THE CHALLENGE OF SURREALISM
“A HERO OF THE WESTERN World” is what André Breton was for Jean Paulhan, the editor of the Nouvelle revue française, whose issue of April 1967 came out under the banner “André Breton and the Surrealist movement 1896-1966.“ Three years later, on the anniversary of Breton’s death, a group of his followers announced that the historical period of Surrealism had ended, but that it had eternal values. Presumably the predicate “eternal” had been chosen to defy those followers of Breton who would never think in terms of eternity.
A contrary opinion was expressed by Gaetan Picon, the right-hand man of Malraux during the regime of de Gaulle. “What was Surrealism after all but the concerted endeavor of a group of discoverers. Once the original group had broken down, not even its leader could reconstitute it. The International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 was the last occasion they presented a united front”; hence: “After Breton’s return to Paris from America in 1946 and to his death, 20 years later, Breton kept trying to reshape and direct the Surrealist group, and the round of exclusions, condemnations and reconciliations went on for years.”1 This was sweet music to the ears of Harold Rosenberg, who, on the occasion of the English translation of Picon’s book, gave it a rave review,2 although not without making one of those elegant intellectual pirouettes by substituting for Picon’s diagnosis that after World War II “the period of history favorable to the peculiar blend of violence and hope was over” his own belief that Surrealism from its inception was pervaded by a deadly seriousness, keyed to the gathering desperation of civil violence, economic depression, dictatorship and approaching war. Surrealism’s humor was expressed in the title of a book by Breton, Black. To a Surrealist’s confrontation of reality with the images of the night, Harold Rosenberg opposes the push and pull of colors arbitrarily identified with “the drama of creation.” The beautiful illustrations accompanying the text of Picon’s Surrealists and Surrealism are a delight to the eyes.
According to the view of the psychiatrist Gaston Ferdière, “Surrealism is a school of art or literature only for those who do not understand what surrealism is all about.”3 Pierre Mabille, a surgeon who was a member of the Surrealist group, further claimed that “Surrealism is the first conscious and collective sign of a complete break with classical European tradition, as it created for certain intellectuals a new climate of sensitivity which began to question the validity of the premises upon which Western culture was developed.”4
The first scholarly exhibition to liberate Dada and Surrealism from museumification was held last January under the sponsorship of the Arts Council of Great Britain at London’s Hayward Gallery. David Sylvester, who conceived the show, says in his catalogue introduction “Regarding the exhibition”:
Dada and Surrealism are not art movements; they are not even literary movements with attendant artists. They are religions with a view of the world, a code of behavior, a hatred of materialism, an ideal of man’s future state, a proselytizing spirit, a joy in a membership of a community of the like-minded, a demand that the faithful must sacrifice other attachments, a hostility to art for art’s sake, a hope for transforming existence.5
I gather that Sylvester uses here the term religion to mean binding (religo), a para-etymology according to the linguists, but commonly accepted in antiquity.
This exhibition was also a history of the reviews that document the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Each of its 17 sections included paintings, sculptures, contemporary and primitive found objects, as well as copies of reviews, featured articles and photographs, mirroring that particular phase. The difference between the Dadaists and the Surrealists is vividly illustrated by Elizabeth Cowling, when she writes:
In the context of a Dada soirée in Zurich during which one might be subjected to abusively worded manifestoes, to simultaneous recitations of incomprehensible poems by weirdly attired individuals . . . the Negro poems, dances and music would have been understood as a further assault on the audience’s sensibilities, not as a homage to a preferred civilization. When, on the other hand, the Surrealists included Oceanic sculpture, objects made by madmen or drawings by mediums in their exhibitions, the visitor would have been in no doubt that the gesture was respectful—the catalogue and other surrealists publications made it clear; so did the more ordered arrangement of the exhibits.6
The catalogue, of approximately 500 pages, is now indispensable to all interested in the subject, and it is a model of an anti-coffee-table art book.
In Les Paris sont ouverts (All Bets are Open), a title intended as an allusion to Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, Claude Cahun writes that
the most revolutionary experience under capitalism has been without doubt for France, and perhaps for Europe, the Dadaist and Surrealist experience, for it aimed at destroying all the artistic myths by means of which it had been possible for centuries to exploit painting sculpture and literature for both ideological and economic reasons.7
Jean Paulhan’s homage to “the Hero of the Western World” ends thus: “Breton is dead, everything has to begin all over again.”8 To understand how it all began in the first place, we should delve into Marguerite Bonnet’s André Breton, subtitled Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste (1975).9 Breton was born in Britanny, the only child of a domineering and unloving mother. As an adult Breton referred to his childhood as “une enfance massacrée.” A perceptive schoolteacher, noticing André’s unusual gift for words, directed the adolescent’s attention to the writings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Huysmans. When he was only 17 (in 1913) three of Breton’s poems, dedicated to Paul Valéry, were published in the review La Phalange.
In the following year he met Valéry and a significant correspondence developed between the two, Through Valéry, Breton came to know Marcel Schwob, an eminent writer deeply interested in anarchism. (An anarchist demonstration of 1913, against the extension of military service to three years, touched the 18-year-old closely.) At this time Breton discovered Rimbaud. Acquiescing to his parents’ wishes he enrolled in a premedical school. Mobilized in 1915, he was sent to Nantes as a medical orderly; shortly after he was assigned as a medic to the neuropsychiatric center of Saint-Dizier, where he first heard of Freud. In Nantes he met Jacques Vaché, who made a profound and lasting impression upon him, although he may not have seen him more than five or six times. Vaché, who was probably viewed as the embodiment of Baudelaire’s description of the dandy, committed suicide in 1919. Under the impact of this event Breton wrote to Tzara, and when, shortly after, he met the Dadaist poet, he was struck by his extraordinary resemblance to Vaché. From the beginning of 1917 Breton was living in Paris, taking the special medical courses necessary to become an auxiliary doctor (médecin auxiliaire). It was then that he met Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and his interest shifted from Rimbaud to Lautréamont, while through Apollinaire he came to know the works of Sade. The enthusiasms of Breton and his friends for Dadaism lasted until 1922, when Breton announced his break with this movement in a pamphlet Lâchez tout, lâchez Dada, (Drop Everything, Drop Dada).
Surrealism, officially born with the publication of the review La Révolution surréaliste in 1924, may be said to have been conceived in 1920. Influenced by the writings of Lautréamont and the theories of Freud, Breton and Soupault invented “automatic writing,” a rapid transcription of oral pronouncements, and in a week’s time they completed Les Champs magnetiques, considered to be the first Surrealist work, and soon recognized as a masterpiece of French literature.
The European café, where, even in the recent past, one could sit over a cup of coffee for over an hour, was a perfect breeding-ground for intellectual and amorous encounters. What made the Surrealists a species different from their predecessors, the Symbolists and the Dadaists, was their belief that a day would come, in all likelihood in their time, when the metamorphoses of the self and the world would conjoin in an apocalyptic encounter.
Marguerite Bonnet’s history of the birth of Surrealism ends with the publication of Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), and its warning to the reader that the Surrealists were about to be faced with momentous decisions of a political nature. The French government had undertaken to crush a revolt of the Arabs in the northern part of French Morocco. Most of the Surrealists, including Breton, signed petitions against this new colonial war, and felt called upon to join the Communist party, the only party which campaigned against the war, despite their profound distaste for the Communists’ preference for realism in art.
Pierre Naville, the first editor of La Revolution surréaliste (1924), and a Trotskyite since 1927, includes, in his memoirs, Le Temps du surréel (1977),10 a chapter in which he restates in very clear terms his position on artistic freedom. He credits the Surrealists with dropping the “policy of demoralization” favored by the Dadaists and for promoting instead a “revolutionary fury.” Yet it became quite obvious to Naville that the term “Surrealist Revolution” was ambiguous: was Surrealism the predicate of revolution or was revolution the predicate of Surrealism? While Naville agrees that the exploration of the unknown should not be subject to coercion, he thinks that for a given period of time such total freedom might have to be suspended for political reasons. He is right when he remarks that artists and poets are often less free than they believe they are, for they often find themselves obliged to make compromises in the name of art in situations pertaining to the exhibition or publication of their work. Naville adds that this question has become more acute today than it was 50 years ago.
Unaware of the existence of these differing views of Naville and the other Surrealists, I experienced the acuteness of the same dilemma in 1942, when I stopped collaborating on the deluxe review VVV, feeling that such a publication by the Surrealists in the United States was a mark of political irresponsibility at a time when intellectuals were being persecuted under Fascism in Europe. Having had the good fortune to reach America early in 1940, I had hoped that when Breton in his turn would cross the Atlantic he would consider it his responsibility to formulate a new Surrealist manifesto. In this expectation I wrote a foreword to an anthology of Surrealist texts in 1940 entitled “Toward a Third Surrealist Manifesto.”11 Breton did write Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto, or Not (1942). It proved to be a disappointment to his Marxist friends.
On the occasion of the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, in 1947, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp published an impressive catalogue, including a series of texts reassessing basic values. In his essay Ferdinand Alquié noted that while Surrealism and existentialism share a common belief in man’s total freedom, Surrealism insists that man is everything, and existentialism maintains that man is alone in the face of nothingness. Confronted by these two choices, Alquié prefers Surrealist optimism to existentialist pessimism, since Sartre’s tragic liberty is not a form of freedom that any man would ever dream of wanting. In my essay, called “Revolt and Liberty,” I reinterpreted Hegel’s dictum “only the man who risks his life is free” in terms of revolt.12
I had to reconcile myself to Surrealism’s survival without Marxism before I was able to appreciate Breton’s major postwar contribution to the Surrealist ideology with his brief but pungent essay “Ascending Sign” (1947). To cut short all discussion with the positivists, Breton states in his first sentence that the only form of thought of interest to him is analogical. He proceeds by distinguishing poetic thinking from mystic thinking, rejecting the latter for its reference to the unknowable, where poetry is rigorously empirical in its methodology. For Breton, Surrealist poetry is ideologically oriented and empirical, and it therefore focuses on an ascending sign.
In the name of a Marxist structuralism, Jean Louis Houdebine rejects “signe ascendant” both for its empirical and ideological character.”13 It is taken for granted that Althusser’s critique of ideology,14 including Marx’s early works, is based on Lévi-Strauss’ reduction of ideology to mythology. According to Levi-Strauss (the father of structural anthropology), thought is a process that can be isolated from language, but actually the thinking process is so conditioned by linguistic communication that it cannot possibly be isolated.
In contradistinction to mythology that provides us with supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, ideology seeks to account for them in terms of logical deductions derived from nonsupernatural premises. Following Karl Mannheim,15 we should always ask of a given ideology whether or not it contains utopian elements, that is, statements that do not fit a given historical perspective. This is precisely what Marx did when he accused Fourier and other French socialists of making claims for socialism which are historically unwarranted, therefore utopian.
Breton believed that utopia would eventually impregnate something that would come out of reality, so that the work of the poet could serve as testimony that utopia is susceptible, as it were, of not being utopian. And Breton’s defense of utopia should be considered as a reaction to the pessimism of the existentialists. His “Ode to Fourier” (1947) invokes a vision that kindled man’s hope and inspired him to believe that total freedom is the ultimate goal of the revolution. Breton appeals to us to read the socialist myth backward, in terms of its utopian ends. As Rudolph Carnap has said, “The heritage of mythology is bequeathed on the one hand to poetry, which produces and intensifies the effects of mythology on life in a deliberate way; on the other hand, it is handed down to theology, which develops mythology into a system.”16
Marxism and surrealism were forged into ideological weapons by militants. It is beside the point to ask ourselves, as do the structuralists, whether ideology is a form of rhetoric or whether it is in a class by itself. Under the Bolsheviks liberty became meaningless from the moment democracy was considered in terms of one category, that of the soviet. It inevitably degenerated into a bureaucracy, since power could never be contested in the name of another type of political structure, such as a freely elected parliament.
The structural error of the Surrealists was to have believed that poetry was reducible to expression. It became apparent that during the ’60s a new generation identified the paroxistic expressionism of the Surrealists with rhetoric. Expression tends to fare: in an agnostic age content is validated by discarding the emphatic in favor of concentrating on critique.
Today André Masson’s Surrealist paintings of the ’30s and ’40s are considered among the greatest of our century, having outlived the paroxistic expressionism of both the Surrealists and their illegitimate heirs the action painters. William Rubin, in André Masson and Twentieth Century Painting, diagnosed the artist’s reemergence “at the end of the thirties as a challenging draftsmanly painter” as “not purely by chance . . . associated iconographically with the theme of Theseus’ emergence from the labyrinth, a salvation made possible for the hero by the thread of Ariadne, which comes increasingly to be identified by Masson with his own line of drawing.”17 Rubin’s reading of The Labyrinth (1943), Pasiphae and Ariadne explains his contention that Masson’s work “is fulfilled in its own terms.”18 It should be added that this statement was made in the context of a reevaluation of Pollock’s later works in other than expressionist terms. An ardent admirer of Nietzsche, Masson was led to go beyond good and evil by closing the gap between Sade and Gradiva, the latter the heroine of Wilhelm Jensen’s strange “Pompeiian fancy,”19 which impressed Freud, Breton and Dali.
In the preface to his Imagery of Surrealism, J.M. Matthews explains that the material assembled in the book was derived from a seminar which “was not designed to provide a critical appraisal of surrealism through analysis of its pictorial and verbal imagery, but to assist those who face the task of helping their students appreciate surrealism.”20 To obtain a “glimpse of the insider’s view of surrealism” the student is warned in a chapter called “The Inner Model” that Breton writes on the fourth page of Le Surrealisme et la peinture: “The plastic work to answer the necessity of total revision of real values, upon which today all minds agree, will refer therefore to a purely inner model or will not exist.”21 Matthews omits quoting the very next sentence, in which Breton cautions that there is no sure way of discovering this model—the artist and poet must be “in a state of grace.”22
When in his Second Surrealist Manifesto, Breton quotes Rimbaud’s definition of poetry as an “alchemy of words,” he draws attention to the affinity between surrealist and alchemist modes of investigation. With René Alleau’s interpretation of Jensen’s Gradiva23 as a hymn to alchemical rejuvenation Breton’s insight was confirmed. Involvement in alchemy is manifest in the case of the poet Philippe Audouin. In his Bourges, cité première he provided conclusive evidence that this city’s medieval buildings were ornamented with alchemical symbols, indicating it as a center for the alchemist’s quest for “spiritual gold.”24 In his recent study on Maurice Fourré (1876–1959) Audouin discovered that this poet’s bizarre tales, which had so fascinated Breton, Cocteau and Paulhan, were “cabalistic.”25 Audouin proves his point by juxtaposing different passages that have as a common denominator the alchemical sign of the initiate’s double nature.
The Surrealist movement is the first activist one to have appealed to the passions in the language of poetry without referring to millenarian forms of wishful thinking, as was done by the Gnostics and their successors, the medieval Christian millenarians. Breton’s motto je cherche l’or du temps, inscribed now on his tomb, epitomizes his whole “alchemical” concept of poetry. Interpreted literally, it means “I am seeking the gold of time.” It might also be translated as je cherche l’hors du temps,26 that is, the outside of time, or the beyond time. Metaphorically, the alchemist’s transmutation of lower metals into gold is a symbol of an ascending sign. Arturo Schwartz, in his introduction to Marcel Duchamp, views alchemy as an atheistic adventure, since “the possibilities of transmuting one element into another rest on a rigorously monistic view of the world.”27 In Art magique Breton reminds the reader that magic forms a link between alchemy and gnosticism.28 Since the publication of my paper “Freedom, Love and Poetry,”29 it has occurred to me that this motto might have been derived by Breton, via Eliphas Levi, from Joachim de Fiore, who considered freedom, love and contemplation as the three basic elements of the forthcoming age of the spirit, and that Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, writes about love, liberty and grace (1:1-6).
Dali’s paranoiac painting and the automatic writing of the poets ignited Jacques Lacan’s theory of the diachronic metaphor: “Let us admit that modern poetry and especially the surrealist school have taken us quite far in the domain of the metaphor by showing that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor.” Since: “The poetic spark of the metaphor does not spring from the conjunction of two images, that is, of two signifiers at the same time. It springs from two signifiers, one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the hidden signifier then remaining through its metonymic relation to the rest of the chain. One word for another, that is the formula of the metaphor.”30 We now may reconsider the fusion of images in a Surrealist work, diachronically, as events that follow one another in a scrambled manner. To disentangle them the reader must appeal to his intersubjective dilemma (intuition). Who is speaking? Is it his ego or his self; and who is speaking in the poem? The poet’s ego or his self? This foursome has for its prototype the intersubjective foursome of a patient and an analyst as interpreted by Lacan.
Marguerite Bonnet writes that the social function of Surrealism has been defined by Marcuse in his introduction to Reason and Revolution (1960): “The poetry of Mallarmé and the Surrealists [is] in search of an authentic language, the language of negation, as the great refusal to accept the rules of a game in which the dice are loaded.”31
Poetry and paintings are “language games” (Wittgenstein). In the context of a game negation ceases to be “sterile” by becoming the object of an encounter. In “Tomorrow’s Player” (Le Demain joueur),32 subtitled “on the future of Surrealism,” Maurice Blanchot calls Breton’s Nadja (labeled a novel by the publisher) a “narrative,” to distinguish it from the “story” of the fiction writer. In Nadja folly makes its appearance as the other that interrupts the encounter and encounters Nadja, alias Mlle D., who is someone who often makes casual remarks, unlike Nadja. Nadja is in quest of her encounter with Breton, the luminous poet, the black man crushed by a thunderbolt at the foot of the Sphinx. For Breton, Nadja is the spirit of the air, the inspired and inspiring, the one who is always about to leave, and leaving. The work progresses by being interrupted by interruptions of the encounter. Nadja is a work interrupted; it is therefore incomplete and never becomes a work of art, unless we consider interruption as a criterion for appraising Surrealist works. Breton follows the interruptions of his encounters with Nadja with a denunciation of the psychiatrist who locked her up in an insane asylum, thereby turning her into an insane person.
Gaston Ferdière (who had treated Antonin Artaud and Leonora Carrington) claims that Breton’s denunciation of Nadja’s doctor had helped psychiatrists of his own generation to alter their approach to the insane.33 If it were not for Breton the Surrealist Stanislas Rodanski might never have been given the opportunity to write his A l’Ombre des ailes while in a psychiatric hospital.34 The book is prefaced by Julien Gracq, who put together the three discontinuous narratives that evoke different facets of an identical mental state. Gracq is undoubtedly right to believe that more of such books would have been written had not the Surrealists of the ’30s committed themselves to a political activity. In the Shadow of the Wings (1975) recreates, in the mood of the ’50s, the spirit of melodrama dear to the Surrealists of the ’20s. Was Rodanski a participant in a bizarre series of events that led him to quit the cafés of Paris to join desperados and spies, who parachuted to an atoll to deliver tons of poisonous blue gas to a secret agent, or had they been flown there as actors for a grade-B movie?
“Nothing that concerns Sade should be permitted to pass unnoticed,” said Maurice Heine, a man whom fate had chosen to mark the “rebirth of Sade.” The last instructions left by Sade concerning the disposition of his body were not respected. He had wanted the grave flattened and sown with vegetation so that no trace of it remained; instead a cross was erected on the tomb of this staunch atheist. Sade was undoubtedly in full possession of his mental faculties when he wrote his testament during his confinement in the insane asylum of Charenton, where he remained until his death.35
In 1959 the Surrealists paid homage to Sade in an extraordinary ceremony during which Pierre Benoit, masked and dressed in a symbolic costume, burnt the word “SADE” on his chest with a red hot iron. Matta, who some ten years earlier had been banned from the Surrealist group, was reinstated immediately upon cutting himself and pouring blood on the memorial slab.
A must for the understanding of Sade is Lacan’s essay “Kant Is with Sade.”36 Kant’s categorical imperative postulates that desire should be repressed, as desiring what the law forbids. Sade, reversing the Kantian position, assumes that the law is evil, and the desire, therefore, good. Sade may or may not have poisoned a couple of prostitutes before being locked in the Bastille. During his imprisonment the victims of his fantastic tales were invariably murdered with sadistic refinement. Having been freed from the Bastille and elected a member of the National Assembly, he was the only one to vote against the death penalty. As Lacan points out, had he voted for the death penalty he would have betrayed his principles by permitting the law to do what should have remained the privilege of desire.
The early Surrealists demonstrated that they had benefited from their experiments with states of mind in which logic was suspended. Sarane Alexandrian in Le Surréalisme et le réve (1974) prefaces this important study with a survey on the dream from the Odyssey to Hervey de Saint-Denis, author of Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger,37 published anonymously in 1867, a work whose significance the Surrealists were the first to note. According to Alexandrian the Surrealists’ exploration of the role of the prophetic dream in our lives goes beyond what had been previously claimed.
The Surrealists assume: (1) The dream is not a divine but a human warning, signaled by the unconscious; (2) all dreams are of significance, even those not considered prophetic; (3) the dream is not just the dream but everything that in reality remains logically unexplainable; (4) the dream does not belong to a world of its own in which the dreamer isolates himself, since it has its place in the concrete universe; (5) the dream is not to be betrayed by language for the sake of producing literary or artistic works which disregard the specific dynamics of the dreams.
On the strength of these propositions Alexandrian has carefully analyzed experiments with hypnosis, processes in automatic writing, word games involving aleatory encounters, and transcriptions of dreams by the dreamers themselves—notably Breton, René Crévet Eluard, Aragon and Artaud among others.
Two months before Breton’s death (September 28, 1966) a series of conferences on Surrealism took place under the auspices of the Centre Culture! International de Cérisy-la-Salle. Participants included both scholars and Surrealists. At Breton’s suggestion, only the younger generation of Surrealists, those who had joined the movement after World War II, took part. The conferences were chaired by Ferdinand Alquie. Jean Schuster, the principal spokesman of the generation of the 1950s, reported that Surrealism was pessimistic and that “at the present time its main ambition is to establish a balance between revolt and despair.”38 During a discussion period he further claimed that he was opposed to the women’s fight for equal opportunities on the grounds that Surrealism could not accept the idea that a woman could fulfill her destiny serving an employer in order to escape the domination of husband or lover.39 Speaking on “Language and Communication,” Gerard Legrand noted that in poetry “language is submerged by being, while simultaneously existence is submerged by language. Language no longer designates, it simply tends to be.”40 Such explanations raise more questions than they clarify. In one of his more recent books, Legrand implies that, in a nonmetaphysical concept of life, eternity is identified with timelessness, and that what is timeless is beauty.41 Legrand thereby negates the very principle upon which Surrealism is founded: the belief that art is for the sake of life and not for the sake of art. When Breton says that “beauty will be convulsive or will not be,” he binds beauty to life, vibrating with convulsions.
The Surrealist seances of word and picture games, in which the intersubjective pronouncements of the group are scrutinized for their oracular qualities, recall sessions with mediums and automatic writing à deux, “immaculate conceptions.” In his report on games at Cérisy, Philippe Audouin compared the “jeux surréalistes” to the quest for the Grail and the alchemist’s pursuit of the stone of philosophy through a succession of transmutations.42 And this, in an age when the metamorphoses of the alchemists have passed into the hands of scientists manipulating genes and chromosomes! At this symposium José Pierre and Réne Passeron paid lip service to some American artists, from Pollock to Rosenquist, but always condescendingly. Besides the poet Alain Jouffroy, I know of no Surrealist who has shown any real interest either in the Beatniks or the Pop artists. The female chauvinism of Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, the Maoist Kristeva, Xavière Gauthier and a few others has been denounced with Surrealist verve by the poet Annie Lebrun in Lâchez Tout (Drop Everything), 1977. Unfortunately, like Schuster, Annie Lebrun fails to make a distinction between the worker’s alienation from the fruits of his works (Marx) and the contemporary woman’s revolt against sexual inequality.43
In Surréalisme et sexualité (1971)44 Xavière Gauthier has convinced herself that, by tracing Breton’s idealization of the woman-child to what she has diagnosed as his sexual trauma, she has thereby dealt a mortal blow to Surrealism, forgetting that the Surrealists reject the idea that art is sublimation. Both Georges Bataille and Pierre Lacan have convinced the Surrealists that complete gratification of desire would require that one partner should annihilate the other and that the second should desire to be annihilated. But is not this the message that the Marquis de Sade has bequeathed to humanity? And isn’t it a theme that Hans Bellmer has so exquisitely illustrated? Furthermore, it is false to imply that the femme enfant is the only ideal type of a Surrealist woman, for she has a complementary opposite, the Sorceress, as Benjamin Peret says in his introductory essay to L’Amour sublime, which is the Surrealist anthology of lyrical poetry.45
Four months before the publication of the volume containing the proceedings of the Surrealist symposium of Cérigny, the Paris students demonstrated in the streets against the de Gaulle regime (May 1968). When a rebellious youth wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne L’lmagination au pouvoir (All Power to the Imagination), he was expressing in Surrealist terms the need to overthrow an establishment, which functioned on the premise that humanism was still in the image of Holbein’s Erasmus, when it was more in the image of Max Ernst’s Euclid. On this occasion it was the workers who failed to back the students.
If the age of the Révolution surréaliste belongs to the past, a number of Surrealists foresee in its stead the coming of the Surrealist civilization. The change is heralded, among others, by the poets Vincent Bounoure and Jean Louis Bedouin, the scholar René Alleau, and the critic Robert Lebel. The book’s title, La Civilisation surréaliste (1976),46 derives from the fascinating essay by Alleau, “Exit from Egypt.” Between the Sphinx’s paws the archeologists unearthed a block of red granite bearing an inscription concerning a young prince who was to become Thutmosis IV, a pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty. While on a hunting expedition, the prince fell asleep in the shade of a solar idol, which guarded the sacred ground. In his dream the Sphinx appeared, promising him the kingdom of Egypt, if he would free him from the sands that all but completely smothered him. The last part of the inscription had become illegible but one supposes that the Sphinx’s plea was fulfilled. Alleau, adopting the view of the Egyptians that life is tripartite, assumes 40 years in physical activity, 20 in sleep, interspersed with 5 years of dreams. He concludes that our own solar (diurnal) civilization is coming to an end, and that we shall go through a new age of nocturnal civilization, in which emphasis is to be on another oneiric illumination. Vincent Bounoure takes it for granted that this new civilization will mark a fulfillment of Surrealism, and what he and his collaborators conceive as an antitechnological era. They probably have forgotten that in 1918 Minotaure had published Pierre Mabille’s essay on dreams, in which he found it necessary to warn his readers that an end should be put to imprecations against the machine! “Man acts, his actions lead to the fabrication of instruments, and knowledge is born.”
The obliteration of the last part of the text inscribed on the sphinx’s monument makes of it an interrupted narrative, which is what Blanchot calls Nadja. According to Michel Foucault, Nietzsche’s madness, which interrupted his thinking, simultaneously signals to the world the importance of this thinking. Commenting on this passage of Foucault, Blanchot wrote that Surrealism is the experience of experiencing. It would have been more correct to say that Surrealism is an experiment on experimenting, about interruption. Hence the danger of the experimenter destroying his mind or his body in this process. Surrealism’s path is strewn with the bodies of its victims.
Stripped of the paraphernalia, with which Foucault plumes folly, we come to realize that “the only true madness is schizophrenia” (Ferdière). Since Gregory Bateson described schizophrenia as a breakdown brought about by the inability to cope with conflicting signals, Surrealism should be reinterpreted as a process of learning to recode the double bind in the language of the enigmas. It is prefigured by Oedipus’ double bind in encountering the Sphinx: by solving the riddle, Oedipus was granted the right to proceed on his journey without the awareness that he had not been freed from his fate.
The enigma: the common denominator between Mallarmé and Duchamp, William Jensen’s Gradiva and André Breton’s Nadja, Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; between the “metaphysical” de Chirico and the Surreal Magritte; between Surrealist behavior and the epistemological anarchism of Paul Feyerabend (Against Method, 1975).
—Nicolas Calas
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NOTES
1. Gaêtan Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism 1919–1939, New York, 1977, pp. 176-177.
2. New York Times Book Review, July 31, 1977.
3. “Surréalisme et alienation mentale,” Le Surréalisme, F. Aiquié ed., The Hague, 1968. p. 303.
4. Pierre Mabille, “Le Surréalisme, un nouveau climat sensible,“ Courier du Centre international d’études poetiques, Brussels, 1957, no. 15.
5. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1978. p. 1.
6. “Another Culture,” Dada and Surrealism Revisited, p. 454.
7. As quoted by Breton in Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme?, Brussels, 1934.
8. Nouvelle révue française, Paris, April 1967, pp. 589–591.
9. Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton et la naissance du surrealisme, Paris, 1975.
10. Pierre Naville, Le Temps du surréel, Paris, 1977.
11. New Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1940, pp. 408–421.
12. Galerie Maeght catalogue, Paris, 1947, pp. 103–106.
13. Marguerite Bonnet, ed., Les critiques de notre temps et André Breton, Paris, 1974, pp. 100–107.
14. Louis Althusser, Pour Marx, Paris, 1965.
15. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, New York, 1936(?).
16. “The elimination of Metaphysical Language,” Logical Positivism, A.J. Ayer ed., New York, 1959, p. 78.
17. William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson, New York, 1976, p. 47.
18. Rubin and Lanchner, p. 67.
19. Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva, a Pompeian Fancy, New York, 1918.
20. J.F. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism, Syracuse, 1977, p. XXII.
21. Matthews, p. 47.
22. André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Paris, Nouvelle edition 1928–1965, p. 9.
23. René Alleau, “Gradiva, Rediviva,” Le surrealisme meme 156/1, pp. 13–21.
24. Philippe Audouin, Bourges, Cité Premiere, Paris, 1972.
25. Philippe Audouin, Maurice Fourré, réveur définitif, Paris, 1978.
26. Gerard Legrand, André Breton en son temps, Paris, 1976, p. 16.
27. As quoted by Legrand.
28. André Breton, L’Art Magique, Paris, 1957.
29. Erratum In “Freedom, Love, and Poetry” (Artforum, May 1978). I wrote that in Arcane 17 Breton identified the woman child with Elisa, a widow. Elisa has since corrected me, she was then a divorcée not a widow. Of one divorced Eliphas Levi’s concept of the girl widowed from love still applies.
30. Pierre Lacan, “The insistence of the letter in the unconscious.” Structuralism, Yale French Studies, New Haven, 1966, pp. 112–147.
31. Bonnet, p. 369.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “Le Demain Joueur,” Nouvelle révue française, April 1967, pp. 863–888.
33. Gaston Ferdière, “Surréalisme et alienation mentale,” Le surréalisme, Paris/The Hague, p. 303.
34. Stanislas Rodanski, La Victoire a l’Ombre des Ailes, Paris, 1975.
35. Exposition internationale de Surrealisme, 1959–1960, Galerie Daniel Cordiet, Paris, pp. 58–60.
36. Pierre Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” Écrits, vol. 2, Paris, 1971, pp. 119–148.
37. Sarane Alexandrian, Le surréalisme et le rêve, Paris, 1974.
38. Alquié, p. 324.
39. Alquié, p. 530.
40. Alquié, p. 22.
41. Gerard Legrand, Preface au système d’eternité, Paris, 1971.
42. Alquié, pp. 455–469.
43. Annie Lebrun, Lâchez Tout, Sagittaire, 1977.
44. Xaviere Gautier, Surréalisme et sexualité, Paris, 1971.
45. Benjamin Peret, L’Amour sublime, Paris, 1956, p. 27.
46. Vincent Bounoure, ed., La civilisation surréaliste, Paris, 1976.
