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Preface
Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art
- Written surrealist composition, or first and last draft
- How not to be bored in company
- How to make speeches
- How to write false novels
- How to catch the eye of a woman you pass in the street
- Against death
##Preface
Such is the belief in life, in the most precarious aspects of life,
by which is meant real life, that in the end belief is lost. Man,
that inveterate dreamer, more and more discontented day by day with
his fate, orbits with difficulty around the objects he has been led
to make use of, those which indifference has handed him, or his own
efforts, almost always his efforts, since he has consented to labour,
at least he has not been averse to chancing his luck (what he calls
his luck!). A vast modesty is now his lot: he knows what women he
has had, what foolish affairs he has been involved in; riches or
poverty are nothing to him, he remains in this respect a new-born
babe, and as for the consent of his moral conscience, I admit that
he does very well without it. If he retains any degree of lucidity,
he can do no more than turn to his childhood, which ruined as it
has been by his teachers' pains, seems to him nonetheless full of
charm. There, the absence of all familiar constraint, furnishes him
with a perspective of several lives lived simultaneously; he becomes
rooted in this illusion; he no longer wishes to know anything beyond
the momentary and extreme facility of everything. Each morning,
children set off without concern. Everything is near, the worst
material circumstances are fine. The woods are black or white, one
will never need to sleep again.
But it is true we would never dare venture so far, it is not merely
a question of distance. Menace accumulates, one yields, one abandons
a part of the terrain to be conquered. That same imagination that
knows no limits, is never permitted to be exercised except according
to arbitrary laws of utility; it is incapable of assuming this
inferior role for long, and at about the age of twenty, prefers,
in general, to abandon Man to his unilluminated destiny.
Let him try, later, now and then, to collect himself, having felt
himself little by little losing all reason to live, incapable as
he has become of rising to the heights of an exceptional situation
such as love, and he will hardly succeed. That is because, from now
on, he belongs body and soul to an imperious practical necessity,
of which one must never lose sight. His gestures will lose all their
expansiveness, his ideas all their grandeur. In what happens to him
or might happen, he will perceive only what relates such events to
a host of similar events, events in which he has not taken part,
waste events. Rather, he will assess them with regard to some one
of those events, more reassuring in its outcome than the rest. On
no account, will he consider them as offering him salvation.
Dear imagination, what I love most about you, is your unforgiving
nature.
The only mark of freedom is whatever still exalts me. I believe it
right to maintain forever, our oldest human fanaticism. Indeed that
reflects my sole legitimate aspiration. Amidst all the shame we are
heir to, it is well to recognize that the widest freedom of spirit
remains to us. It is up to us not to abuse it in any serious manner.
To make a slave of the imagination, even though what is vulgarly
called happiness is at stake, is to fail profoundly to do justice
to one's deepest self. Only imagination realises the possible in
me, and it is enough to lift for a moment the dreadful proscription;
enough also for me to abandon myself to it, without fear of error
(as if one could be any more in error). Where does error begin, and
security end for the spirit? Is not the possibility of error, for
the spirit, rather a circumstance conducive to its well-being?
Madness remains, 'the madness one locks away' as has been so aptly
said. That madness or another…Everyone knows, in fact, that the mad
owe their incarceration to a number of legally reprehensible actions,
and that were it not for those actions, their liberty (or what we
see as their liberty) would not be at risk. They may be, in some
measure, victims of their imagination, I am prepared to concede
that, in the way that it induces them not to observe certain rules,
without which the species feels threatened, which it pays us all
to be aware of. But the profound indifference they show for the
judgement we pass on them, and even the various punishments inflicted
on them, allows us to suppose that they derive great solace from
imagination, that they enjoy their delirium enough to endure the
fact that it is only of value to themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations,
illusions etc, are no slight source of pleasure. The most well-ordered
sensuality partakes of it, and I know there are many evenings when
I would gladly tame that pretty hand which in the last pages of
Taine's L'Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. The
confidences of the mad, I could pass my whole life inspiring them.
They are a scrupulously honest tribe, whose innocence has no peer
but my own. Columbus ought to have taken madmen with him to discover
America. And see how that folly has gained substance, and endured.
It is not the fear of foolishness that compels us to leave the
banner of imagination furled.
The case against the realist position needs to be considered, after
considering the materialist position. The latter, more poetic however
than the former, admittedly implies on the part of a Man, a monstrous
pride, but not a new and more complete degeneration. It should be
seen, above all, as a welcome reaction against certain ridiculous
spiritualist tendencies. Ultimately, it is not incompatible with
a certain nobility of thought.
The realistic position, in contrast, inspired by positivism, from
Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, appears to me to be totally hostile
to all intellectual and moral progress. It horrifies me, since it
arises from mediocrity, hatred and dull conceit. It is what engenders
all the ridiculous books, and insulting plays of our day. It feeds
on newspaper articles, and holds back science and art, while applying
itself to flattering the lowest tastes of its readers; clarity
bordering on stupidity, the life lived by dogs. The activity of
the best minds is affected by it, the law of the lowest common
denominator imposes itself on them, in the end, as on the others.
One amusing result of this state of things, in literature for
example, is the vast quantity of novels. Each brings its little
measure of 'observation'. Feeling in need of a purge, Paul Valéry
recently suggested the compilation of an anthology of as great a
number as possible of opening passages from novels, hoping much
from the ensuing bouts of insanity. The most famous of authors would
be included. Such an idea reflects honour on Paul Valéry who, some
time ago, on the subject of novels, assured me that, as far as he
was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing: The
Marquise went out at five. But has he kept his word?
If the declarative style, pure and simple, of which the sentence
just offered is an example, is almost the rule in novels, it is
because, as one must recognise, the authors' ambition is quite
limited. The circumstantial, needlessly specific, nature of their
respective writings, leads me to think they are amusing themselves
at my expense. They spare me not a single one of their issues of
characterisation: will he be fair-haired, what will he be called,
will we encounter him in summer? So many questions, resolved once
and for all, haphazardly; the only power of choice I am left with
is to close the book, which I take care to do at about the first
page. And the descriptions! Nothing can be compared to their vacuity;
it is nothing but the superimposition of images from a catalogue,
the author employs them more and more readily, he seizes the
opportunity to slip me postcards, he tries to make me fall in step
with him in public places:
'The small room into which the young man was shown was decorated
with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums and muslin curtains in
the windows; the setting sun cast a harsh light over all…There was
nothing special about the chamber. The furniture, of yellow wood,
was all quite old. A sofa with a tall curved back, an oval table
opposite the sofa, a dressing table and mirror set against the
overmantel, chairs against the walls, two or three etchings of
little value, representing German girls holding birds in their hands
– amounted to all the furniture.' (Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment)
I am in no mood to admit, even for a moment, that the mind welcomes
such motifs. It may be argued that this childish description has
its place, and that at this point in the novel the author has his
reasons for burdening me with it, but he is wasting his time since
I avoid entering his room. The idleness, the fatigue of others does
not interest me. I have too fragile a notion of life's continuity
to equate my moments of depression and weakness with my best. I
prefer one to be silent, when one ceases to feel. Understand that
I am not condemning lack of originality for its lack of originality.
I simply say that I take no notice of the empty hours of life, and
that it may be an unworthy action for any man to crystallise out
those which seem so to him. Allow me to ignore that description of
a room, along with a host of others.
Whoa, I'm into psychology, a subject about which I'll take care not
to jest.
The author seizes on a character, and, this being granted, makes
the hero wander about the world. Whatever occurs, this hero, whose
actions and reactions are admirably predictable, must not disturb,
despite seeming to be about to do so, the calculations of which he
is the object. The seas of life can appear to raise him, toss him
about, and sink him again, he will always revert to that pre-formed
human type. A simple game of chess which I am wholly disinterested
in, Man, in whatever form, being a mediocre adversary. What I can't
bear are those wretched debates over this or that move, which have
no bearing on winning or losing. And if the game's not worth the
candle, if objective reason serves so terribly, as it does, whoever
summons it, is it not right to avoid such categories?
'Diversity is as broad as all the tones of voice, manners of walking,
coughing, blowing one's nose, sneezing….(Pascal, Pensées, B114)
If a bunch of grapes contains no two alike, why do you need me to
describe this grape among others, among all others, to make a grape
worth eating? Our brains are dulled by this incurable mania for
reducing the unknown to the known, to the classifiable. The desire
for analysis wins out over feeling. It results in lengthy statements
whose persuasive force derives from their very strangeness, and
only impress the reader by recourse to an abstract vocabulary, which
is moreover quite ill-defined. If the general ideas proposed for
discussion by philosophy to date signalled thereby their definitive
incursion in a wider domain, I would be the first to rejoice. But
till now it has been mere sophisticated banter; the flashes of wit,
and other mannerisms vie in hiding from us true thought in search
of itself, instead of focusing on achieving success. It seems to
me that every action carries within itself its own justification,
at least for one who has had the capacity to commit it, that it is
endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is certain
to enfeeble. Because of the latter, it even, in some sense, ceases
to exist. Nothing is gained by being thus singled out. Stendhal's
heroes are subject to their author's appraisal, a more or less happy
one, which adds nothing to their glory. Where we truly rediscover
them, is where Stendhal lost sight of them.
We are still living under the rule of logic, that, of course, is
what I am driving at. But in our day, logical procedures are only
applicable in solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute
rationalism still in fashion only allows us to consider facts
directly related to our own experience. The aims of logic, in
contrast, escape us. Pointless to add that our very experience finds
itself limited. It paces about in a cage from which it is more and
more difficult to free it. It leans, it too, on immediate utility,
and is guarded by common sense. Under the flag of civilisation,
accompanied by the pretext of progress, we have managed to banish
from the spirit everything that might rightly or wrongly be termed
superstition, fancy, forbidding any kind of research into the truth
which does not conform to accepted practice. It was by pure chance,
it seems, that a part of our mental world, and to my mind the most
important, with which we pretended to be no longer concerned, was
recently brought back to light.
We must give thanks to Freud for his discoveries. On the basis of
his research, a current of opinion is at last flowing, by means of
which the explorer of humanity will be able to push his investigations
much further, authorised as he will be to take account of more than
merely superficial realities. Imagination may be on the point of
re-asserting its rights. If the depths of our spirits contain strange
forces capable of supplementing those on the surface, or waging
victorious war against them, there is every reason to seize on them,
seize on them and then, if needs be, submit them to the control of
reason. Analysts themselves have everything to gain from it. But
it is worth noting that the means of conducting such an enterprise
is not defined a priori, that until further notice, it can be taken
to be the province of poets as well as scientists, and that its
success will not depend upon the paths, more or less capricious,
which are followed.
Very rightly, Freud applied his critical faculties to dreams. It
is unacceptable, indeed, that this considerable part of psychic
activity (since, from the birth to death of human beings at least,
thought presents no solution to continuity: the sum of the dream
moments, from a temporal viewpoint, and considering only pure dream
in sleep, being in no way inferior to the sum of moments of reality,
or to be precise, waking moments) has still received so little
attention. The vast difference in importance, in weight, that the
ordinary observer grants to events while awake and asleep, has
always astonished me. It is because human beings, when they cease
to sleep, are above all the playthings of memory, and memory in its
normal state takes pleasure in re-tracing the events of dreams only
feebly, depriving the latter of all real importance, and distancing
the sole determinant from the point where it thinks, several hours
later, that it was left: a solid hope, a going concern. It has the
illusion of continuing something worthwhile. Dream finds itself
reduced to a parenthesis, like the night. And, in general, delivers
as little information as night does. This curious state of affairs
seems to me to call for certain reflections:
1. Within the bounds in which they operate (or are thought to
operate), dreams, to all appearances, are continuous and show signs
of order. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to recall
excerpts, to ignore transitions, and to represent it to us rather
as a series of dreams than the dream itself. By the same token, we
possess at any moment only a single distinct configuration of
reality, whose coordination is a matter of will. (Account must be
taken of the depth of the dream. For the most part I retain only
what I can glean from its most superficial layers. What I delight
in contemplating most about a dream is whatever sinks back beneath
the surface when awake, all I have forgotten concerning my previous
day's activities, dark leaves, dense branches. In reality, similarly,
I prefer to fall.) What is worth noting, is that nothing permits
us to infer a more profound dissipation of the constituent elements
of dream. I regret having to speak according to a formula which
excludes dream, in principle. When will there be sleeping logicians,
sleeping philosophers! I would like to sleep, to surrender myself
to the dreamers, as I deliver myself to those who read to me, eyes
wide open; to cease from imposing, in this realm, the conscious
rhythm of my thoughts. My dream last night, perhaps it continues
that of the preceding night, and will in turn be continued the
following night, with exemplary rigour. It's quite possible, as
they say. And since there is not the slightest proof that, in doing
so, the 'reality' which preoccupies me still exists in the dream
state, failing to sink back behind memory, why should I not accord
dream what I occasionally refuse reality, that quality of certainty
in itself, which, in its own domain of time, is free from exposure
to my repudiation? Why should I not expect more from dream-signs
than I expect from a degree of consciousness daily more acute? Can
the dream not also be applied to the solution of life's fundamental
questions? Are they the same questions in one case as the other,
and are those questions already there in dream? Is the dream any
less subject to sanctions than the rest? I age, and more than that
reality to which I believe myself subject, it is perhaps the dream,
the indifference I show towards it, which ages me.
2. I return, once more, to the state of being awake. I am obliged
to consider it as a phenomenon due to interference. Not only does
the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency towards
disorientation (a tale of lapses and errors of all sorts the secret
of which is beginning to be revealed) but what is more it seems
that when the mind is functioning normally it does no more than
respond to suggestions which come to it from the depths of that
night to which I commend it. However well balanced it is, its
equilibrium is a relative one. It scarcely dares to express itself,
and, when it does, limits itself to verifying that some idea, some
female has made an impression on it. What impression, it would be
quite incapable of saying, showing by that the measure of its
subjectivity, no more. This idea, or female, troubles it, inducing
it to be less strict. It has the effect of separating it, for a
moment, from its solvent, and depositing it over the heavens, as
the lovely precipitate that it can become, that it is. When all
else fails, it calls upon chance, a divinity more obscure even than
the others, to whom it attributes its distraction. Who can say that
the angle at which this idea which stirs it is presented, what it
loves in that woman's eye, is not precisely what ties it to dream,
binds it to the data which through its own fault it has lost? And
if things were otherwise, what might it not be capable of? I would
like to grant it the key to this passage.
3. The spirit of the man who dreams is quite content with what
happens to him. The agonising question of possibility is no longer
posed. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you
die, are you not certain of waking among the dead? Let yourself be
led, events will not allow you to defer them. You have no name. The
easiness of it all is inestimable.
What reason, I ask, a reason so much greater than that other, confers
the natural quality on dream, makes me welcome unreservedly a host
of episodes whose strangeness would confound me as I write? And yet
I can believe my own eyes, and ears; the great day has arrived, the
beast has spoken.
If Man's awakening is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly,
it is because he has been led to accept an impoverished idea of
expiation.
4. From the moment it is subjected to methodical investigation,
when by means yet to be determined, we succeed in accounting for
dream in its entirety (and that presupposes a discipline in the use
of memory spanning generations; but let us start all the same by
registering the salient facts) when the curve of its graph will
progress with unparalleled regularity and amplitude, we may hope
that mysteries which are no such thing will give way to the great
Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states,
seemingly so contradictory, of dream and reality, in a kind of
absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak. That is the quest I
am about, certain not to find it, but too heedless of death not to
weigh a little the joys of its possession.
They say that every evening, before he slept, Saint-Pol-Roux (the
Symbolist poet) used to have posted on the door of his manor house
at Camaret, a notice which read: POET AT WORK.
There is a great deal more to be said, but in passing I simply
wished to touch on a subject which would alone necessitate a long,
altogether more rigorous, discussion: I will return to it. At this
point, it was my intention to do justice to that hatred of the
marvellous which rages in certain individuals, to that ridicule
beneath which they would like to bury it. Let's not beat about the
bush: the marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is
beautiful, only the marvellous could be beautiful.
In the realm of literature, the marvellous alone is capable of
making fertile those works which belong to a lesser genre such as
the novel, everything in general that involves storytelling. Lewis's
The Monk bears admirable witness to this. A breath of the marvellous
animates it throughout. Long before the author has delivered his
characters from all temporal constraint, one feels them ready to
act with unprecedented pride. That passion for eternity that stirs
them incessantly lends an unforgettable intensity to their torments
and mine. I mean that the book, from beginning to end, and in the
purest way, exalts only that part of the spirit which aspires to
quit the ground; and that stripped of an insignificant portion of
its novelistic plot, belonging to its period, it constitutes a model
of accuracy and innocent grandeur. (What is admirable about fantasy
is that nothing fantastic remains, there is only the real) It seems
to me that no one has bettered it, and that the character of Matilda
in particular is the most moving creation that one could credit to
the figurative mode in literature. She is less a character than a
continual temptation. And if a character is not a temptation, what
is? An extreme temptation, she. The 'nothing is impossible to he
who dares' is in The Monk given its full and convincing measure.
Ghosts play a logical role in it, since the critical mind does not
seize on them to contest their being. Likewise Ambrosio's punishment
is treated in a legitimate way, since it is ultimately accepted by
the critical mind as a natural denouement.
It may seem arbitrary for me to propose this example, when discussing
the marvellous, from which the literature of the North and Oriental
literature has borrowed time and again, without mentioning the truly
religious literature of every land. It is simply that most of the
examples those literatures might furnish me with are tainted by
puerility, for the sole reason that they are addressed to children.
At an early age children are weaned on the marvellous, and later,
fail to retain sufficient virginity of mind to really enjoy Cinderella.
Charming as the stories may be, adults would consider it demeaning
to nourish themselves on fairytales, and I would agree they are not
suitable for them. The web of adorable unrealities requires to be
spun a little more finely, the older we get, and one
is left waiting for that species of spider…But the faculties do not
change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the
taste for the extravagant, are devices which we will never summon
in vain. There are stories to be written for grown-ups, stories as
yet quite rare. The marvellous is not the same in all ages; it
participates obscurely in some kind of general revelation of which
only the particulars reach us: romantic ruins, the modern mannequin
or any other symbol capable of stirring the human sensibility for
any length of time. In those appurtenances that make us smile, there
is forever revealed an incurable human restlessness, and that is
why I take them into consideration, why I judge them inseparable
from certain products of genius, which are painfully affected by
them more than others. They are Villon's gibbets, Racine's Greeks,
Baudelaire's couches. They coincide with an eclipse of taste which
I am made to endure, I whose idea of taste is a large stain. Amidst
the bad taste of my age, I force myself to go further than anyone
else. It is I, If I had lived in 1820, I 'the blood-stained nun',
I, who would not have refrained from that banal and deceitful 'let
us dissimulate' of which the parodic J.P.R Cuisin speaks, I who
would have revelled, I, in gigantic metaphors, as they say, in all
the phases of the 'Silvered Disc'.
For now, I think of a castle, of which at least half is not necessarily
in ruins; the castle belongs to me, I picture it in a rural setting
not far from Paris. The outbuildings are endless, and as for the
interior, it has been utterly restored, in a manner that leaves
nothing to be desired in the way of comfort. There are autos parked
near the door, cloaked by the shadows of trees. A few of my friends
are installed on the premises: there is Louis Aragon departing; he
only has time to wave to you; Philippe Soupault rises with the stars
and Paul Éluard, our mighty Éluard, has not yet returned. There
are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac, out in the park, deciphering
an old edict on duelling; Georges Auric, Jean Paulhan; Max Morise,
who rows so well, and Benjamin Péret, occupied with his equations
of birds; and Joseph Delteil; and Jean Carrive; and Georges Limbour,
and Georges Limbour (there is a whole hedge of Georges Limbour);
and Marcel Noll; there is T. Fraenkel gesturing to us from his
captive balloon, Georges Malkine, Antonin Artaud, Francis Gérard,
Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boiffard, then Jacques Baron and his brother,
both of them handsome and cordial, and so many others too, and what
ravishing women. These young men, how could one refuse them a thing,
their wishes are, as to wealth, commands. Francis Picabia is about
to visit, and last week, in the hall of mirrors we received a certain
Marcel Duchamp previously unknown to us. Picasso hunts in the
neighbourhood. The spirit of demoralisation has taken up residence
in the castle, and we have to deal with it whenever there is a
question of relating to our peers, but the doors are always open
and one does not commence by 'thanking' the world, you know. Moreover,
the solitude is vast, we don't often encounter one another. Then
isn't the essential thing that we are masters of ourselves, and
masters of women, and of love too?
I will be convicted of poetic deceit: everyone will go about saying
I live on the Rue Fontaine, and they won't swallow that tale. So
what! Are they so sure that the castle to which I invite them is
only a phantom? What if the castle exists! My guests are there to
prove it; their fancy is the luminous road that leads there. It is
really our fantasies we inhabit, when we are there. And how could
what one person does bother another, there, in the refuge of
sentimental pursuit and occasional meeting?
Man proposes and disposes. It falls to him alone to belong to himself
completely, that is to maintain the host of his desires, daily more
formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to do so. It
bears within itself a perfect compensation for the miseries we
endure. It can also be a means of organisation, if ever under the
influence of a less intimate disappointment we choose to take it
quite seriously. The time is coming when it will decree an end to
money and itself will break heaven's bread for the earth! There
will still be gatherings in public squares, and movements in which
you never dared hope to take part. Farewell to absurd choice, dreams
of the abyss, rivalries, endless patience, the flight of the seasons,
the artificial ordering of ideas, the balustrade of danger, the
time for everything! Only let us take pains to practice poetry.
Does it not fall to us, who are already living, to try to make that
which we propose for our much wider field of enquiry, prevail?
It is irrelevant whether there is a degree of disproportion between
this defence and the illustration of it that follows. It was a
matter of returning to the sources of poetic imagination, and what's
more, of staying there. Not that I pretend to have done so. It would
be to take a great deal on oneself to wish to establish oneself in
those remote regions where everything at first appears so troublesome,
all the more so if you wish to lead someone else there. Besides,
one is never quite sure of really being there. If you are taking
all that trouble, you are also tempted to stop elsewhere. The fact
remains that an arrow now points in the direction of those regions,
and that to attain the true goal only depends on the traveller's
powers of endurance.
We know, more or less, the road travelled. I was careful to relate,
in an analysis of the case of Robert Desnos, entitled: THE ENTRANCE
OF THE MEDIUMS (ENTRÉE DES MÉDIUMS, Littérature, nouvelle série no.
6 November 1, 1922) that I had been 'led to focus my attention on
more or less partial phrases which, in complete solitude, on the
verge of sleep, become perceptible to the mind without being able
to discover in them any prior intention.' I had at that time attempted
the poetic venture with minimum risk, that is my aspirations were
the same as today, but I trusted in tardiness of elaboration, to
protect me from useless proximity, a proximity of which I wholly
disapproved. In that lay a modesty of thought of which some vestiges
remain. At the end of my life, I will doubtless manage with difficulty
to speak as others do, apologising for my voice and paucity of
gesture. The virtue of speech (and writing, moreover) seemed to me
to spring from the ability to contract in a striking way the
exposition (since such it was) of a small number of facts, poetic
or otherwise, of which I made myself the subject. I concluded that
Rimbaud proceeded no differently. I composed, with a concern for
variation which merited more, the last poems of Pawn-Shop (Mont de
piété, 1919), that is I managed to derive incredible benefit from
the blank lines of that book. Those lines were the eye, closed to
the operations of thought that I believed I should hide from my
readers. That was not deceit on my part, but a delight in shocking
them. I achieved the illusion of potential complicity, which I had
more and more difficulty in relinquishing. I had begun to cherish
words immoderately for they space they admit around them, for their
tangencies with a host of other words I did not utter. The poem
BLACK-FOREST derives from precisely this state of mind. It took me
six months to write and take my word for it I did not leave off for
a single day. But you will understand that it stemmed rather from
my self-esteem at that time, I love these foolish confessions. At
that time, Cubist pseudo-poetry was trying to gain a hearing, but
it had emerged helpless from Picasso's brain and as far as I was
concerned I was thought to be as dull as ditchwater (I still am).
I suspected, moreover, that from the poetic point of view I had
taken a wrong turning, but I hedged my bets the best I could, defying
lyricism with a barrage of definitions and formulae (the phenomenon
of Dada was soon to appear) and pretending to be searching for an
application of poetry to advertising (I claimed that the world would
end, not with a good book, but a brilliant advertisement for heaven
or hell).
In those days, a man, at least as boring as I, Pierre Reverdy,
wrote: The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two
more or less remote realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is
remote and true, the stronger the image – the greater its emotive
power and poetic reality….etc. (Nord-Sud, March 1918)
These words, however Sibylline to the uninitiated, were extremely
revealing and I meditated on them for a long while. But the image
eluded me. Reverdy's aesthetic, an aesthetic totally a posteriori,
led me to mistake effects for causes. It was amidst all this that
I was driven to renounce my point of view, irrevocably.
One evening then, before falling asleep, I perceived, so clearly
articulated that it was impossible to change a word, but distinct
however from the sound of any voice, a quite bizarre phrase which
came to me without bearing any trace of the events in which, my
consciousness agrees, I found myself involved at that time, a phrase
which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, dare I say it, that came
knocking at the window. I took swift note of it, and prepared to
move on, when its organic nature struck me. Truly the phrase
astonished me; I have unfortunately been unable to recapture it
precisely even today; but it was something like: 'There is a man
sliced in two by the window', but it suffered no ambiguity, accompanied
as it was by a faint visual representation of a man walking, severed
half-way up by a window at right angles to the axis of his body.
(Were I a painter, this visual image would no doubt have seemed
more important to me than the other. It was indeed my prior
predisposition which decided the issue. Since that day, I have had
occasion to focus my attention at will on similar apparitions, and
I know they are just as clear as auditory phenomena. With a pencil
and a sheet of blank paper to hand, I could easily trace their
outlines. Here again it is not a matter of depicting but merely
tracing. In this way I could reproduce a tree, a wave, a musical
instrument, a host of things, of which I am currently incapable of
achieving even the roughest sketch. I would dive in, convinced of
finding my way through a maze of lines which at first sight seemed
to be heading nowhere. Then on opening my eyes I would gain the
intense impression of something 'previously unseen'. The proof of
what I am saying has been demonstrated many times by Robert Desnos:
to convince oneself, one has simply to leaf through the pages of
issue 36 of Feuilles libres which contains several of his drawings,
Romeo and Juliet, A Man Died This Morning etc., which were accepted
by that journal as the drawings of a madman and published as such).
Without question, what offered itself was a simple presentation in
space of a man leaning from a window. But the window having followed
the man's movements, I realised that I was dealing with an image
of a sufficiently rare kind, and I could think of nothing but how
to incorporate it among my materials for poetic construction. I had
no sooner accorded it this place however than it was succeeded by
an almost continuous succession of phrases, scarcely less surprising,
and leaving me with an impression of gratuitousness such that the
control I had exercised over myself up till then seemed illusory
and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable
quarrel taking place within me. (Knut Hamson attributes this kind
of revelation of which I was the recipient as deriving from hunger,
and he may be right, since it is true I did not eat every day during
that period of my life. Certainly the manifestations he describes
are clearly the same:
'The next day I woke early. It was still dark. My eyes had been
open a long while when I heard a clock in the apartment above strike
five. I wanted to go back to sleep but could not. I was wide awake
and a host of thoughts flooded through my mind. Suddenly a few
choice fragments came to mind, perfectly suitable for use in a rough
draft, or to be serialised; instantly I found, quite by chance,
lovely phrases such as I had never conceived. I repeated them to
myself slowly, word by word; they were excellent. And still more
followed. I rose and snatched a pencil and paper from the table
behind my bed. It as a though an artery had burst inside me, one
word followed another, found its correct position, adapted itself
to the context, scene piled on scene, events unfolded, one vessel
after another bubbled in my mind, and I was enjoying myself immensely.
Thoughts came so swiftly and flowed so copiously that a whole host
of subtle details escaped me, because my pencil could not keep up
with them, and yet I went as fast as I could, my hand in continual
motion, not losing an instant. The sentences continued to well up
within me; I was pregnant with my subject.'
Apollinaire claimed that Chirico's first paintings were created
under the influence of cenesthetic disorder (migraine, colic, etc.)
Totally preoccupied with Freud as I then was and familiar with his
methods of investigation which I had some slight occasion to practice
on patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what
one tries to obtain from others, namely a monologue delivered as
rapidly as possible, on which the critical mind of the subject is
unable to pass judgement, unembarrassed consequently by reticence,
comprising, as precisely as possible, spoken thought. It appeared
to me, , and still does – the manner in which the phrase about the
man sliced in two came to me bears witness to it – that the speed
of thought is no greater than that of speech, and does not necessarily
defy capture in language, nor even the flow of the pen. It was in
this frame of mind that Philippe Soupault, to whom I had confided
these initial conclusions, and I, undertook to blacken some paper,
with a laudable disdain for what might ensue of a literary nature.
Ease of execution achieved the rest. At the end of the first day,
we were able to read through fifty or so pages obtained in this
manner, and began comparing our results. All in all, Soupault's
pages and mine were remarkably analogous: the same poor construction,
similar deficiencies, but also, on both our parts, the impression
of extraordinary eloquence, much emotion, a considerable selection
of images of a quality such that we would not have been capable of
creating a single one in longhand, a very special quality of the
picturesque and, here and there, a certain piquant buffoonery. The
only apparent difference between our two texts seemed to me to
derive in essence from our respective temperaments, Soupault's being
less static than mine, and if I allow myself this mild criticism,
from the fact that he had committed the error of placing at the top
of certain pages, and no doubt in a spirit of mystification, a few
words by way of title. I must, on the other hand, do him justice,
in that he was constantly, and forcefully, opposed to the least
re-touching, the least correction, of any passage of this kind which
appeared at all ill-conceived. In that, he was indeed absolutely
right. (I believe, more and more, in the infallibility of my thoughts
with respect to myself, and that is more than reasonable. Nevertheless,
with this thoughtwriting, where one is at the mercy of the first
distraction from outside, 'ebullitions' may occur. It would be
inexcusable to pretend otherwise. Thought, by definition, is
overpowering, and incapable of detecting itself in an error. The
blame for such obvious weaknesses must be placed on suggestions
that reach it from outside.) It is, in fact, very difficult to
assess the various elements present at their true value, one might
even say it is impossible to appreciate them at first reading. On
writing them, these elements are, to all appearances, as strange
to you as to others, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically
speaking, they strike you above all by a high degree of instantaneous
absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, on closer examination,
being to make room for everything admissible, legitimate in the
world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and facts
no less objective, in the end, than all the rest.
In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who recently died, and who, on
several occasions, seemed to us to pursue a discipline of this kind,
without however having relinquished in doing so an indifferent
literary method, Soupault and I designated the new mode of pure
expression we had adopted and whose benefit we wished to bestow on
our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I see no point now in
dwelling on the word, the meaning we have given it having generally
prevailed over the that of Apollinaire. To bestow a yet more
appropriate title on it, we could no doubt have appropriated the
word SUPERNATURALISM, employed by Gérard de Nerval in the dedication
to his Girls of Fire (Filles du feu, 1854) and also by Thomas Carlyle
in Sartor Resartus (Book III, Chapter VIII, 'Natural Supernaturalism').
It seems, in fact, that Nerval possessed to a marvellous degree
that spirit with which we claim kinship. Apollinaire, having
possessed, in contrast, only the letter, as yet imperfect, of
Surrealism, and having shown himself powerless to give the theoretical
insight into it which we possess. Here are two passages by Nerval
which seem particularly significant in this regard:
'I will explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phenomenon of which you
spoke earlier. There are, you know, certain story-tellers who cannot
invent without identifying with their imaginary characters. You may
recall how convincingly our old friend Nodier told us of his
misfortune in being guillotined during the Revolution; we were so
convinced by it, we asked him how he had managed to set his head
back on his neck again.'
'…And since you have been imprudent enough to have quoted one of
the sonnets composed in this SUPERNATURALISTIC reverie, as the
Germans say, you will have to hear them all. You will find them at
the end of this volume. They are scarcely more obscure than Hegel's
metaphysics or Swedenborg's MEMORABILIA (1766), and would lose their
charm if explained, if the latter were possible, at least concede
the value of the expression…' (See also the term idéoréalisme in
Saint-Pol-Roux)
It is dishonest in the extreme to dispute our right to employ the
word SURREALISM in the quite specific sense that we understand it,
since it is clear that before us the word lacked currency. I therefore
define it once and for all:
SURREALISM, n. m. Pure psychic automatism by means of which one
intends to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other
manner, the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in
the absence of any control exercised by reason, free of any aesthetic
or moral concern.
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the
superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected association,
in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to the destruction of all other psychic mechanisms completely,
and to the replacement of them with itself, in solving the principal
problems of life. The following have performed acts of ABSOLUTE
SURREALISM, Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive,
Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Éluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise,
Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.
They appear, to date, to be the only ones, and there would be no
question of error in this were it not for the fascinating case of
Isidore Ducasse, about whom I lack data. And of course, a fair
number of poets might pass for Surrealists, if one considers their
works superficially, beginning with Dante, and in his finer moments,
Shakespeare. In the course of various attempts at reducing to its
basic principles, what by an abuse of confidence, is called genius,
I have in the end found nothing that can be attributed to any other
process.
Young's Night Thoughts are surrealist from end to end; unfortunately
a clergyman speaks, a bad clergyman, no doubt, but still a clergyman.
Swift is surrealist in spitefulness. De Sade is surrealist in
sadism. Chateaubriand is surrealist in exoticism. Constant is
surrealist in politics. Hugo is surrealist when he is not being
stupid. Desbordes-Valmour is surrealist in love. Bertrand is
surrealist in the past. Rabbe is surrealist in death. Poe is
surrealist in adventure. Baudelaire is surrealist in morality.
Rimbaud is surrealist in his way of life, and elsewhere. Mallarmé
is surrealist in his confidences. Jarry is surrealist in absinthe.
Nouveau is surrealist in the kiss. Saint-Pol-Roux is surrealist
in symbolism. Fargue is surrealist in atmosphere. Vaché is
surrealist within me. Reverdy is surrealist at home. Saint-John
Perse is surrealist at a distance. Roussel is surrealist in the
anecdote. Etc.
They are not always surrealist, I would stress, In that, I discern
in each of them a certain number of preconceived ideas to which –
quite naively! – they clung. They clung to them because they failed
to hear the surrealist voice, the one that continues to preach at
the hour of death and above the storm, because they would not simply
serve to orchestrate the marvellous score. They were instruments,
too full of pride, and that is why they failed to produce harmonious
sound at all times. (I might say the same of a number of philosophers
and artists, including, among the latter, Ucello among the old
masters, and in the modern era Seurat, Gustave Moreau, Matisse, in
La Musique of 1939 for example, Braque, Duchamp, Picabia, Chirico,
so admirable for so long, Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and one very
close to us, André Masson.)
But we, who are free from any attempt to filter, who in our works
have made ourselves silent receptacles filled with echoes, modest
recording instruments who are not hypnotised by the designs we
trace, perhaps we serve a yet nobler cause. So we render with
integrity the 'talent' lent to us. You may as well talk to me of
the talent of that platinum ruler, that mirror that door, or the
sky above.
We have no talent: ask Philippe Soupault: 'Anatomical products and
cheap housing will destroy the greatest cities.'
Ask Roger Vitrac: 'No sooner had I summoned the marble-admiral than
he pirouetted on his heels like a horse rearing at the pole star
and showed me in the plane of his bicorn hat a region where I ought
to spend my life.'
Ask Paul Éluard: 'It is an old tale I recount, a famous poem I
re-read: I am leaning against a wall, with greening ears and scorched
lips.'
Ask Max Morise: 'The cave-bear and his friend the bittern, the
vol-au-vent and the wind his valet, the Lord Chancellor with his
Lady, the scare-crow for sparrows and the sparrow his accomplice,
the test-tube and his daughter the needle, the carnivore and his
brother the carnival, the road-sweeper and his monocle, the Mississippi
and its little dog, the coral and its jug of milk, the Miracle and
its good Lord, have simply to disappear from the surface of the
sea.'
Ask Joseph Delteil: 'Alas! I believe in the virtue of birds. And
it only takes a feather for me to die laughing.'
Ask Louis Aragon: 'During a break in the party, while the players
were gathering around a bowl of flaming punch, I asked the tree
whether it still had its red ribbon.' And ask me, who could not
prevent myself writing the disturbing serpentine lines of this
preface.
Ask Robert Desnos, he who more than any of us, perhaps, is closest
to the surrealist truth, he who, in his still unpublished works,
NOUVELLES HÉBRIDES, DÉSORDRE FORMEL, DEUIL POUR DEUIL (New Hebrides
1922, illustrated by Miró 1974, Formal Disorder 1922/23, Grief for
Grief 1924) and in the course of the numerous experiments he has
lent himself to, has fully justified the hopes I placed in surrealism
and leads me to hope for much more yet. Desnos now speaks surrealist
at will. The prodigious agility with which he follows his thought
orally is worth as much to us as the pleasure we derived from
splendid speeches now lost, Desnos having better things to do than
preserve them. He reads himself like an open book and does nothing
to retain the pages, which fly off in the windy wake of his life.
##Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art
- Written surrealist composition, or first and last draft Have
writing materials brought, once you are settled in a place as
favourable as possible for focusing the mind on itself. Put yourself
in the most passive, or receptive, state you can. Forget about your
genius, your talents, and those of others. Tell yourself repeatedly
that literature is one of the saddest roads leading to everything.
Write swiftly with no preconceived subject, swiftly enough that you
cannot retain it, and are not tempted to reread. The first sentence
will arise spontaneously, it being the case in truth that each
second there is a sentence, unknown to our conscious thought, which
only asks to be externalised. It is quite difficult to make
pronouncements about the next sentence; it no doubt participates
in both our conscious activity and the other kind, if you agree
that the fact of having written the first entails a minimum of
perception. That should matter little to you, however; and in that
resides, to a large extent, the interest of the surrealist game.
It is still the case that punctuation definitely runs counter to
the absolute continuity of flow which concerns us, although it may
seem as necessary as the distribution of nodes on a vibrating string.
Continue for as long as you wish. Trust in the inexhaustible nature
of that murmuring. If silence threatens to establish itself, if you
have committed an error: an error, let us say, of inattention, break
off without hesitation with a more than obvious blank line. Following
a word whose origin seems suspect to you, place some letter, the
letter 'l' for example, the letter 'l' every time, and recall the
arbitrary by making this letter the initial one of the very next
word.
- How not to be bored in company This is extremely difficult. Never
be at home to anyone, and occasionally when some irrelevance has
broken the injunction, interrupting you in the full flow of surrealist
activity, your arms crossed, say: 'It's no matter, there are doubtless
better things to do or not do. Life's interests can't sustain
themselves. Simplicity, what's going on within me is still tiresome!'
or some such revolting banality.
- How to make speeches Put your name on the list, on the eve of
election, in the first country which considers it worthwhile
proceeding with such public consultations. Each of us has the makings
of an orator: the multicoloured loincloths, the glass baubles of
words. Through surrealism one will surprise despair in all its
poverty. One night on some public platform, all by oneself, one
will carve up eternal heaven, that rich carcase. One will promise
so much and perform so little that it will be a wonder. To the
demands of an entire people one will concede a partial and ludicrous
ballot. One will join together the most intractable of enemies in
a secret yearning, which will blow nations apart. And one will
achieve this merely by allowing oneself to be elevated by the vast
word which melts with pity and spins with hatred. Incapable of
failure, one will triumph among failures. One will be truly elect
and the loveliest women will love one with all-consuming passion.
- How to write false novels Whoever you are, if your spirit moves
you, burn a few laurel leaves, and without needing to fan the meagre
flame, you'll begin writing a novel. Surrealism permits it; you
have only to position the needle marked 'Fair' at 'Action' and the
game will begin. Here are some characters varying widely in appearance:
their names in your writing can be simply capital letters, and they
will conduct themselves as easily with respect to active verbs as
does the personal pronoun 'it' towards words like: 'rains', 'is',
'must' etc. They will order them about, so to speak, and whenever
observation, reflection and the power of generalisation prove of
no assistance to you, be assured they will credit you with a thousand
intentions you never had. Thus endowed with a small number of
physical and moral characteristics, these beings, who in truth owe
so little to you, will no longer depart from a fixed mode of conduct
with which you no longer need to occupy yourself. A plot, appearing
more or less skilful, will result from this, justifying point by
point the moving or reassuring denouement about which you care not
a jot. Your false novel will simulate a true novel to a marvellous
degree; you will become rich and all will agree that you have
'something in your belly', since it is there as well that this
something is located. Of course, by an analogous method, and
provided you ignore what you review, you can devote yourself
successfully to false criticism.
- How to catch the eye of a woman you pass in the street
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- Against death Surrealism will introduce you to death which is a
secret society. It will glove your hand, burying within it the
profound M with which the word Memory starts. Do not forget to make
proper arrangements for your will: personally, I ask to be conducted
to the cemetery in a removal van. Let my friends destroy every last
copy of my Discourse on the Paucity of Reality. (Discours sur le
Peu de Réalité 1927)
Language has been given to Man so that he can make surrealist use
of it. To the extent that he is required to make himself understood,
he manages to express himself more or less, and by so doing to
accomplish various functions from among those most vulgar. To speak,
to read a letter presents little real difficulty to him, provided
that, in so doing, he does not set a goal beyond the average, that
is, provided he limits himself to conversing (for the pleasure of
conversing) with someone. He is not worried about the forthcoming
words, nor of the sentence beyond that which he utters. To a very
simple question, he will be capable of giving a point-blank response.
In the absence of tics contracted through dealings with others, he
can pronounce spontaneously on a small number of subjects; he has
no need to 'think long and hard before speaking' nor to formulate
anything at all in advance. Who could convince him that this power
of making a first draft will only do him a disservice if he chooses
to establish more delicate relations? There is nothing about which
he should refuse to speak, to write in abundance. To listen to
oneself, to read oneself only has the effect of suspending the
workings of the occult, that admirable resource. I am in no hurry
to comprehend myself (Enough! I shall always comprehend myself).
If such and such a sentence of mine causes me a momentary disappointment,
I trust in the next sentence to right its wrongs, I refrain from
beginning it over again or polishing it. Only the merest loss of
impetus might prove fatal to me. Words, groups of words which succeed
one another display the greatest solidarity among themselves. It
is not for me to favour these at the expense of others. It is for
a miraculous compensation mechanism to intervene – and intervene
it does.
Not only does this free flow of language which I seek to render
forever valid, which seems to me to adapt itself to all the
circumstances of life, not only does this language fail to deprive
me of any of my resources, but it grants me further an extraordinary
lucidity, and in the area I least expected. I shall even go so far
as to state that it instructs me and, indeed, it has happened on
occasions that I have employed surreally words whose meaning I have
forgotten. I was able to verify subsequently that the way in which
I had used them corresponded exactly to their definitions. That
would lead one to believe that we do not 'learn', that we only ever
'relearn'. There are happy turns of phrase that I have thus become
familiar with. And I say nothing of the poetic consciousness of
objects I have been able to acquire through spiritual contact with
them a thousand times repeated.
However it is to dialogue that the forms of surrealist language are
best adapted. Here, two thoughts confront one another; while one
is being delivered, the other is occupied with it, but how is it
so occupied? To suppose that it incorporates it within itself would
be to admit that for a while it is possible for it to feed entirely
on the other thought, which is highly improbable. And in fact the
attention it pays is purely external; it only has time to accept
or reject, generally reject, with all the consideration a man can
summon. This mode of language moreover does not allow the depths
of a subject to be plumbed. My attention, prey to a demand which
it cannot with decency refuse, treats the opposing thought as an
enemy; in ordinary conversation, it always almost 'picks up' on the
words, the figures of speech employed; it places me in a good
position to employ them in my reply while altering them. This is
true to such a degree that in certain pathological mental states
where sensory disorders occupy the patient's whole attention, the
latter, while continuing to reply to questions posed, will seize
on the last word spoken in his presence, or the last fragment of
some surrealist phrase a trace of which he finds in his mind:
'How old are you? – You' (Echolalia)
'What is your name? – Forty-five houses.' (Ganser syndrome, or a
reply that is beside the point.)
There is no conversation in which something of this disorder does
not appear. The effort of socialising which dictates it and the
considerable practice we have at it are the only things which allow
us to conceal it temporarily. It is also the great weakness of a
book that it is in a constant battle with its finest, by which I
mean its most exacting, readers. In the short dialogue I improvised
above, between doctor and madman, moreover, it is the latter who
has the upper hand. Since, by his replies, he impresses himself on
the examining doctor's attention – and because he is not the one
who is asking the questions. Is that to say that at that moment his
power of thought is stronger? Perhaps. He is free to take no more
account of his age and name.
Poetic surrealism, to which I am dedicating this study, has applied
itself to date in re-establishing dialogue in accord with absolute
truth, by freeing the two speakers from the obligations of polite
behaviour. Each of them simply pursues his soliloquy, without trying
to derive any particular dialectical pleasure and without imposing
on his neighbour in any way. The statements made are not, as is
usually the case, aimed at developing a thesis, however slight,
they are as disinterested as possible. As for the reply they elicit,
it is in principle totally indifferent to the self-esteem of the
person speaking. The words, the images are only so many spring-boards
for the mind of the listener. This is the way in which, in Magnetic
Fields (Les Champs magnétiques,1919), the first purely surrealist
work, the pages grouped together under the title Barriers (Barrières)
should be construed, pages in which Soupault and I show ourselves
as impartial interlocutors.
Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to
abandon it when they please. Everything suggests that it acts on
the mind as drugs do; like them it creates a certain state of
dependence and can drive Man to terrible acts of rebellion. It is
also, if you like, an artificial paradise and the taste one acquires
for it comes within the scope of Baudelaire's criticism, under the
same headings as drugs do. As does the analysis of the mysterious
effects and special pleasures it can engender – in many respects
surrealism presents itself as a new vice which it seems need not
be restricted to only a few; like hashish it has the power to satisfy
all tastes – place for such an analysis must necessarily be found
in the present study.
1. It is true of surrealist images as it is of those engendered by
opium that Man does not evoke them, but that they 'offer themselves
to him, spontaneously, despotically. He cannot dispel them; for the
will is powerless, and no longer governs the faculties.' (Baudelaire)
It remains to be seen whether images can ever be 'evoked'. If, as
I do, one accepts Reverdy's definition, it does not seem possible
to conjoin of one's own volition what he terms 'two distant realities'.
The conjunction is made or not made, that is all. For my part, I
refuse to believe, in the most formal; way, that in Reverdy's work
images such as:
In the stream there is a song that flows
or:
Day unfolded like a white tablecloth
or:
The world returns to a sack
reveal the slightest degree of premeditation. It is false, in my
opinion, to pretend that 'the mind has grasped the relationship'
between the two realities before it. Firstly, it has not grasped
anything consciously. It is the juxtaposition of two terms, in some
fortuitous manner, that has emitted a certain light, the light of
the image, to which we show ourselves to be infinitely sensitive.
The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained;
it is, consequently, a function of the difference in potential
between the two conductors. When a difference barely exists as in
a comparison (note the image in the work of Jules Renard) no spark
is produced. Now it is not in man's power, to my mind, to effect
the conjunction of two far distant realities. The principle of
association of ideas, such as we conceive it, militates against it.
Or else we would be forced to revert to an elliptical art, which
Reverdy deplores as I do. We are obliged then to admit that the two
terms of the image are not deduced one from another by the mind in
order to conjure a spark, that they are simultaneous products of
the activity I term surrealist reason limiting itself to noting and
appreciating the luminous phenomenon.
And just as the length of the spark increases to the extent it does
when traversing rarefied gases, the surrealist atmosphere created
by automatic writing, which I desire to place within reach of
everyone, is especially conducive to the production of the most
beautiful images. One might even say that, in this vertiginous race,
the images appear, as the mind's sole means of steering. The mind,
little by little, becomes convinced of the supreme reality of these
images. At first confining itself to submitting to them, it soon
perceives that they stimulate its powers of reason, increasing its
knowledge accordingly. It becomes conscious of limitless expanses
where its desires are made manifest, where for and against are
constantly diminished, where its obscurity does not betray it. It
goes onward, borne by these images which delight it, which scarcely
leave time to cool the fire in its fingers. It is the most beautiful
night of all, the night of the lightning-flash: day, compared to
it, is night.
The innumerable types of surrealist image call for classification,
a task which I do not propose to attempt here. To group them according
to their specific affinities would take me too far afield; what I
want to take account of, essentially, is their common virtue. The
most powerful, for me, I must reveal, is that which presents the
greatest degree of arbitrariness; that which takes the longest to
translate into everyday language, either because it contains an
immense amount of apparent contradiction; or because one of its
terms is strangely hidden; or because proclaiming its sensational
nature, it has the appearance of ending weakly (abruptly reducing
the angle of its compass); or because it derives from itself a
ridiculous formal justification; or because it is of a hallucinatory
nature; or because it gives a mask of the concrete to the abstract
in a very natural manner; or, conversely, because it implies the
negation of some elementary physical property; or because it provokes
laughter. Here, in order, are a few examples:
The ruby of Champagne. (Lautréamont) Lovely as the law of arrested
development of the breast in adults whose propensity to growth is
not in proportion to the quantity of molecules the organism
assimilates. (Lautréamont)
A church stood there brilliant as a bell. (Philippe Soupault)
In Rrose Sélavy's sleep a dwarf risen from a well comes to eat her
bread at night. (Robert Desnos)
On the bridge the dew with a she-cat's head rocks itself to sleep.
(André Breton)
A little to the left, in my divined firmament, I see – but it is
doubtless only a mist of blood and murder – the frosted gleam of
freedom's disturbances. (Louis Aragon)
In the blazing forest, The lions were cool. (Roger Vitrac)
The colour of a woman's stockings is not necessarily in the likeness
of her eyes, which led a philosopher whom it is useless to name to
declare: 'Cephalopods have more reasons to hate progress than
quadrupeds.' (Max Morise)
Whether we like it or not, there is enough there to satisfy several
of the mind's demands. All these images seem to testify that the
mind is ripe for something more than the benign joys it commonly
accords itself. This is the only means it has to turn the ideal
quantity of events it is charged with to its own advantage. (Let
us not forget that, according to Novalis' formula, 'there is a
series of events which runs parallel to real events. Men and
circumstances commonly modify the ideal train of circumstances, so
that it appears imperfect, and their consequences are equally
imperfect. So it was with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism
we got Lutheranism.') These images show the mind the extent to which
it usually dissipates itself and the disadvantages that it thus
incurs. It's no bad thing that the images ultimately disconcert it,
since to disconcert the mind is to place it in the wrong. The
sentences I cited provide amply for this. But the mind that savours
them draws from them the conviction that it is on the right track;
by itself, it is incapable of convicting itself of quibbling; it
has nothing to fear anyway since it bids fair to encompass everything.
2. The mind which plunges into surrealism relives with exaltation
the best part of its childhood. For such a mind, it is a little
like the conviction with which a person drowning reviews, in less
than a moment, all the insuperable events of his life. You will say
that is not very encouraging. But I have no intention of encouraging
those who tell me so. From childhood memories and a few others
emerges a feeling of being unpreoccupied and subsequently of being
delinquent, which I regard as the most fecund that exists. It is
childhood perhaps which comes closest to 'real life'; childhood
beyond which Man has, apart from his passport, only a few complimentary
tickets at his disposal; childhood where everything nevertheless
conspires to bring about his possession of himself, efficiently and
without risk. Thanks to surrealism, it seems those opportunities
return. It is as if one were still running towards one's salvation,
or perdition. One revisits, in the shadows, a precious terror. Thank
God, it's only Purgatory. We traverse, with a shudder, what the
occultists call dangerous territory. I arouse the monsters lurking
in my wake; they are not as yet ill-intentioned towards me, and I
am not lost, since I fear them. Here are 'the elephants with the
heads of women and the lions flying' that used to make Soupault and
I tremble to encounter, here is 'the soluble fish' that still
frightens me a good deal. SOLUBLE FISH, am I not the soluble fish,
I was born under the sign of the Fish, and man is soluble in his
thought! The fauna and flora of surrealism go un-avowed.
3. I do not believe in the imminent establishment of a surrealist
model. The common characteristics of all the texts of the genre,
among them those I have just cited, and many others that might yield
us a logical analysis and a strict grammatical analysis, do not
preclude the specific evolution of surrealist prose in time. Following
on from a number of essays I have offered in this vein over the
past five years and which I am indulgent enough as to consider
extremely disordered for the most part, the little stories which
comprise the balance of this volume furnish me with glaring proof.
I do not judge them, because of that, any more worthy or worthless,
in demonstrating for the reader the benefits that the surrealist
contribution is liable to effect in his consciousness.
Surrealist methods moreover, demand to be elaborated. Everything
is suitable for obtaining the immediacy desired from certain
associations. The glued paper employed by Picasso and Braque has
the same value as the introduction of a commonplace into a literary
work of the purest style. It is even permitted to employ the title
POEM for what we obtain from as gratuitous a collection as possible
(observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and fragments of
headlines snipped from newspapers:
POEM
A burst of laughter
Of sapphire in the island of Ceylon
The most beautiful straws
HAVE A FADED COLOUR
BENEATH THE BOLTS
On an isolated farm
FROM DAY TO DAY
worsens
the pleasant
A driveable track
leads you to the edge of the unknown
the café
preaches for its saint
THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY
MADAME
a pair
of silk stockings
is not
A leap in the void
A STAG
Love above all i
Everything could be arranged so well
PARIS IS A LARGE VILLAGE
Watch out for
The fire that covers
THE PRAYER
Of fine weather
Know that the ultra-violet rays
have finished their task
Short and sweet
THE FIRST BLANK NEWSPAPER
OF CHANCE
Red will be
The wandering singer
WHERE IS HE?
in the memory
in his house
AT THE SUITOR'S BALL
I do as I dance
What one did, what one is going to do
And one could offer many more examples. Theatre, philosophy, science,
criticism would all find themselves there. I hasten to add that the
surrealist techniques of the future do not concern me.
Far more serious it seems to me (Whatever reservations I may be
permitted to harbour concerning responsibility in general and the
medicolegal considerations which determine an individual's degree
of responsibility – complete responsibility, irresponsibility,
limited responsibility – however hard it is for me to accept the
principle of any kind of responsibility, I would like to know how
the first punishable offences, the surrealist character of which
will be clearly apparent, will be judged. Will the accused by
acquitted, or will he merely be given the benefit of the doubt
because of extenuating circumstances? It is a pity that violation
of the laws governing the Press is today barely acted against, for
if that were not the case, we would soon see a trial of this kind:
the accused has published a book which has outraged public decency.
Several of his 'highly respected and honourable' fellow citizens
have lodged a complaint against him, and he is also charged with
libel and slander. There are also many other charges against him,
such as insulting and defaming the army, inciting to murder, rape,
etc. The accused, moreover, hastens to agree with his accusers in
'stigmatizing' most of the ideas expressed. His sole defence lies
in claiming that he does not view himself as the author of the book,
the said book being no more nor less than a surrealist concoction
which precludes any question of merit or lack of it on the part of
the person who signs it; further, that he has merely transcribed
the document without offering any opinion on it, and that the text
under accusation is at least as foreign to him as to the presiding
judge. What is true for the publication of a book will also hold
true for a whole host of other acts, as soon as surrealist methods
begin to enjoy widespread favour. When that occurs, a new morality
must be substituted for that prevailing, which is the source of all
our trials and tribulations.) far more serious, and I have intimated
it often enough, are the applications of surrealism to action.
Certainly, I do not believe in the prophetic power of the surrealist
word. 'It is oracular what I say' (Rimbaud: Une Saison en Enfer:
Mauvais Sang): yes, just as you wish, but what is the nature of
this oracle? (And yet, AND YET….We absolutely ought to get to the
bottom of this. Today, June 8th, 1924, at one o'clock, the voice
whispered to me: 'Béthune, Béthune.' What did that mean? I have
never been to Béthune, and have only the foggiest notion where it
is located on the map of France. Béthune evokes nothing for me, not
even a scene from The Three Musketeers. I ought to have left for
Béthune, where there was someone awaiting me perhaps; that would
have been simply too obvious. Someone told me they once read in a
book by Chesterton of a detective who, in order to find someone he
is searching for in a certain city, merely scoured the houses, from
roof to cellar, whose exteriors seemed abnormal to him in some way,
if only in some slight detail. That method is as good as any other.
Similarly, in 1919, Soupault entered any number of impossible
buildings to ask the concierge whether Philippe Soupault lived
there. He would not have been surprised, I suspect, by an affirmative.
He would have gone and knocked on his door.) The piety of Man does
not fool me. The surrealist voice that shook Cumae, Dodona and
Delphi was nothing more than the voice which dictates to me my less
irate speeches. My time ought not to be its time, why should it
help me to resolve the childish problem of my destiny? I pretend,
unfortunately, to act in a world where, in order to take account
of its suggestions, I would be obliged to resort to two sorts of
interpreter, one to translate its utterances for me, the other,
impossible to find, to impress on others whatever understanding I
had of those utterances. This world in which I endure what I endure
(do not go and look), this modern world, well, what the devil do
you want me to do with it? Perhaps the surrealist voice will fall
silent, I no longer try to keep track of the vanished. I will not
pursue, however briefly, the marvellously detailed account of my
years and days. I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year
to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he
was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent
to all the world's ballets. What I have done, or not done, I leave
to you.
And, since then, I have exhibited a passion for treating scientific
reverie with indulgence, so unseemly in the final analysis in every
respect. Radio? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't
see why not. Cinema? Bravo, for darkened rooms. War? Gave us a
good laugh. The telephone? Hello, yes. Youth? Charming white hairs.
Try to make me say thank you: 'Thank you.' Thank you… If the populace
hold in high esteem what properly speaking may be termed laboratory
experiments, it is because they have led to the development of some
machine, the discovery of some serum, in which the populace see
themselves directly involved. They are certain that all this is
designed to improve their lot. I don't know what humanitarian aims
are involved in the scientific ideal, but it does not seem to me
that it constitutes any great kindness. I speak, you understand,
of true scientists and not those of all kinds who popularise it by
means of patents. I believe, in this domain as in any other, in the
pure surrealist joy of the man who warned of the repeated failure
of others, refuses to confess himself beaten, sets off from wherever
he chooses, by any other road than a rational one, and arrives where
he can. Such and such an image, with which he judges it opportune
to mark his progress, and which perhaps may bring him public
recognition, I must confess, is in itself a matter of indifference
to me. No more does the material which he is obliged to encumber
himself with: his glass tubes, or my metallic feathers…As to his
method, I credit it with as much worth as my own. I have seen the
discoverer of the cutaneous plantar reflex at work; he manipulated
his subjects without respite, it was much more than an 'examination'
he undertook, it was obvious that he followed no set plan. Here and
there, he formulated a remark, distantly, without setting down his
needle to do so; and while his hammer tapped away continuously. He
left to others the futile task of treating the sick. He was devoted
to his sacred fever.
Surrealism, such as I envisage it, declares our absolute nonconformity
clearly enough that there can be no question of bringing it before
the court, at the trial of the real world, as a witness for the
defence. It would, on the contrary, only serve to justify the utter
state of absentmindedness that we hope truly to achieve here below.
Kant's distraction with respect to woman, Pasteur's distraction
'with grapes', Curie's distraction regarding vehicles, are in this
respect profoundly symptomatic. This world is only relatively-speaking
in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only episodes,
till now the most notable, in a war of independence in which I have
the glory of participating. Surrealism is the 'invisible ray' which
will one day allow us to gain the upper hand over our adversaries.
'You no longer quiver, carcase.' This summer the roses are blue;
the wood is of glass. The earth draped in its verdure has as much
effect on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are
imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
