Yvan Goll’s Surrealism

 

Next month I mean to post an analysis of Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

 

     While Surrealism is generally identified with André Breton and defined by his manifestos, he was the inventor neither of the movement nor of many of its ideas.  The term had been used in May 1917 by Apollinaire in his program notes for Cocteau’s Parade (a legendary production that featured the work of Massine, Picasso, and Satie) and again a month later for Apollinaire’s own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias.  In October of the same year, only weeks before Breton published his first manifesto, Yvan Goll included an unsigned manifesto he had written as the first article in  his journal Surréalisme.  The inaugural issue which included contributions from Apollinaire, Reverdy, Crevel, Jean Painlevé, and Robert Delaunay among others, turned out to be the only one.  The vagaries of literary fashion have resulted in Breton’s manifestos being reprinted and cited countless times, while Goll’s is quite difficult to find.  After failing to find any English translation, I made my own.

     Both Breton and Goll had a band of partisans and the meaning of the term Surrealism was debated for a time in journals and cafés, but this dispute arose as much from friendships and early associations as from disagreements about theory.  (In fact, the Surrealist group always included artists with a wide variety of styles.)  Goll, born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine, went on to write Expressionist plays and screenplays and to translate Joyce’s Ulysses.  His books of poetry were illustrated by such artists as by  Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger (Der Neue Orpheus) and Pablo Picasso (Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre).

     Goll’s version of Surrealism has in common with Breton’s the preference for unlikely metaphor, the sort of juxtaposition identified with Lautréamont’s formula from Les Chants de Maldoror: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  In Goll’s words “The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible.”  This emphasis on the vividly presented image constitutes the modernity of the technique he prescribes, emphasized by his requirement that poetry should be “direct” and “intense” and avoid “abstract or second-hand notions” such as “logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play” (while apparently allowing his own governing theory).

     Goll takes the opposite of Breton’s position from the start, however, when he acknowledges “reality” as “the basis for all great art.”  Indeed, all art might equally be described as Goll defines surrealism, as the “transposing of reality into a higher plan,” in other words, the phenomenal world filtered through the artist’s consciousness.  Art, he maintains, is put together out of the “raw material” of experience like the wallpaper included in a Cubist collage or the use of overheard talk mentioned by Max Jacob, or, indeed, the sources of any writer who makes something new based on experience.

     Goll dismisses popular entertainment, for him an oddly broad term covering not only both ballet and the music hall, but “all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art” as well.  He rejects Dada as well which for him consists of simply seeking to épater les bourgeois. 

     Most pointedly he condemns Breton’s Surrealism without naming his rival, saying that it, too, aims only at scandal and sensation and, with its fascination with dreams, erroneously makes of Freud “a new Muse.”  Goll insists as an axiom that “our physical organism” “instructs us that reality is always right” and “that life is truer than thought.”

   The fact is that his assertion that modern art centers on the image has proven substantially true in terms of the history of poetry.  From the Imagists through the Objectivists and later the practitioners of what some call the “deep image” and some “leaping images” this focus remained central for much of the twentieth century.  

     Goll’s place in the origin of Surrealism has been largely obscured by Breton’s success in assuming the role of leader of the Surrealist movement, with the authority to define the meaning of the term.  Yet both as a poet and as a critic Goll merits the attention of the historian of modern art and in particular of the avant-garde.  Evaluation of the following manifesto is perhaps the initial step in reassessing his significance in the art of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

 

Yvan Goll’s Surrealist Manifesto

 

     Reality is the basis of all great art.  Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads.

     Everything that the artist creates has an origin in nature. The Cubists, when they were new, understood that, as humble as the purest primitives, they lowered themselves radically into the simplest object, into what is valueless, and went so far as to stick a piece of wallpaper onto a painting, in all its reality.

     This transposing of reality into a higher (artistic) plan constitutes surrealism.

     Surrealism is a concept arising from Guillaume Apollinaire.  Looking at his poetic body of work, we find the same elements as in the earliest cubists: the words of everyday life possess for him a “strange magic” and it is with these, the raw material of writing, that he worked.  Max Jacob tells how one day he simply noted down words and phrases he overheard on the street and made of them a poem.

        With this raw material alone, he formed poetic images.  Today the image is the criterion for good poetry.  The rapidity of association between the first and second impression constitutes the quality of the image. 

    The first poet observed, “The sky is blue.”  Somewhat later, another declared, “Your eyes are blue like the sky.”  A good while later another ventured to say, “You have the sky in your eyes.”   A modern will cry out, “Your heavenly eyes!”  The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible. 

     Thus the image has become the most appreciated element in modern poetry.  Before the beginning of the twentieth century it was the ear that determined the quality of poetry: rhythm, sonority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme, all are for the ear.  In the last twenty years, the eye has had its revenge.  It is the century of movies.  We communicate better with visual signs.  And it is speed that makes quality today.

     Art is an emanation of human life and the human organism.  Surrealism, the expression of our own age, takes into account takes into account the symptoms that characterize our time: it is direct, intense, and it pushes back against those arts that rest on abstract or second-hand notions: logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play.

     Surrealism would not be satisfied to be the mode of expression of a coterie or a country: it will be international; it will absorb all the “isms” that share Europe and will gather up the vital components of each.

     Surrealism is a vast movement in our time.  It signifies health and will with ease hold off the tendencies to decomposition and morbidity that come up wherever something is being built.

     The art of entertainment, of the ballet and the music hall, all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art will soon cease to amuse a generation that, after the war, needed only to forget.

      And the counterfeit of Surrealism which some ex-Dadas dreamed up to continue to shock the bourgeoisie, will soon be out of circulation.

     They affirm “the omnipotence of the dream” and make of Freud a new Muse.  That Dr. Freud makes use of dreams to cure highly terrestrial problems is all very well.  But to apply his doctrines to the world of poetry, is that not to confound art and psychiatry?

    Their concept of a “psychic mechanism based on the dream and the free play of thought” can never be strong enough to conquer our physical organism, which instructs us that reality is always right, and that life is truer than thought.

       Our surrealism recovers nature, the primal emotions of man, and proceeds, with entirely new artistic material, toward creation, toward an act of will.