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.
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