and moral progress of any kind. I have a horror of it, because it is the product of mediocrity, hatred and dreary self-satisfaction.”[48] For genuine creative work one requires freedom, and it is essential to throw off the weight of everything that oppresses man in real life, everything upon which the structure of realism is founded. “We are still living under the reign of logic… But logical processes, in our time, can now only be applied to the resolultion of problems of secondary importance. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion only allows one to consider the facts that narrowly pertain to our experience. What we have lost, on the other hand, are logical aims. Needless to say, even experience has got to the stage of assigning itself limits. It turns around in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to get it to come out. It, too, rests on immediate utility, and it is watched over by common sense. Under the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have reached the point of banning from the mind everything which can be criticised, rightly or wrongly, as superstitious or chimerical; of forbidding any method of seeking after truth that does not conform to the standard approach.”[49] What has to take the place of rationalism, and of the source of inspiration provided by the realities of everyday life, is the imagination: “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting its rights. If the depths of our mind contain strange forces that are capable of adding to those at the surface, or of winning the fight against them, there is every interest in capturing them, in capturing them first, to tame them afterwards…”
Valentine Hugo, Toad from Maldoror, 1936.
Gouache and pencil on paper, 47 × 30.5 cm.
The Neshui Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections.
Jindrich Styrsky, Book-Object, 1937.
Private Collection.
The Surrealist poet had at one time embarked on a medical career in psychiatry, and so, when he went in search of the sources of the imagination, he turned to the experience of Freud, who was the first man to appreciate the vast place in the life of man occupied by dreams. “Man, when he is no longer asleep, is above all the toy of his memory, and in his normal state the latter gratifies itself by feebly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, depriving the dream of any real importance, and causing what he thought was the only determining factor at the time he left it a few hours earlier to disappear: whatever firm hope he cherished, or fear he felt. Afterwards he has the illusion of carrying on with something that is worthwhile.”[50] The objective of Surrealism is to make use of the dream, which will open the way to the Great Mystery of Life in the cause of his own art – which for Breton basically meant literature. “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, so contradictory in appearance, that are the dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a “surreality”, if one can put it that way. This is what I am striving to attain…”[51]
The imagination of André Breton erected a castle, at once fantastic and real, inhabited by both the former Dadaists and the Surrealists: “This castle belongs to me, I see it in a rustic site, not far from Paris… Some of my friends have come to live there: Louis Aragon is just leaving; …Philippe Soupault gets up when the stars come out, and Paul Éluard, our great Paul Éluard, is not yet back. Here are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac, who are in a park deciphering an old edict on the duel; Georges Auric, Jean Paulan; Max Morise, who rows so well, and Benjamin Peret, engaged in his funny equations; and Joseph Delteil; and Jean Carrive; and Georges Limbourg…; and Marcel Noll; here comes T. Fraenkel who is signalling to us with his captive balloon, Georges Malkine, Antonin Artaud, Francis Gérard, Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boiffard, and then Jacques Baron and his brother, hale and hearty, and so many others as well, and some ravishing women… Francis Picabia comes to see us, and last week, in the hall of mirrors, a gentleman named Marcel Duchamp, who had not previously been introduced, came to call. Picasso hunts in the grounds.”
After sketching a portrait of the Surrealist circle, Breton eventually gives his definition of what Surrealism is:
Surrealism, n. A purely psychological form of automatic reflex by which one sets out to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other fashion, the operation of thought. Dictation from thought, in the absence of any exercise or control on the part of reason, outside every aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Surrealism rests on a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations that, until it appeared, had been neglected, on a belief in the absolute power of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It aims to ruin conclusively all the other psychological mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the resolution of the principal problems of life.[52]
In this fashion, Breton consolidated the language of Surrealism, for the sake of which the Dadaists had been striving to destroy the outdated language of art. Breton’s automatism of composition was basically a literary affair. In his manifesto he gives a lesson in this kind of writing, asserting that: “[L]anguage was given to man for him to use it in a surrealist way.”[53] When it came to the language of other fields of art, such as painting and sculpture, Breton’s disciples would have to find it by themselves in their own individual fields.
From December 1, 1924, the journal La Révolution surréaliste, run by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Peret, and printing the work of Aragon, Éluard, Soupault, Vitrac and numerous others, became the printed mouthpiece of the Surrealists. It was dressed up to look serious, outwardly imitating such scientific journals as La Nature, and became one of the most talked-about journals in Paris. From 1925, Breton was in charge of the journal. They established an “Office of Surrealist Research”, rather like a laboratory, where they would engage in Surrealist experiments. “At number 15 on the Rue de Grenelle”, wrote Aragon, “we opened a romantic hostel for unclassifiable ideas and ongoing revolts. Anything in this universe of despair for which there is still hope, may one day look up in its final delirium towards our pitiful little workshop: we were trying to arrive at a new declaration of the rights of man.”[54] They sent briefings to the press – their “butterflies” flew out of the office at very frequent intervals. Every Surrealists’ get-together, at the apartment of one of the group, or at one of their favourite cafes – Certa, Cyrano, the tabac on the Place Pigalle, or the Café de la Place Blanche – was usually accompanied by games. In 1925, the Surrealists published their first “exquisite corpses” – the result of their favourite game. “A game with folded pieces of paper, which consists in having a sentence or a drawing put together by several persons, without any of them being able to take account of the contribution or contributions that preceded it. The example, now a classic, which has given the game its name, is contained in the first sentence obtained in this fashion: “The exquisite corpses will drink the new wine.” For the Surrealists, this game was an example, first of all, of automatic, absolutely unpremeditated creativity, and second, of the creativity of a team.
La Révolution surréaliste carried on the business of Dada, overturning the authorities of the old art. A pamphlet against Anatole France was entitled “A Corpse”. “An old man like the rest of them”, wrote Éluard. “A ridiculous character, and so empty”, Soupault seconded him. “Have you ever given a dead man a slap in the face?” inquired Aragon, and gave a summing-up: “On certain days I have dreamed of a rubber to erase the squalor of humanity.”[55] All this created a loud scandal, as did the special events they organised. One of them was the “Homage to Saint-Pol-Roux” organised by “Les Nouvelles littéraires” on the Boulevard
Maurice Nadeau,
