Breton's Surrealism

  

 For convenience, my quotations from Breton use the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, readily available at https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf.   References in parentheses are to this text; those in brackets are endnotes.

 

       Surrealism is one of the chief artistic movements of the twentieth century.  Its practices are now not only familiar in countless works of art, but in advertisements and popular culture as well.  Song lyrics (and band names) that would have seemed radically revolutionary in the 1920s had, by the 1960s, become commonplace on popular radio stations.  In spite of earlier precedents for writing that seems Surrealist as well as prior uses of the term by Apollinaire and Yvan Goll, the Surrealists, as an organized cultural formation, are generally traced to André Breton’s 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto.”  For decades Breton defined the movement, notoriously exerting a tyrannical authority over the group, admitting new acolytes and expelling the insubordinate, while maintaining tight control of the brand during his entire life.

     Intended as a revolutionary call to action, Breton’s manifesto might well be read as a look backwards, a belated document of Romanticism.  It is quite natural that he makes an extended example of a passage from the 1796 novel The Monk.  The Surrealist valorization of irrationality and the marvelous would have been familiar to Lewis’s readers over a hundred years earlier.  For Breton “in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.” (9)

     While Breton’s Surrealist program is wandering and self-indulgent, its general drift is unmistakable.  He seeks to question the value of received ideas and everyday experience, rejecting the limitation of imagination by “the laws of an arbitrary utility”  which confine most peoples’ imagination to “a state of slavery.” (4)  “The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,” he insists, since “the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism . . . clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” (6)  In reaction against Realism, he quotes a passage from Crime and Punishment, the “purely informative style” of which he declares to be an “unworthy” “school-boy description.” (8)

     In place of a straightforward imitation of ordinary (or dramatic) lived experience, Breton offers new perspectives available in such sources as dreams, madness, chance operations, and the minds of children.  The first of these suggestions flies in the face of the cliché that nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams, a notion seconded by most readers of Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac.  In literature all readers are aware that anything presented as a dream, a vision, a fantasy, or hallucination is likely to be of critical importance in  understanding the narrative in which it is embedded, but these are carefully composed elements of a work of art, not simple transcriptions of real dreams.   Deluded perhaps by such precedents, Breton and others (Gide even) published what purported to be their dreams, but these have attracted little attention, particularly when compared to the concept on which their presentation to the public is founded.  The Surrealist fetishization of dreams is  a modern twist on the ancient idea that at night the gods speak to the sleeper, only in its twentieth century iteration the source of wisdom is not the divine but rather the unconscious.

     In fact the most dreams can do is to suggest possibilities that would not otherwise occur to the writer and to widen the scope of what is permissible in narrative.  The artist must, however, process the raw material presented by this richer inventory of possibilities, selecting those which taste admits whether the decisions be conscious or intuitive.  Fruits of this new freedom are apparent in the devices of magic realism and in metafiction.  Breton had rejected the therapeutic value of dreams claimed by Freudian analysis, but maintained their aesthetic value, a claim which has proven largely fruitless in practice.  His story about Saint-Pol-Roux posting a sign outside his bedchamber declaring “the poet is working” (14) is delightful, but implies nothing about the poet’s actual writing routine.  Far from recognizing the craftsmanship and care that produces worthwhile art, Breton provocatively (and simplistically) claims that the waking state is “a phenomenon of interference” and calls for “sleeping logicians” and “sleeping philosophers.” (12)

     According to Breton what limits the artist, in his terms what keeps “the flag of imagination furled,” is an unjustified “fear of madness.” (6)  Since Breton’s manifesto, the art world has cultivated an appreciation for “outsider art,” what Dubuffet called art brut, many of the most celebrated works of which were made by people diagnosed with major mental illness.  The reader may wonder whether Breton learned anything from contact with people suffering from major mental illness.  To him mad people “derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,” indeed “they enjoy their madness,” (5) generalizations which would scarcely be consistent with what psychiatric workers and the families of the afflicted observe.  While the art of people like Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger is indeed impressive and beautiful, that is simply because they are outstanding artists, not because of their illness.   On the other hand, Breton notes with satisfaction that Robert Desnos’ drawings were taken to be the work of an insane person, though the artist was not, in fact, mad. (23) 

     Breton names “psychic automatism” as the very heart of Surrealism (26), and “automatism” in English or French can only mean production without conscious control.   The most important element of his free-writing with Soupault is that they make no revisions. (24)  He emphasizes “the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (26)  Surrealism thus, by only a slight elaboration, became associated with altogether chance operations, the sort called “aleatory” by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955.  The notion that a discerning judgment is an obstacle can be entertained only by those who have never devoted prolonged attention to works produced without conscious craftsmanship.. 

     Finally, Breton fancies that wisdom resides in the insights of small children, another Romantic notion straight from Wordsworth.  According to him to find inspiration, one need only “tum back toward his childhood.” (3)  Yet this enlightened early stage is undone by education.  “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales.” (15)  Some writers, such as Chatterton and Rimbaud, are the more celebrated for writing done in their teens, and parents are fond of quoting their clever sayings of their offspring, but no art whatever by young children is preserved and enjoyed. 

     The barrenness of all these resources – dreams, insanity, suspension of judgement, and the mind of early childhood --  is transformed to luxuriant fruitfulness, however, when Breton’s ideas are read as metaphorical gestures, as figures of speech.  In this rhetorical way, he is recommending writing as weighted with significance as dreams, as daring and innovative as the moves of a schizophrenic’s mind, as unpredictable as randomness, and as fresh and attractive as a child’s imagination.  Reading the manifesto in this way produces ideas far less provocative and dramatic but far more defensible.

     While Breton’s condemnation  of rational cognitive processes pervades the manifesto throughout, providing a polemical froth that he never cares to justify, the real innovation of Surrealism, the acceptance of underdetermined metaphors had more lasting influence.   Many critics and readers are, like Breton, susceptible to “the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” (26)  In support he offers the testimony of Apollinaire (who recommended figures of speech with an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity” which “upon closer scrutiny” which may “give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” (24) 

     Even more explicit is the prescription he quotes from Reverdy.

 

     It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

     The more the relationship between the two Juxtaposed realities is distant and true) the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality. (20)

 

While clearly going too far in advocating such “modern” images by claiming that there is a direct correspondence between “distance” and value, this formulation states the principle unmistakably.

     Breton proceeds then to provide an example of his own, saying that the apparently meaningless phrase "There is a man cut in two by the window," occurred to him quite clearly but without any cause in prior thought or experience, straight from the unconscious he would have his readers believe. (21)   This verbal “apparition” then stimulates “a whole series of phrases” coming into his consciousness without reflection or intention.  The reader has nothing but Breton’s enthusiasm to indicate that the image has any meaning or that this concatenation of words has the slightest value.

     Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” is less a statement of aesthetic theory or a handbook for practice than a pose, a work of art on its own, regardless of its “truth” or “usefulness.”  As a statement of what might by now perhaps be labeled the “classic avant-garde,” it is bracing in its cheekiness and provocative in its iconoclasm.  In visual art and in literature, Surrealism’s primary contribution was in fact the admittance of novel and “readerly” metaphors, to an extent far beyond what the Symbolists had dared.  Today art-lovers have become accustomed to the use of such figures of speech, finding them far less puzzling than they had seemed a few generations ago.  When “exquisite corpses” are a recommended elementary school exercise and dream imagery fills music videos the time has perhaps come to define what was new and what is lasting about Breton’s Surrealism.

Three Notes on Crane’s “The Monster”

 

1.  Whilomville and Port Jervis

     Stephen Crane wrote fourteen stories set in Whilomville, a town based on Port Jervis, New York, where the author had lived for five years of his childhood and where he later was a frequent visitor.  His father had been minister of the Methodist Church there and his brother William Howe Crane was later a leading lawyer and judge who held local political office.  I happen to live only a short distance from Port Jervis where the church and William Crane’s home are yet standing.  Like Stephen Crane I have rambled in the woods of Sullivan County and at Twin Lakes, a short distance across the state line in Pennsylvania. 

     “The Monster” was published in The Monster and other stories in 1899, while the other Whilomville Stories appeared as a collection in 1900.  “The Monster” differs radically in theme and style from the volume that followed.  The other Whilomville stories are, for the most part, nostalgic pictures of a semi-rural childhood reminiscent of Tom Sawyer very likely written with income rather than art in the author’s mind.  “The Monster” is altogether different.  Much longer and less likely to appeal to popular taste, it has more in common with “The Blue Hotel” in its engagement with violence and social prejudice, its harsh incidents, and bleak conclusion. 

     Port Jervis has not always been comfortable with its association with Crane.  When he was writing Crane’s willfully bohemian lifestyle offended many.  His sympathetic story of Maggie: a Girl of the Streets was bad enough, but his involvement with social outcasts was not limited to fiction.  He generated scandal by defending in court a prostitute named Dora Clark with whom he was acquainted.  Later he began living with Cora Taylor who had operated a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida called the Hotel de Dream.

     Small towns are, yet today, conventionally regarded as secure and conventional havens where people look out for each other in a bucolic setting.  In the early parts of “The Monster” Crane plays against this expectation with mild satire tinged with affection.  The churches of Whilomville compete over which can produce “the greatest din” with their bells and the various fire companies each boast of enthusiastic partisans. [1]  The young men “affected” dislike for the corny town band, but they attended its concerts  because the young women were sure to be there (though they seem to have been more interested in observing each other than interacting with the boys).  The youth make cynical remarks such as saying that the band sounds like the reservoir water pump because such wit was “fashionable.”  The band’s leader seeks to imitate “the mannerisms of the great musicians.”  For their part, the women, both young and old, prefer gossiping to music.

     The reader might regard such faults as more endearing than blameworthy, but, with the catastrophe that befalls Henry Johnson, Crane’s criticism of the townspeople turns fierce.  Eventually cruel sentiment against the “monster” leads to an effective boycott of Dr. Trescott‘s practice.  Scholars have suggested several disfigured people in Port Jervis whose experience may have served as Crane’s model, but they have recalled as well that the town was the site of one of the few lynchings of African-Americans in New York, that of Robert Lewis in 1892. [2]  To the extent that Crane’s story reminded people of Lewis’s death, it would have been unwelcome to many of the townspeople.

     Crane’s reputation for an irregular life combined with his condemnation of Whilomville’s provincial mindset and what was taken by some as a reference to a dark incident in town history led to animosity against him from the time of his publications until recently. 

     Port Jervis’ suspicions about Crane endured for decades.  A monument to the Civil War dead had been  erected in 1886 in a small park in the center of town called Orange Square.  Though no evidence exists, Crane is said to have gathered material for The Red Badge of Courage in conversations with veterans on park benches there.  Called Orange Square as late as 1933 the name was at some point changed to Stephen Crane Memorial Park.  By 1983 this name had come to irritate some local citizens, including the commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who was under the impression that the famous novel, often assigned to high school students, celebrated a cowardly deserter and that “Stephen Crane did a disservice to the many honorable veterans when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage.” [3]  The park was renamed Veterans Memorial Park. 

 

 

2.  Men and Women in Whilomville

     Racism, clearly an issue in “The Monster,” has attracted considerable commentary, but the story also encodes information about the relations of the sexes in Whilomsville.  The town is portrayed as no less patriarchal than  most societies.  “’My father says’” the reader is told, “was a very formidable phrase.”  Mrs. Page wishes to hold a birthday party for her daughter, but cannot proceed until her husband has casually consented: “Oh, let her have it.”  Later, the decisive actions – putting Johnson in jail, cautioning Trescott about the town’s animosity – are performed by men.

     Yet the women’s attitude is the basis for the town’s heartless rejection of the unfortunate Johnson.  Mrs. Page is a principal organizer of opposition to Dr. Trescott after her daughter’s party is disturbed by the “monster’s” approach.  The other women all but unanimously  greet the problem as a welcome occasion for malicious talk.  Before they can discuss the issue Carrie Dungen felt choked by “an overplus of information”; she had “a great deal of grist.”  When the ladies do get together her eyes are “shining with delight” at the opportunity, confident in the knowledge that “everyone says” what she thinks.  In the Black community, Johnson’s placement at the Williams home is disturbed by the wife’s inability to receive callers, and Johnson’s onetime fiancée Bella Farragut rejects the injured man with horror.  Finally, in the sad conclusion, Mrs. Trescott is dismayed that no one will attend her teas due to her husband’s attempts to help the injured man.

     Not quite all the women, however, agree.  Martha Goodwin is a notable exception, the town’s nonconformist.  Unmarried due to her intended having died of smallpox, she is thrown for support on her married sister who exploits her labor.  Yet this marginalized figure is “a woman of great mind” who has developed “adamantine opinions” on world affairs and many public questions.  Due to her outsider status the other ladies “all were required to disbelieve any  theory for which Martha fought.”  The sole woman not bound by local conventions, she is the only one to express wholehearted support for Dr. Trescott. 

     The dialectic of gender relations is thus sketched in some complexity.  While the women of the town are in the end subject to patriarchal rule, they are nonetheless able to exert considerable influence on social decisions.  The persecution of the doctor and Henry Johnson is in fact led by the women who respond with an all-but-unanimous voice in support of Carrie Dungen.  The reader must suppose even the virtuous Dr. Trescott will be moved by the tears of his uncomplaining wife in the concluding scene.  The eccentric Martha Goodwin stands alone, but her example suggests a wild card, the possibility of  independent thinking, whether foolish or wise, free of social coercion, that allows for new ideas and for change.

 

 

3.  Modernity and Whilomville

     The philosophical preference for a rural setting is a classical trope since antiquity but with Romanticism, it became a commonplace.  Not only in Wordsworth and Burns but earlier in Cowper and Gray, poets assume the corruption of the city and oppose it to the unspoiled beauty of areas that remained wild or were devoted to farming.  Such regions were associated with communities in which people’s relations with each other were characterized by mutual support and straightforward honesty. 

     Though stories like Maggie proved that Crane was well aware of the horrors on the underside of urban life, in “The Monster” he is questioning the ideal of innocence associated with small town America as Mark Twain had done in the devastating portraits of small towns in Huckleberry Finn and as, a few decades later, Sherwood Anderson would do in Winesburg Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology. 

     Crane accents the drama of his scene by depicting Whilomville in the process of modernization.  The disastrous fire that precipitates the crisis is foreshadowed in the recent renovations of the streetcars [4] and electric street lamps.  The “shimmering blue of the electric arc lamps” and the “shrill” calls of the trams conveying “both warnings and simple noise” mark modernization and, perhaps, a loss of innocence and a vague foreboding.  If small town America had ever been an Eden, its prelapsarian innocence was lost.  The very name Crane invented suggests that the town’s time has passed. and the action of the story occurs in a belated space, already looking back to mythic happy days gone by while a once benign provincial conformity turns to heartless cruelty.

 

  

1.  I was surprised when I moved to Goshen, New York, twenty-four miles from Port Jervis to find that this village of less than five thousand inhabitants had no less than four different fire companies, all made up of volunteers, each of which puts on a proud display at area parades.

2.  The so-called “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick was at the time a sort of celebrity and may have also played a role in Crane’s inspiration.  Though Lewis is sometimes named as the only Black lynching victim in New York history, Robert Mulliner had been hanged by a mob in Newburgh in 1863.  Other incidents of New York mob violence, including the cases of Paulo Boleta, Charles Kelsey, and George Smith were against white people.

3.  Charles Larocca, “Stephen Crane’s Inspiration,” American Heritage 42:3 (May/June 1991).  

4.  Though unmentioned in the story, the yards for intercity rail lines provided the basis of Port Jervis’ economy for many years.  The tram lines of The Port Jervis Electric Street Railway Co. had been in operation for only a year when “The Monster” was published.

Is Martin Chuzzlewit a “Great Bad Book”?

 

     Martin Chuzzlewit can look a bit imposing to a twenty-first century reader with nearly a thousand pages, but it is, after all, a Dickens novel with a solid plot, clear-cut morality, and characters with funny names like Mrs. Gamp (“Sairey”) and Chevy Slyme.  American readers have long been particularly interested in the episodes of the younger Martin’s experiences in the United States, which generated considerable controversy upon publication.  Though Dickens himself had said thought the book “in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories,” [1] not all readers since have agreed. 

     In fact many critics have complained about the looseness of the narrative structure and the chapters concerning America have attracted particular criticism.  Even many of those who appreciated the book consider it to lack sufficient formal organization.  George Gissing, who thought Chuzzlewit “in some respects, the greatest of [Dickens’] novels” nonetheless felt himself “lost” in its plot.  “Repeated readings avail not to fix in one’s mind as a sequence of events; we know the persons, we remember many a scene, but beyond that all is a vague reminiscence.”  Gissing wondered at the great author’s “inability” to build a stronger plot line and wished he had “but trusted to some lucid story, however slight.” [2]  To Leslie Fiedler it was “a great bad book” with an “involved and cumbersome” story-line. [3]  According to Robert Polhemus Chuzzlewit is a “hodge-podge,” lacking “wholeness and order.”  He quotes Barbara Hardy with approval when she finds in the book a “failure” with “disintegrated form.” [4]

     Many have found the American chapters an adventitious addition.  Not only did they offend American sensibilities; they seemed out of place on formal grounds to such an extent that at least two British reviewers at the time of the book’s publication called the American episodes an “excrescence.”  To a modern critic they were neither “preconceived nor even well conceived,” but rather seemed “to be a spontaneous and indiscriminate eruption of hatred against everything American that had been seething in him for some time.” [5]

     Two motives seem to have motivated what seems to some an artistic faux pas.  Dickens had just completed his first visit to the United States which he had undertaken in large part with the goal of gaining legal copyright protection for his writing.  Considering himself, very likely correctly, to be the biggest financial victim  of pirated editions, he had hoped to convince the American Congress to make a new copyright law to protect writers.  Having failed to bring about that change, he felt an animated anger against the young country which he expressed first in an open letter of protest, then in his American Notes in which the very faults dramatically highlighted in Martin Chuzzlewit are detailed: slavery, violence, extreme individualism, an exclusive focus on money, and, as the physical corollary of these distasteful traits, personal slovenliness and foul habits, foremost among them the spitting of tobacco. 

     Apart from his annoyance at failing in his legislative objective and his desire to set down his impressions of the rather raw new country, Dickens may have thought he could increase the sagging sales of the serial publication with scenes in the New World.  His sales were scarcely half (or less) what they had been for Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, and below of third of the sales for Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans had been very popular twelve years earlier, but, if he and his publisher had thought they could boost sales with this turn of the plot, they were mistaken.  Chapman & Sons was sufficiently displeased that they required him to repay money they had given him as an advance to be certain that their costs at least were covered. 

     Further, Martin Chuzzlewit seemed to many readers not only to lack the effervescent humor of some of his earlier work  but even, according to Polhemus, any sense of a “relatively optimistic vision.”  His comedy is hamstrung by his uncertainty about the “possibilities of human communion and the goodness of life.” [6]  The fact is that, apart from the feckless Tom Pinch, the eccentric Mark Tapley, the highly compromised Mr. Chuffey, and the incidental Mr. Bevan, there are few really admirable characters, and none with the warm-heartedness of his most beloved characters like Micawber or Joe Gargery.  The novel focuses on petty self-interest and Pecksniff is hardly the only character to exemplify the theme.  Ruth and John Westlock are decent people, though not extraordinary, and old Martin turns out (rather incredibly) to be well-meaning in the end.  Even the redoubtable Mrs. Gamp, who plays a considerable role in the book’s comedy, is an ambiguous figure, a heavy drinker who looks after her main chance. 

     The thinness of any sense of attractive human potential is what makes the book wearing for some readers who feel as though they are treading water in a sort of endless purgatory.  The best way to read the book is probably as it was written, in instalments with little concern for over-arching structure or a reassuring affirmation of our species.  If Martin Chuzzlewit lacks the dazzling image clusters of Bleak House and the satisfying overall form of David Copperfield, it has its own rewards.  Here his amusing eccentrics such as Mark Tapley, who seeks suffering to ennoble his jollity, and Mrs. Gamp, who never lacks a few pungent words of commentary, operate in a world defined by a fierce, almost Swiftian, denunciation of human character, allowing Dickens to avoid the mawkishness of which he was capable, but at the sacrifice of a milder warmth.  The reader would be well advised to drift with the plot, unconcerned about literary theory or rules of good practice.  Dickens was an entertainer and, even on an off night, he has first-rate material to offer.  Even if Martin Chuzzlewit is not a "great bad book," it is assuredly a "good bad book."

 

 

1.  Letter to John Forster of Nov 2, 1843.  Dickens went on to add “I feel my power now more than I ever did . . . I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had.” 

2.  Gissing, George, Charles Dickens, a critical study, 50-51.

3.  Fiedler likes to position himself as a contrarian.  In A Centre of excellence : essays presented to Seymour Betsky (ed. Robert Druce), Fiedler calls the plot “involved and cumbersome” and complains of the novel’s “unremitting bitter tone.”  He finds it “unpleasant,” “disgusting,” “mean,” and “without real tenderness or love.”

4.  Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, 90. 

5.  The word appeared in both the Athenaeum and the North British Review.  See a fuller account in Jerome Meckier’s “Dickens and the Newspaper Conspiracy of 1842,” Dickens Quarterly, V:1 (March 988) and Sidney P. Moss, “The American Episode of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’: The Culmination of Dickens' Quarrel with the American Press,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1983), pp. 223-243.

6.  Polhemus 90