of super and

realism
Guillaume Apollinaire, who Breton hailed
as the last great poet, was the first to
use the term
Apollinaire created the word to describe a
new drama that did NOT attempt
verisimilitude and that was itself a new
artistic and literary faith

When man wanted to imitate walking he

created the wheel, which does not
resemble a leg. In the same way he has
created Surrealism unconsciously.
-- Guillaume Apollinaire

 The goal of the early French Surrealist

was to transform perception and
transcend conventional rational thought.
Andre Breton, often considered the father
of Surrealism and the consummate
surrealist poet, is concerned not only with
the destruction of old conceptions about
human experience and conventional
representations of reality, but also with the
discovery of a "super-reality."

Origins and Basic

Definitions
At its most basic, Surrealism was
a literary, artistic, philosophical
and political movement
influenced by Freudianism and
dedicated to the expression of
imagination as revealed in
dreams, free of the conscious
control of reason and free of
convention

Seize Septembre & Black Magic, Rene Magritte

My painting is visible images which

conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and,
indeed, when one sees one of my
pictures, one asks oneself this simple
question, 'What does that mean?'. It does
not mean anything, because mystery
means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Rene Magritte

Song of Love, Giorgio di Chirico

 Surrealist writers are interested in

the associations and implications
of words rather than their literal
meanings
Surrealism hasnowcome to
refer to a style of expression in
which fantastic visual imagery
from the subconscious mind is
used with no intention of making
the work logically comprehensible.

Seeking a synthesis of the dreams,

as revoked at dawn, and reality, as
it disappears at sunset, the
surrealists landed on the shifting
sands of the subconscious along
the shores of the sea of knowledge
where rests the concrete
manifestation of reality
-- Andre Breton

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

from The First Surrealist

Manifesto:
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
functioning of thought. Dictated by thought,
in the absence of any control exercised by
reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral
concern.

 ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy.
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 ruin once and for all all other
psychic mechanisms and to substitute
itself for them in solving all the
principal problems of life.

Max Ernst, "The Robing of the Bride"

 Through radical juxtaposition of images, Breton intends

achieve a different understanding of human experience
One important question is whether or not this delivery
to a new state of consciousness and understanding is
possible for the reader or only the artist/writer creating
the surreal work
Breton displays numerous detailed and often
incongruous/unexpected/surprising images, stacked one
after another.
His concern lies with how these images are juxtaposed
and contrasted, i.e. their interplay, with the intention of
creating a montage or collage of image after image that
has the effect of a psychological epiphany

 The disjointed, fractured and often

disturbing juxtapositions create a dreamlike, oneiric world that supposedly
enables the reader (perhaps?) finally and
ultimately to dwell in a thought process in
which perception of this super-reality is
made manifest

Galatea of the Spheres, Salvador Dali

(Surrealist collage is) the chance encounter

of two distant realities on an unfamiliar
plane . . . or, in short, the cultivation of the
effects of a systematic displacement . . . a
function of our will to the complete
displacement of everything
-- Max Ernst

 Surrealism intends to overturn logic and

reason by using images and details that
have no apparent rational or sensible
connection.
Psychic automatism is a condition that
results from the use of juxtaposed images
and pure expression with an emphasis on
luminous detail.

 The emphasis on 'automatic writing'

whereby the interplay of images that
occurs for the reader (perhaps
subconsciously) is privileged over what is
already known or perceived.
Breton suggest that surrealism is an
attempt to discover and uncover what
transpires in the depths of the minds of all
human beings.

 Surrealism, in a sense, is a device that allows

for psychic automatism, or a thinking and
sensibility that is free from the constraints of
logic and the modalities of culture.
Breton contends that human experience and
our myriad perceptions of reality are in some
way problematic. He suggests that the
commonly held ideologies and sensibilities that
describe (and in many ways create) our world
are insufficient in representing our actual
existence and our relationship to objective
reality.

 Max Ernst
Fireside Angel
1937

Max Ernst, Fireside Angel,1937

 These inadequacies can be transformed

to the extent that the reader can at least
gain a more lucid and accurate
understanding of the human condition
and our relationship within the universe.
Breton purports that a super-reality exists
above and beyond the limitations of
objective reality as revealed and
constructed by reason.

 Psychic automatism is akin to the speech of

thought, according to Breton
Surrealist writing is escapist in the sense that it
alleviates the thinker from psychological rule
by convention and culture
For Breton, poetry emanates from the lives of
human beings
The human attitude behind the poetry is more
important than the actual work itself

The only thing I would consider worth

doing is escaping, as much as possible,
from that human type we all share in. . . .
I still see poetry as the terrain on which
the terrible difficulties that consciousness
has with confidence, in a given individual,
have the best chance of being resolved.
(Breton from The Disdainful Confession)

Salvador Dal, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936

 He further suggests that our apparently

familiar world is in fact what estranges
and alienates us most.
Surrealist poetry is an attempt to create a
re-perception of human existence and
reality, in the present moment, which
allows for a more accurate, effectual,
direct, emotional, intense, realistic, and
generally more "human" cosmology.

Poetry is made in bed like love

Its unmade sheets are the dawn of things
The embrace of poetry like the ebrace of
the naked body
Protects while it lasts
Against all access by the misery of the
world
--Andre Breton (from Poemes)