CONTEXT for: "the simplest surrealist act"
elag
Subject: CONTEXT (for: "the simplest surrealist act")
Newsgroups: alt.surrealism
Date: 1998/09/25
For anyone who's still interested and has no easy access to the text,
here is the immediate context for "the simplest surrealist act..." quote
w/ Breton's footnote. Of course, reading the entire 2nd manifesto is
highly recommended but scanning the whole thing is a copyright no-no.
EXCERPT FROM THE 2nd MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM by A. Breton (1930)
Before proceeding, however, to verify the balance sheet, it is
worthwhile to know just what kind of moral virtues
Surrealism lays claim to, since, moreover, it plunges its roots
into life and, no doubt not by chance, into the life of this
period, seeing that I laden this life with anecdotes like the
sky, the sound of a watch, the cold, a malaise, that
is, I begin to speak about it in a vulgar manner. To think
these things, to hold any rung whatever of this
weatherbeaten ladder溶one of us is beyond such things
until he has passed through the last stage of asceticism. It is
in fact from the disgusting cauldron of these meaningless
mental images that the desire to proceed beyond the
insufficient, the absurd, distinction between the beautiful
and the ugly, true and false, good and evil, is born and
sustained. And, as it is the degree of resistance that this
choice idea meets with which determines the more or less
certain flight of the mind toward a world at last inhabitable,
one can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make
for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of
sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing
save from violence.
The simplest Surrealist act consists of
dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing
blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of
thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and
cretinization in effect has a well defined place in that
crowd, with his belly at barrel level.*
The justification
of such an act is, to my mind, in no way incompatible with
the belief in that gleam of light that Surrealism seeks to
detect deep within us. I simply wanted to bring in here the
element of human despair, on this side of which nothing
would be able to justify that belief. It is impossible to give
one's assent to one and not to the other. Anyone who should
pretend to embrace this belief without truly sharing this
despair would soon be revealed as an enemy. This frame of
mind which we call Surrealist and which we see thus
occupied with itself, seems less and less to require any
historical antecedents and, so fer as I am personally
concerned, I have no objection if reporters, judicial experts,
and others hold it to be specifically modern. I have more
confidence in this moment, this present moment, of my
thought than in the sum total of everything people may try
to read into a finished work, into a human life that has
reached the end of its road. There is nothing more sterile, in
the final analysis, than that perpetual interrogation of the
dead: did Rimbaud become converted on the eve of his
death? can one find in Lenin's last will and testament
sufficient evidence to condemn the present policy of the
Third International was an unbearable, and completely
persona!, disgrace the mainspring of Alphonse Rabbe's
pessimism? did Sade, in plenary session of the National
Convention, commit a counterrevolutionary act? It is
enough to allow these questions to be asked to appreciate
the fragility of the evidence of those who are
no longer among us. Too many rogues and rascals are
interested in the success of this undertaking of spiritual
highway robbery for me to follow them over this terrain.
When it comes to revoit, none of us must have any need of
ancestors. I would like to make it very clear that in my
opinion it is necessary to hold the cult of men in deep
distrust, however great they may seemingly be. With one
exception有autreamont悠 do not see a single one of them
who has not left some questionable trace in his wake.
*I know that these last two sentences are going to delight a certain
number of simpletons who have been trying for a long time to catch me up
in a contradiction with myself. Thus, am I really saying that "the
simplest Surrealist act . . . ?" So what if I am! And while some, with
an
obvious axe to grind, seize the opportunity to ask me "what I'm waiting
for," others raise a hue and cry about anarchy and try to pretend that
they have caught me in flagrante delicto committing an act of
revolutionary indiscipline. Nothing is easier for me than to deprive
these people of the cheap effect they might have. Yes, I am concerned to
learn whether a person is blessed with violence before asking myself
whether, in that person, violence compromises or does not compromise. I
believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place,
spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance, and no reasons of
general efficacity, from which long, pre-revolutionary patience draws
its inspiration羊easons to which
I defer 謡ill make me deaf to the cry which can be wrenched from us at
every moment by the frightful disproportion between what is gained and
what is lost, between what is granted and what is suffered. As for that
act that I term the simplest: it is clear that my intention is not to
recommend it above every other because it is simple, and to try and pick
a quarrel with me on this point is tantamount to asking, in bourgeois
fashion, any nonconformist why he doesn't commit suicide, or any
revolutionary why he doesn't pack up and go live in the U.S.S.R. Don't
come to me with such stories! The haste with which certain people would
be only too happy to see me disappear, coupled with my own natural
tendency to agitation, are in themselves sufficient reason for me not to
clear out of here for no good reason.