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.
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