Andre Breton: What is Surrealism?
elag
At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months
later,aged twenty-four), the author of
the Chants de Maldororand of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known
bythe name of Comte de
Lautréamont, whose thought has been of thevery greatest help and
encouragement to myself and my
friendsthroughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded
in carryinga common activity,
made the following remark, among many others whichwere to electrify
us fifty years later: ``At the hour
in which I write,new tremors are running through the intellectual
atmosphere; it isonly a matter of
having the courage to face them.'' 1868-75: it isimpossible, looking
back upon the past, to perceive an
epoch sopoetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so
chargedwith distant meaning as that
which stretches from the separatepublication of the Premier Chant de
Maldoror to theinsertion in a
letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbauld's last poem,Rêve, which has
not so far been included in
hisComplete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see theworks of
Lautréamont and Rimbaud
restored to their correcthistorical background: the coming and the
immediate results of the warof 1870.
Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to riseout of
that military and social cataclysm
whose final episode was tobe the atrocious crushing of the Paris
Commune; the last in datecaught many
of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaudfound themselves
thrown into the preceding one,
and by way of revengehas had as its consequence - and this is the
new and important fact -the triumph
of the Bolshevik Revolution.
I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as
wethen were - we who, on one hand,
came for the most part from thepetite-bourgeoisie, and on the other,
were all by vocation possessedwith
the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane - the days
ofOctober, which only the passing of the years
and the subsequentappearance of a large number of works within the
reach of all werefully to illumine,
could not there and then have appeared to turn sodecisive a page in
history. We were, I repeat,
ill-prepared andill-informed. Above all, we were exclusively
preoccupied with acampaign of systematic
refusal, exasperated by the conditions underwhich, in such an age,
we were forced to live. But our
refusal did notstop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds.
Apart from theincredible stupidity of
the arguments which attempted to legitimize ourparticipation in an
enterprise such as the war, whose
issue left uscompletely indifferent, this refusal was directed - and
having beenbrought up in such a
school, we are not capable of changing somuch that is no longer so
directed - against the whole series
ofintellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and
fromall sides weigh down upon man and
crush him. Intellectually, it wasvulgar rationalism and chop logic
that more than anything else
formedthe causes of our horror and our destructive impulse; morally,
it wasall duties: religious, civic
and of the family; socially, it was work(did not Rimbaud say:
``Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots defeu!''
and also: ``La main à plume vaut la main à charrue.Quel siècle à
mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main!'').
Themore I think about it, the more certain I become that nothing was
toour minds worth saving, unless
it was... unless it was, at last``l'amour la poésie,'' to take the
bright and trembling title ofone of Paul
Eluard's books, ``l'amour la poésie,'' considered asinseparable in
their essence and as the sole good.
Between thenegation of this good, a negation brought to its climax
by the war,and its full and total
affirmation (``Poetry should be made by all, notone''), the field
was not, to our minds, open to
anything but aRevolution truly extended into all domains, improbably
radical, to thehighest degree
impractical and tragically destroying within itself thewhole time
the feeling that it brought with it both of
desirabilityand of absurdity. Many of you, no doubt, would put this
down to acertain youthful
exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; Imust, however,
insist on this attitude, common to
particular men andmanifesting itself at periods nearly half a
century distant from oneanother. I should
affirm that in ignorance of this attitude one canform no idea of
what surrealism really stands for. This
attitude alonecan account, and very sufficiently at that, for all
the excesses thatmay be attributed to us
but which cannot be deplored unless onegratuitously supposes that we
could have started from any
otherpoint. The ill-sounding remarks, that are imputed to us,
theso-called inconsiderate attacks, the
insults, the quarrels, thescandals - all things that we are so much
reproached with - turned upon the
same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning,
thesurrealist attitude has had that in
common with Lautréamont andRimbaud which once and for all binds our
lot to theirs, and that
iswartime defeatism.
I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be morerelevant
than ever. ``New tremors are
running through the intellectualatmosphere; it is only a matter of
having the courage to face them.''They
are, in fact, always running through the intellectualatmosphere: the
problem of their propagation and
interpretationremains the same and, as far as we are concerned,
remains to besolved. But, paraphrasing
Lautréamont, I cannot refrain fromadding that at the hour in which I
speak, old and mortal shivers
aretrying to substitute themselves for those which are the very
shiversof knowledge and of life. They
come to announce a frightful disease, adisease followed by the
deprivation of all rights; it is only a
matterof having the courage to face them also. This disease is
called fascism.
Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow
hasgreatly advanced over Europe
recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolinihave either drowned in blood
or subjected to corporal
humiliationeverything that formed the effort of generations
straining towards amore tolerable and more
worthy form of existence. In capitalistsociety, hypocrisy and
cynicism have now lost all sense of
proportionand are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making
exaggeratedsacrifices to
humanitarianism, which always involves impossiblereconciliations and
truces to the advantage of the
stronger, i shouldsay that in this atmosphere, thought cannot
consider the exteriorworld without an
immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascismshows that it is
precisely the homologation of
this state of affairs,aggravated to its furthest point by the
lasting resignation that itseeks to obtain from
those who suffer. Is not the evident role offascism to re-establish
for the time being the tottering
supremacy offinance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to
make it worthyof all our hatred; we
continue to consider this feigned resignation asone of the greatest
evils that can possibly be inflicted
upon beingsof our kind, and those who would inflict it deserve, in
our opinion,to be beaten like dogs.
Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact thatthis immense danger is
there, lurking at our doors, that it has
madeits appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure
byzantinismto dispute too long, as in
Germany, over the choice of the barrier tobe set up against it, when
all the while, under
severalaspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us. During the
courseof taking various steps with a
view to contributing, in so far as I amcapable, to the organization
in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle,
Ihave noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into
theintellectual circles of the left as to the
possibility of successfullycombating fascism, a doubt which has
unfortunately infected even
thoseelements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and
whohad come to the fore in this
struggle. Some of them have even begun tomake excuses for the loss
of the battle already. Such
dispositionsseem to me to be so dismaying that i should not care to
be speakinghere without first having
made clear my position in relation to them,or without anticipating a
whole series of remarks that are to
follow,affirming that today, more than ever before, the liberation
of themind, demands as primary
condition, in the opinion of thesurrealists, the express aim of
surrealism, the liberation ofman, which
implies that we must struggle with our fetters with allthe energy of
despair; that today more than ever
before thesurrealists entirely rely for the bringing about of the
liberation ofman upon the proletarian
Revolution.
I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is
toattempt to explain what surrealism is. A
certain immediate ambiguitycontained in the word surrealism, is, in
fact, capable of leading oneto
suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental
attitude,while, on the contrary it expresses -
and always has expressed for us- a desire to deepen the foundations
of the real, to bring about aneven
clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousnessof
the world perceived by the senses.
The whole evolution ofsurrealism, from its origins to the present
day, which i am about toretrace,
shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgentfrom day
to day, has been at all costs to
avoid considering a systemof thought as a refuge, to pursue our
investigations with eyes wideopen to
their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that theresults
of these investigations would be
capable of facing thebreath of the street. At the limits, for many
years past - ormore exactly, since the
conclusion of what one may term the purelyintuitive epoch of
surrealism (1919-25) - at the limits, I
say,we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior
reality astwo elements in process of
unification, or finally becomingone. This final unification is the
supreme aim of surrealism:interior
reality and exterior reality being, in the present form ofsociety,
in contradiction (and in this
contradiction we seethe verycause of man's unhappiness, but also the
source of his movement),
wehave assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two
realitieswith one another on every
possible occasion, of refusing to allow thepreeminence of the one
over the other, yet not of acting on
the oneand on the other both at once, for that would be to
supposethat they are less apart from one
another than they are (and I believethat those who pretend that they
are acting on both simultaneously
areeither deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion);
ofacting on these two realities not both at
once, then, but one afterthe other, in a systematic manner, allowing
us to observe theirreciprocal
attraction and interpenetration and to give to thisinterplay of
forces all the extension necessary for the
trend of thesetwo adjoining realities to become one and the same
thing.
As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one
candistinguish two epochs in the surrealist
movement, of equal duration,from its origins (1919, year of the
publication of ChampsMagnétiques)
until today; a purely intuitiveepoch, and a reasoning epoch. The
first can summarily becharacterized
by the belief expressed during this time in theall-powerfulness of
thought, considered capable of freeing
itself bymeans of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a
prevailing viewthat I look upon today as
being extremely mistaken, the view thatthought is supreme over
matter. The definition of
surrealismthat has passed into the dictionary, a definition taken
from theManifesto of 1924, takes
account only of this entirelyidealist disposition and (for voluntary
reasons of simplification
andamplification destined to influence in my mind the future of
thisdefinition) does so in terms that
suggest that I deceived myself at thetime in advocating the use of
an automatic thought not only
removedfrom all control exercised by the reason but also disengaged
from``all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.'' It should atleast have been said: conscious
aesthetic or moralpreoccupations.
During the period under review, in the absence, ofcourse, of all
seriously discouraging exterior events,
surrealistactivity remained strictly confined to its first
theoretical premise,continuing all the while to be
the vehicle of that total``non-conformism'' which, as we have seen,
was the binding feature inthe
coming together of those who took part in it, and the cause,during
the first few years after the war, of
an uninterrupted seriesof adhesions. No coherent political or social
attitude, however, madeits
appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important tostress
this), until the outbreak of the
Moroccan war, which,re-arousing in us our particular hostility to
the way armed conflictsaffect man,
abruptly placed before us the necessity of making a publicprotest.
This protest, which, under the title
LaRévolution d'Abord et Toujours (October 1925), joinedthe name of
the surrealists proper to those
of thirty otherintellectuals, was undoubtedly rather confused
ideologically; it nonethe less marked the
breaking away from a whole way of thinking; itnone the less created
a precedent that was to determine
the wholefuture direction of the movement. Surrealist activity,
faced with abrutal, revolting,
unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itselfwhat were its proper
resources and to determine their
limits;it was forced to adopt a precise attitude, exterior to
itself, inorder to continue to face whatever
exceeded these limits. Surrealistactivity at this moment entered
into its reasoning phase. Itsuddenly
experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap thatseparates
absolute idealism from dialectical
materialism. Thisnecessity made its appearance in so urgent a manner
that we had toconsider the
problem in the clearest possible light, with the resultthat for some
months we devoted our entire
attention to the means ofbringing about this change of front once
and for all. If I do nottoday feel any
retrospective embarrassment in explaining this change,that is
because it seems to me quite natural that
surrealist thought,before coming to rest in dialectical materialism
and insisting, astoday, on the
supremacy of matter over mind, should have beencondemned to pass, in
a few years, through the
whole historicdevelopment of modern thought. It came normally to
Marx throughHegel, just as it
came normally to Hegel through Berkeley andHume. These latter
influences offer a certain
particularity in that,contrary to certain poetic influences
undergone in the same way, andaccommodated
to those of the French materialists of the eighteenthcentury, they
yielded a residuum of practical action.
To tryand hide these influences would be contrary to my desire to
show thatsurrealism has not been
drawn up as an abstract system, that is tosay, safeguarded against
all contradictions. It is also my desire
toshow how surrealist activity, driven, as I have said, to ask
itselfwhat were its proper resources, had
in some way or another toreflect upon itself its realization, in
1925, of its relativeinsufficiency; how
surrealist activity had to cease being content withthe results
(automatic texts, the recital of dreams,
improvisedspeeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions) which
it hadoriginally planned; and
how it came to consider these first results asbeing simply so much
material, starting from which the
problemof knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.
As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing aconstant
process of becoming and, what
is more, solidly relying onconcrete facts, surrealism has brought
together and is still bringingtogether
diverse temperaments individually obeying or resisting avariety of
bents. The determinant of their
enduring or short-livedadherence is not to be considered as a blind
concession to an inertstock of ideas
held in common, but as a continuous sequence of actswhich,
propelling the doer to more or less distant
points, forces himfor each fresh start to return to the same
starting-line. Theseexercises not being
without peril, one man may break a limb or - forwhich there is no
precedent - his head, another may
peaceably submergehimself in a quagmire or report himself dying of
fatigue. Unable asyet to treat itself
to an ambulance, surrealism simply leaves theseindividuals by the
wayside. Those who continue in the
ranks are awareof course of the casualties left behind them. But
what of it? Theessential is always to
look ahead, to remain sure that one has notforfeited the burning
desire for beauty, truth and justice,
toilinglyto go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of
freshlandscapes, and to continue doing
so indefinitely and withoutcoercion to the end, that others may
afterwards travel the samespiritual road,
unhindered and in all security. Penetration, tobe sure, has not been
as deep as one would have
wished. Poeticallyspeaking, a few wild, or shall we say charming,
beasts whose criesfill the air and bar
access to a domain as yet only surmised, arestill far from being
exorcized. But for all that, the piercing
of thethicket would have proceeded less tortuously, and those who
are doingthe pioneering would have
acquitted themselves with unabating tenacityin the service of the
cause, if, between the beginning and
the end ofthe spectacle which they provide for themselves and would
be glad toprovide for others, a
change had not taken place.
In 193(6), more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself
todefend the postulate of the necessity of
change. It is amusing,indeed, to see how the more spiteful and silly
of our adversariesaffect to triumph
whenever they stumble on some old statement we mayhave made and
which now sounds more or less
discordantly in the midstof others intended to render comprehensible
our present conduct. Thisinsidious
manoeuvre, which is calculated to cast a doubt on our goodfaith, or
at least on the genuineness of our
principles, can easily bedefeated. The development of surrealism
throughout the decade of itsexistence
is, we take it, a function of the unrolling of historicalrealities
as these may be speeded up between the
period of reliefwhich follows the conclusion of a peace and the
fresh outbreak of war.It is also a
function of the process of seeking after new values inorder to
confirm or invalidate existing ones. The
fact that certain ofthe first participants in surrealist activity
have thrown in thesponge and have been
discarded has brought about the retiring fromcirculation of some
ways of thinking and the putting into
circulationof others in which there were implicit certain general
dissents on theone hand and certain
general assents on the other. Hence it is thatthis activity has been
fashioned by the events. At the
present moment,contrary to current biased rumour according to which
surrealism itselfis supposed, in
its cruelty of disposition, to have sacrificed nearlyall the blood
first vivifying it, it is heartening to be
able to pointout that it has never ceased to avail itself of the
perfect teamworkof René Crevel, Paul
Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret,Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and the
present writer, all of whom can
attestthat from the inception of the movement - which is also the
date ofour enlistment in it - until now,
the initial principle of theircovenant has never been violated. If
there have occurred differenceson some
points, it was essentially within the rhythmic scope of theintegral
whole, in itself a least disputable
element of objectivevalue. The others, they whom we no longer meet,
can they say as much?They
cannot, for the simple reason that since they separated from usthey
have been incapable of achieving a
single concerted action thathad any definite form of its own, and
they have confined
themselves,instead, to a reaction against surrealism with the
greatest wastage tothemselves - a fate
always overtaking those who go back on their past.The history of
their apostasy and denials will
ultimately be read intothe great limbo of human failings, without
profit to any observer -ideal yesterday,
but real today - who, called upon to make apronouncement, will
decide whether they or ourselves have
brought themore appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution
of the manyproblems surrealism
has propounded.
Although there can be no question here of going through the history
ofthe surrealist movement - its
history has been told many a time andsometimes told fairly well;
moreover, I prefer to pass on as
quicklyas possible to the exposition of its present attitude - I
think Iought briefly to recall, for the
benefit of those of you who wereunaware of the fact, that there is
no doubt that before the
surrealistmovement properly so called, there existed among the
promoters of themovement and others
who later rallied round it, very active, notmerely dissenting but
also antagonistic dispositions which,
between1915 and 1920, were willing to align themselves under the
signboard ofDada. Post-war
disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchicthat guided that
cycle's many manifestations, a deliberate
refusal tojudge - for lack, it was said, of criteria - the actual
qualificationsof individuals, and, perhaps,
in the last analysis, a certain spiritof negation which was making
itself conspicuous, had brought about
adissolution of the group as yet inchoate, one might say, by reason
ofits dispersed and heterogeneous
character, a group whose germinatingforce has nevertheless been
decisive and, by the general consent
ofpresent-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of ideas.
Itmay be proper before passing rapidly
- as I must - over this period, toapportion by far the handsomest
share to Marcel Duchamp (canvases
andglass objects still to be seen in New York), to Francis
Picabia(reviews ``291'' and ``391''), Jacques
Vaché (Lettres deGuerre) and Tristan Tzara (Twenty-five Poems,
DadaManifesto 1918).
Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there
wasseeking to organize itself in 1920
what - as yet on a basis ofconfidential exchange - assumed the name
of surrealism, a wordfallen from
the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted from therather
general and very confusing connotation he
had given it. Whatwas at first no more than a new method of poetic
writing broke awayafter several
years from the much too general theses which had come tobe expounded
in the Surrealist Manifesto -
Soluble Fish,1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to them,
wherebythe whole was raised to a
vaster ideological plane; and so there hadto be revision.
In an article, ``Enter the Mediums,'' published inLittérature, 1922,
reprinted in Les PasPerdus,
1924, and subsequently in the SurrealistManifesto, I explained the
circumstance that had originally
putus, my friends and myself, on the track of the surrealist
activity westill follow and for which we are
hopeful of gaining ever morenumerous new adherents in order to
extend it further than we have sofar
succeeded in doing. It reads:
It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approachof
sleep, that my attention was
arrested by sentences more or lesscomplete, which became
perceptible to my mind
without my being able todiscover (even by very meticulous
analysis) any possible
previousvolitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was
about to fallasleep, I
became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a
pointexcluding all possibility of
alteration and stripped of all quality ofvocal sound; a curious
sort of sentence which
came to me bearing - insober truth - not a trace of any
relation whatever to any
incidents Imay at that time have been involved in; an insistent
sentence, itseemed to
me, a sentence I might say, that knocked at thewindow. I was
prepared to pay no
further attention to it when theorganic character of the
sentence detained me. I was
reallybewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the
exact sentenceat this
distance, but it ran approximately like this: ``A man is cutin
half by the window.''
What made it plainer was the fact that it wasaccompanied by a
feeble visual
representation of a man in the processof walking, but cloven,
at half his height, by a
window perpendicularto the axis of his body. Definitely, there
was the form,
re-erectedagainst space, of a man leaning out of a window. But
the windowfollowing
the man's locomotion, I understood that I was dealing withan
image of great rarity.
Instantly the idea came to me to use it asmaterial for poetic
construction. I had no
sooner invested it withthat quality, than it had given place to
a succession of all
butintermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but
in astate, I would say,
of extreme detachment.
Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar
withhis methods of investigation, which
I had practised occasionally uponthe sick during the War, I resolved
to obtain from myself what
oneseeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue poured out
asrapidly as possible, over which the
subject's critical faculty has nocontrol - the subject himself
throwing reticence to the winds - andwhich
as much as possible represents spoken thought. It seemedand still
seems to me that the speed of
thought is no greater thanthat of words, and hence does not exceed
the flow of either tongue orpen. It
was in such circumstances that, together with PhilippeSoupault, whom
I had told about my first ideas
on the subject, I beganto cover sheets of paper with writing,
feeling a praiseworthy contemptfor
whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement
broughtabout the rest. By the end of the first
day of the experiment we wereable to read to one another about fifty
pages obtained in this mannerand
to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on thewhole
striking. There were similar
faults of construction, the samehesitant manner, and also, in both
cases, an illusion of
extraordinaryverve, much emotion, a considerable assortment of
images of a qualitysuch as we should
never have been able to obtain in the normal way ofwriting, a very
special sense of the picturesque,
and, here and there,a few pieces of out and out buffoonery. The only
differences which ourtwo texts
presented appeared to me to be due essentially to ourrespective
temperaments, Soupault's being less
static than mine, and,if he will allow me to make this slight
criticism, to his havingscattered about at the
top of certain pages - doubtlessly in a spiritof mystification -
various words under the guise of titles. I
mustgive him credit, on the other hand, for having always forcibly
opposedthe least correction of any
passage that did not seem to me to bequite the thing. In that he was
most certainly right.
It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their
justvalue the various elements in the result
obtained; one may even saythat it is entirely impossible to
appreciate them at a first reading.To you who
may be writing them, these elements are, in appearance,as strange as
to anyone else, and you are
yourself naturallydistrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are
distinguishedchiefly by a very high
degree of immediate absurdity, thepeculiar quality of that absurdity
being, on close examination,
theiryielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in the
world:divulgation of a given number
of facts and properties on the whole notless objectionable than the others.
Kwigd144
Morpheal
> I AM SURREALISM!
You're pure and utter ROT.
R.