Art and Freedom
john adams
from this link: http://tuba.music.gla.ac.uk/~tfowler/articles/Artfree, which
I happened across and believe is worth a read to the end, newcomer or non
alike.
Art and Freedom
André Breton and problems
of 20th century culture
By Frank Brenner and David Walsh
Part One
In June and July 1938 Leon Trotsky, exiled Russian revolutionary, and André
Breton, French Surrealist poet and thinker, collaborated in Mexico on the
writing of an extraordinary "Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art".
This declaration remains the most eloquent expression yet produced of the
commonality of interests of the artist and the revolutionary Marxist.
The statement began: "Without any exaggeration one can say that human
civilisation has never before been exposed to so many dangers. "The authors
took note of the "ever more widespread transgression of those laws" that govern
intellectual creation, particularly in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. "If
... we reject all solidarity with the caste that is currently ruling the USSR,
it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most
treacherous and dangerous enemy," the manifesto explained.
"The communist revolution," it continued, "is not afraid of art. It has learned
from the study of the development of the artistic calling in the collapsing
capitalist society that this calling can only be the result of a clash between
the individual and various social forms that are inimical to him." The
declaration concluded: "Our goals: the independence of art for the revolution;
the revolution for the liberation of art once and for all." (See Note 1)
That it was these two figures, Trotsky and Breton, who authored the 1938
manifesto cannot be set down merely to the workings of chance. No individual in
history has had a broader and deeper conception of the socialist transformation
of society than Leon Trotsky, the living embodiment of the traditions of
Bolshevism. For this very reason the official disseminators of information
today universally exclude his name or falsify his role in events.
As for Breton, he has fared little better. In France he is ignored or at best
treated as `ancient history' by contemporary intellectuals; in North America,
where most of his work has gone untranslated until recently, he is typically
written off within academic and literary circles as a supposedly despotic
leader of an avant-garde group.
We need to bring André Breton back to life. Not only is a reconsideration of
the Surrealist writer timely given that last year marked the centenary of his
birth, but we also now have at our disposal a major new biography, Mark
Polizzotti's Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). Even more vital to such a reconsideration is
the spate of translations of Breton's works that has appeared in the last
decade (many of them coming from the University of Nebraska Press): The
Communicating Vessels, Arcanum 17, The Immaculate Conception, Mad Love,
Earthlight, Lost Steps, Free Rein and Conversations: The Autobiography of
Surrealism.
This now gives us a chance to take a fresh look at Breton indeed, it is as if a
major writer has suddenly appeared on the scene. And one who is hugely and
gloriously out of step with current intellectual fashion, whose every line is
charged with the kind of passionate engagement that the coolly ironic cynics of
Post-modernism abhor.
A critical appreciation
The purpose of this article is to revive interest in Breton's writings and
thought, "to stem," as he once said of utopian socialist Charles Fourier, "the
current of oblivion that has engulfed him." (See Note 2) Marxists, of course,
are not required to provide anyone, including leading figures in their own
movement, with a special dispensation from criticism. In tackling Breton as a
literary and intellectual figure, one takes on a number of the great
contradictions of the century.
By any objective standpoint Breton's most productive period extended from the
mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. In the end he was unable to escape the fate that
befell nearly all of those intellectuals attracted to the banner of the October
Revolution and repulsed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The strangulation of the
Spanish and French revolutions (in which Breton had set great store) in 1936-8,
the Moscow Trials, Trotsky's death in 1940, the second imperialist war and the
new equilibrium that followed it, the apparent strength of Stalinism, the
difficulties of the Fourth International all took their toll on his
intellectual reserves. (It is instructive to note the fate of the International
Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (IFIRA) called into being by the
1938 manifesto. Breton was able to rally fellow Surrealists such as poet
Benjamin Péret, painters Yves Tanguy and André Masson; Victor Serge, Marcel
Martinet, Ignazio Silone, Herbert Read (who, in turn, solicited the support of
George Orwell) and others. Despite this the French section ceased operations
after the publication of two issues of its journal Clé (Key) in January and
February 1939.
Internal differences played a part in the IFIRA's failure to take root, but the
greatest problem was the extremely difficult political environment: the
influence within the intelligentsia of the Stalinist apparatus and the
demoralised condition of many of those not under the latter's thumb, as well,
of course, as the outbreak of war in Europe. In his last letter to Trotsky in
June 1939, Breton wrote: "Perhaps I am not very talented as an organiser, but
at the same time it seems to me that I have run up against enormous obstacles."
(See Note 3) The tragic element in this should not be lost on the reader.
In the early 1950s Breton formally rejected Marxism in favour of left protest:
anarchism (whose betrayal of the Spanish Revolution was specifically denounced
in the 1938 manifesto) and utopian socialism (in the form of Fourier's work).
He was not the first intellectual in a climate of political retreat and
stagnation who suddenly recalled that the Bolsheviks had been responsible for
carrying out the "brutal suppression of the Kronstadt uprising of 18 March
1921." (See Note 4) It would be difficult to dispute that his poetic and
critical output declined, in both quality and quantity, in the last 20 years of
his life as a consequence of the generally dispiriting conditions within which
he worked.
Breton's attitude toward `competing' artistic tendencies is another of the
complications raised by his life and work. The German philosopher Hegel
maintained that the Absolute Spirit had found its highest expression in the
Prussian monarchy and its state. In a similar fashion Breton tended to see
Surrealism as the culminating point in the entire history of artistic and
intellectual efforts. One is not obliged to accept his view or that of his
coterie of uncritical admirers. In any event, there is no doubt that the
difficult conditions of the 1930s and 1940s helped solidify his doctrinaire
insistence that only Surrealism embodied artistic progress and that its
pantheon of artistic heroes alone had embodied such progress in the past. In
other words, confronted with Breton one is obliged to do a good deal of
sifting. But what gems one comes across!
Revolution only of the mind?
Polizzotti's new biography is a conscientious account of Breton's life and
work. It has its limitations. The title, Revolution of the Mind, makes Breton
out to be more of a consistent idealist than he was. From 1925 onward the
fundamental axis of his activity was forging a link between the revolution of
the mind and the revolution of social reality. As he once famously declared,
the two watchwords of Surrealism were Marx's injunction to transform the world
and Rimbaud's injunction to change life. (See Note 5)
While Polizzotti is a intelligent biographer, he brings no apparent theoretical
framework or intellectual commitments of his own to bear on his treatment of
Breton. A distorted picture can emerge. Often in his work, for example,
personal relationships get foregrounded at the expense of historical, artistic
or political developments, giving a myopic quality to some of Polizzotti's
account.
Nonetheless, for those capable of filling in the gaps (or, at times, reading
between the lines), this biography, lucidly written and well-documented, opens
a window on one of the great lives of the 20th century. It is a life of
enduring relevance, a life very much for our day, because Breton devoted
himself to a battle that still needs to be waged uniting the vanguard of art
and the vanguard of the socialist revolution.
This `relevance' has a contradictory character. It would not be immediately
self-evident to many. In large measure it exists in the form of a scathing
critique of contemporary intellectual life; it highlights what is
overwhelmingly absent. Many of the attitudes and views, for instance, that
Breton and his comrades took for granted a genuine non-conformism, a
willingness to take on all comers in intellectual matters, a contempt for
patriotism and nationalism, a hatred for the moral strictures of bourgeois
society are in rare supply today. Listen to this declaration of the Surrealists
in 1925 in reaction to an imperialist incursion by France into Morocco:
"Even more than patriotism which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria,
though emptier and shorter-lived than most we are disgusted by the idea of
belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic
of the concepts to which we are subjected.... Wherever Western civilisation is
dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money
can be made payment in hard cash."(See Note 6)
Of course in the 1920s and 1930s the Surrealists were hardly unique within the
European intelligentsia in their opposition to capitalism and war, but if we
are to properly appreciate Breton's significance we have to understand what set
him and the Surrealists apart. For Breton it was not a matter of merely being
`sympathetic' to the socialist revolution, as was the case with a great many of
the intellectuals of the period. Such an attitude, no matter how sincere,
implied a tacit acceptance of the division between art and life, between the
inner world of fantasy and imagination and the outer world of everyday reality,
so that one's political sympathies, even when they found direct artistic
expression, had little bearing on how one felt life.
What was Surrealism?
Maurice Nadeau, in his history of the movement, writes: "Surrealism ... is
deeply embedded in the period between the two world wars. To say as some have
that on the level of art it is only a manifestation of the period is
oversimplified materialism: surrealism is also the heir and extender of
artistic movements which preceded it and without which it would not have
existed." (See Note 7) As a sociological phenomenon Surrealism, whose first
manifesto (written by Breton) appeared in 1924, no doubt contained as an
element the disgust felt by many young people for the slaughter of the First
World War and the society that had produced it. The Surrealists carried that
over into a rejection of what was perceived as French society's dominant
ideological outlook, "positivist rationalism," and into a fascination with
dream states and the unconscious. In Nadeau's words: "Reason, all-powerful
reason, stands accused.... Reality is something besides what we see, hear,
touch, smell, taste. There exist unknown forces that control us, but upon which
we may hope to act. We have only to find out what they are." (See Note 8) On
the one hand, the Surrealists turned to Freud's work, and, on the other, they
`returned' to Hegel and German idealism.
The preoccupation with Hegel might seem peculiar in the light of the
Surrealists' professed hostility to logic. One left wing commentator notes that
Breton and his colleagues "were passionately devoted to Hegel, in whose
merciless dialectic they found an admirable weapon." (See Note 9) This is a bit
too easy, confusing the Breton of 1922 or 1924 with the same man a dozen years
later. The case could be made that Breton was drawn to Hegel for quite distinct
reasons at different points in his intellectual development.
Aside from the desire, in the immediate aftermath of World War One, to provoke
wildly anti-German official France by ostentatiously esteeming German
philosophy and poetry, Breton seems to have been as attracted to Hegel's
idealism, to the notion of the unlimited power of thought and the thinking
subject, as he was to his dialectics.
In the Surrealist rejection of positivism and empiricism, combined with an
interest in Hegel, does one find an echo of Lenin's materialist reworking of
Hegel's Logic, undertaken in 1915? No doubt the failings of `objectivist'
habits of thinking bound up with the relatively peaceful growth of capitalism
from 1871 to 1914 were apparent to thoughtful people of many stripes. The point
of view adopted and the conclusions drawn, however, varied according to the
perspective and class orientation of the individuals or groupings in question.
One could say at the very least that the Surrealists' pre-disposition toward
Hegel's dialectics facilitated their subsequent move in the general direction
of Marxism. At a later point they played a valuable role in promoting the study
of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks. The first excerpts, in fact, from the
Notebooks translated into French appeared in one of their publications in 1933.
As an artistic movement, in contrast to Dadaism from which it emerged and which
heaped abuse on everything created in the past, Surrealism insisted on the
importance of tradition. It perceived itself as the continuator of the work of
a number of individuals and trends in particular, a select group of
lesser-known French and German Romantics and, above all, Lautréamont (Isidore
Ducasse, author of Chants de Maldoror), poet Arthur Rimbaud and
playwright-black humorist Alfred Jarry.
In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton declared that the new
movement's defining principle was "psychic automatism", by which he meant
thought freed from "any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic
or moral concern." 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." And further: "I believe in the
future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly
so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality [sur = `on',
`above' in French], if one may so speak." (See Note 10)
What is the source of this extreme irrationalism again, aside from the healthy,
insolent desire to shock respectable middle class public opinion? From the
point of view of historical development, it no doubt expressed the position of
social layers whose confidence in the stability of the existing order and its
self-satisfied outlook had been deeply shaken by the calamitous world war and
its political consequences, including the Russian Revolution.
A variety of trends which arose in those years celebrated the unconventional or
the irrational. Some extolled "the future" or "the machine" as things in
themselves; others, the most depraved, denigrated the Enlightenment and
`decadent' Western democracy and venerated "blood" and "race," helping build up
the ideological stockpile of future fascist movements. In the sphere of social
conceptions, Dadaism and Surrealism had nothing in common with such tendencies,
but their common emergence does demonstrate the crisis of intellectual life.
One is also obliged to ask: in what lay the appeal of this anti-reason to
Breton, an intellectual who had served in the French army during the mad
slaughter of the world war, as an individual? We can perhaps see in his
particular devotion to the spontaneous and his preoccupation with dream-states
a furious act of over-compensation on the part of a rigorously educated and
serious French middle class youth rejecting, if not entirely comprehending, a
social order officially dedicated to Reason and Logic, which suddenly seemed
horrifying to him. In the fury of that rejection the distinction between
`Reason' as French ruling class ideology and reason as its potential
revolutionary antidote could be lost sight of.
To achieve their stated objective of joining dream and reality, the Surrealists
developed various techniques such as automatic writing, games and experiments
with hypnosis, seances and trance-like states; chance and spontaneity were
valorised as a way of breaking down the barriers of logic and gaining access to
the depths of the unconscious mind. Such excursions, no matter how often Breton
and others solemnly rejected the existence of the supernatural, led the
Surrealist group at times into the swamp of spiritualism. According to Nadeau,
for example, "a hosannah in honour of the East," constituted almost the entire
third issue of La Révolution Surrealiste, edited by Antonin Artaud in the
spring of 1925. Artaud, Robert Desnos and others had discovered a "new kind of
mysticism" associated with "the mysterious East of the Buddha and the Dalai
Lama." (See Note 11) At this point Breton reassumed editorial control of the
journal and soon afterward developed an orientation toward Marxism and the
Communist Party. In the first manifesto, Breton had gone so far in his
infatuation with dreams and dreaming as to suggest that the waking state was "a
phenomenon of interference." (See Note 12)
His views altered, for a time at least, as he made a serious effort to
reconcile them with Marxist conceptions from the mid-1920s onward. In a lecture
delivered in Belgium in 1934 Breton noted that he now viewed the movement's
earlier belief in the "omnipotence of thought" as "being extremely mistaken."
He noted that in 1925 "Surrealist activity ... entered into its reasoning
phase. It suddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap that
separates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism." (See Note 13) In one
of his finest essays, "Non-national Boundaries of Surrealism" (1937), Breton
proclaimed the first of "a fundamental and indivisible set of propositions":
"Adherence to all the principles of dialectical materialism endorsed in their
entirety by surrealism: the primacy of matter over thought...." (See Note 14)
It would be fair to say that there was always something tentative about that
`adherence' and that he found dialectics far more convincing than materialism.
He apparently held the view, shared by many Left intellectuals in this century,
that Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was a rather simplistic and
vulgar work. Breton's obsession with the non-rational was at best one-sided and
at worst an unworthy descent into open idealism. (In his later years Breton's
interest in the occult became a serious preoccupation. Trotsky, in their 1938
conversations, had suggested that Breton was trying to "keep open a little
window on the beyond." (See Note 15) Only eleven years after his firm
endorsement of materialism, in fact, he could write that its opposition to
idealism was "purely formal.")(See Note 16)
The entirely legitimate desire, of course, to understand the ideological
underpinnings of a given artistic current must be balanced by the recognition
that the latter's ultimate significance is determined by its contribution to
artistic truth. Confusion is never a virtue, but its presence can be evidence
of a break with intellectual inertia and routine, and in the case of the
Surrealists, it was symptomatic of a tremendous creative ferment. Out of that
emerged a new perspective which affected the course of Western art and, even,
in some respects, pointed the way towards what culture could be in a genuinely
human, classless, society. It is this revolutionary element in Surrealism that
needs to be recovered and assimilated.
Artistic life in France
To understand Surrealism, it is important to place it in its artistic as well
as its historical context. Mark Polizzotti provides a list of dozens of
artistic movements in France (Symbolism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Scientism,
etc.) that preceded Surrealism in the last decades of the 19th and the first
decades of the 20th century. (See Note 17) It would be wrong to see this
proliferation of artistic `isms' as a sign of the vitality of bourgeois
culture: on the contrary, many of these movements were febrile and abortive,
soon vanishing into obscurity. But looking back on it now, what seems most
striking about this period is quite simply how seriously people took art.
Of course egoism and subjectivism played an enormous role in all of this, but
it is noteworthy how eagerly the personal sought to become impersonal (or,
perhaps more accurately, super-personal), as if the sheer force of one's
artistic vision couldn't be contained within a one-man show. This is what seems
so far-removed from the cultural sensibility prevailing at the end of the 20th
century. The common assumption of our period is the impotence of art and of the
artist: since art cannot really change anything, since change in any
fundamental sense seems impossible, what point is there in artists banding
together? In place of movements based on common artistic ideas and objectives,
cliques abound.
Another possible way of defining Surrealism, then, is as the highest and most
extreme expression of the belief in the power of art. But pushed to the limit,
art can no longer be what most of us take it to be, i.e., the production of
artefacts, of beautiful images in words, paint, film, etc. The Surrealists were
hostile to conventional art and to the careers that went into making it. As
Polizzotti explains, "it was the sheer vanity of the literary enterprise that
revolted them, the self-congratulatory uselessness of writing yet one more
novel, publishing yet one more collection of poems, and in the end doing no
more than adding to one's own petty renown. If the act of writing was to mean
anything, it had to be more than just literature; creation had to yield more
than mere art." (See Note 18)
Indeed, in one of the early issues of their journal, the Surrealists wittily
exposed that vanity by posing a simple but telling query to members of the
Paris literary scene: Why do you write? Most of the responses demonstrated
sometimes hilariously not only that the authors had no worthwhile reason for
their artistic activity, but that the question itself had never before occurred
to them. Needless to say, this question remains as relevant in 1997 as it was
in 1919.
Involved here was more than just the usual impertinences and bad manners of an
up-and-coming group of artists towards their elders (although it included that
element); at issue was the very reason for making art in the first place.
"Beauty will be CONVULSIVE," declared Breton at the end of his extraordinary
novel Nadja, "or will not be at all."(See Note 19) This was a declaration of
war on the aesthetic notion that saw beauty as contemplative and a refuge from
life, an oasis of perfection in a harsh and ugly world. Poetry was far less a
matter of words on a page it was, as Breton once put it, "the opposite of
literature" than of a way of living, an ethic rather than an aesthetic, one
which allowed for the experience of the convulsion of beauty, even to the point
of delirium. (See Note 20)
To say that beauty was in life didn't mean turning a blind eye to the misery
and wretchedness of most people's lives; on the contrary, it was because they
hated that wretchedness that the Surrealists eventually turned towards Marxism.
But life was more than just the sum of its external manifestations and artistic
tendencies such as realism and naturalism were, in Breton's view, not being
realistic enough in that they largely ignored life's other dimension the inner
realm of dreams and imagination. This was the realm out of which could emerge a
new conception of beauty and of the relation of art to life.
Notes
1. André Breton, Free Rein (La Clé des Champs), trans. Michel Parmentier and
Jacqueline d'Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 29-31,
34.
2. Franklin Rosemont, ed., What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, (New York:
Pathfinder, 1978), Book two, p. 264.
3. Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), p. 472.
4. Breton, Free Rein, p. 266.
5. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.
Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 241.
6. Rosemont, ed., What is Surrealism?, Book two, pp. 318-19.
7. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1965), p. 43.
8. Ibid., p. 48.
9. Rosemont, ed., What is Surrealism?, Book one, p. 33.
10. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, pp. 26, 14.
11. Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, p. 105.
12. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 12.
13. Rosemont, ed., What is Surrealism?, Book two, pp. 116-17.
14. Breton, Free Rein, p. 9.
15. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 458.
16. Breton, Free Rein, p. 109.
17. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, pp. 17-18.
18. Ibid., p. 95.
19. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,
1960), p. 160.
20. Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, p. 274.
Morpheal
> "The communist revolution," it continued, "is not afraid of art. It has learned
> from the study of the development of the artistic calling in the collapsing
> capitalist society that this calling can only be the result of a clash between
> the individual and various social forms that are inimical to him."
That only says that it was not afraid to challenge art. The artist as someone they
felt could be recruited, to other purposes, such as bloodshed in the name of
revolution.
Nothing new in that, and nothing good. It is simply the same old death trap.
M.
john adams
M. wrote:
<<That only says that it was not afraid to challenge art. The artist as someone
they
felt could be recruited, to other purposes, such as bloodshed in the name of
revolution.
Nothing new in that, and nothing good. It is simply the same old death trap.>>
I hope that isn't the only thing you got from reading the
(entire) article.