At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months later, aged twenty-four), the author of the Chants de Maldoror
and of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known by the name of Comte de Lautréamont, whose thought has been of the very
greatest help and encouragement to myself and my friends throughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded in
carrying a common activity, made the following remark, among many others which were to electrify us fifty years later:
"At the hour in which I write, new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to
face them.'' 1868-75: it is impossible, looking back upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so
revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches from the separate publication of the Premier Chant
de Maldoror to the insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbauld's last poem, Rêve, which has not so far been included in
his Complete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to their correct
historical background: the coming and the immediate results of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have
failed to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris
Commune; the last in date caught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont
and Rimbaud found themselves thrown into the
preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its
consequence - and this is the new and important fact
- the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.
I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as we then were - we who, on one hand, came for the most part
from the petite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were all by vocation possessed with the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane
- the days of October, which only the passing of the years and the subsequent appearance of a large number of works within
the reach of all were fully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn so decisive a page in history. We were, I
repeat, ill-prepared and ill-informed. Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign of systematic refusal,
exasperated by the conditions under which, in such an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was
insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our
participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed - and having
been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed - against the whole
series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him.
Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than anything else formed the causes of our horror and our
destructive impulse; morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work (did not Rimbaud say:
"Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de feu!'' and also: "La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à mains! Je n'aurai
jamais ma main!''). The more I think about it, the more certain I become that nothing was to our minds worth saving, unless it
was... unless it was, at last "l'amour la poésie,'' to take the bright and trembling title of one of Paul Eluard's books,
"l'amour la poésie,'' considered as inseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between the negation of this good, a negation brought
to its climax by the war, and its full and total affirmation ("Poetry should be made by all, not one''), the field was not, to our
minds, open to anything but a Revolution truly extended into all domains,
improbably radical, to the highest degree impractical and tragically destroying within itself the whole time the feeling that it brought with it both of desirability and of absurdity. Many
of you, no doubt, would put this down to a certain youthful exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; I must, however,
insist on this attitude, common to particular men and manifesting itself at periods nearly half a century distant from one another. I
should affirm that in ignorance of this attitude one can form no idea of what surrealism really stands for. This attitude alone can
account, and very sufficiently at that, for all the excesses that may be attributed to us but which cannot be deplored unless one
gratuitously supposes that we could have started from any other point. The ill-sounding remarks, that are
imputed to us, the so-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the quarrels, the scandals - all things that we are so much reproached with - turned
up on the same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, the
surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime defeatism.
I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be more relevant than ever.
"New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them.'' They are, in fact, always running through the
intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are concerned,
remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain
from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old
and mortal shivers are trying to substitute
themselves for those which are the very shivers of
knowledge and of life. They come to announce a
frightful disease, a disease followed by the
deprivation of all rights; it is only a matter of
having the courage to face them also. This disease
is called fascism.
Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss
and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations
straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence. In capitalist society, hypocrisy and cynicism have now
lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to
humanitarianism, which always involves impossible reconciliation's and truces to the advantage of the stronger,
I should say that in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exterior world without an immediate shudder. Everything we know about
fascism shows that it is precisely the homologation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its furthest point by the lasting resignation
that it seeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to
re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it worthy of all our hatred; we continue to consider this
feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can possibly be inflicted upon beings of our kind, and those who would inflict
it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there,
lurking at our doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure byzantinism to dispute too long,
as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several aspects, it is creeping
nearer and nearer to us. During the course of taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am capable, to the
organization in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual circles
of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements
whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore in this struggle. Some of them have even
begun to make excuses for the loss of the battle already. Such dispositions seem to me to be so dismaying that
I should not care to be speaking here without first having made clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a whole series of
remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more than ever before, the liberation of the mind, demands as primary
condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the
express aim of surrealism, the liberation of man,
which implies that we must struggle with our fetters
with all the energy of despair; that today more than
ever before the surrealists entirely rely for the
bringing about of the liberation of man upon the
proletarian Revolution.
I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is to attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain immediate
ambiguity contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what
transcendental attitude, while, on the contrary it expresses - and always has expressed for us - a desire to deepen the
foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world
perceived by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day, which
I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a
system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure
ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many
years past - or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25) - at
the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or
finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the
present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we seethe very cause of man's unhappiness, but also the
source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every
possible occasion, of refusing to allow the preeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other
both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are (and I believe that those who
pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion); of acting on
these two realities not both at once, then, but one
after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us
to observe their reciprocal attraction and
interpenetration and to give to this interplay of
forces all the extension necessary for the trend of
these two adjoining realities to become one and the
same thing.
As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one can distinguish two epochs in the surrealist movement, of equal duration,
from its origins (1919, year of the publication of Champs Magnétiques) until today; a purely intuitive epoch, and a reasoning
epoch. The first can summarily be characterized by the belief expressed during this time in the all-powerfulness of thought,
considered capable of freeing itself by means of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a prevailing view that I look upon
today as being extremely mistaken, the view that thought is supreme over matter. The definition of surrealism that has passed
into the dictionary, a definition taken from the Manifesto of 1924, takes account only of this entirely idealist disposition and (for
voluntary reasons of simplification and amplification destined to influence in my mind the future of this definition) does so in terms
that suggest that I deceived myself at the time in advocating the use of an automatic thought not only removed from all control
exercised by the reason but also disengaged from "all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.'' It should at least have been said: conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations. During the period under review, in the absence, of course, of all seriously
discouraging exterior events, surrealist activity remained strictly confined to its first theoretical premise, continuing all the while to
be the vehicle of that total ``non-conformism'' which, as we have seen, was the binding feature in the coming together of those
who took part in it, and the cause, during the first few years after the war, of an uninterrupted series of adhesions. No coherent
political or social attitude, however, made its appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important to stress this), until the
outbreak of the Moroccan war, which, re-arousing in us our particular hostility to the way armed conflicts affect man, abruptly
placed before us the necessity of making a public protest. This protest, which, under the title La Révolution d'Abord et
Toujours (October 1925), joined the name of the surrealists proper to those of thirty other intellectuals, was undoubtedly rather
confused ideologically; it none the less marked the breaking away from a whole way of thinking; it none the less created a
precedent that was to determine the whole future direction of the movement. Surrealist activity, faced with a brutal, revolting,
unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itself what were its proper resources and to determine their limits; it was forced to adopt a
precise attitude, exterior to itself, in order to continue to face whatever exceeded these limits. Surrealist activity at this moment
entered into its reasoning phase. It suddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap that separates absolute idealism
from dialectical materialism. This necessity made its appearance in so urgent a manner that we had to consider the problem in
the clearest possible light, with the result that for some months we devoted our entire attention to the means of bringing about
this change of front once and for all. If I do not today feel any retrospective embarrassment in explaining this change, that is
because it seems to me quite natural that surrealist thought, before coming to rest in dialectical materialism and insisting, as
today, on the supremacy of matter over mind, should have been condemned to pass, in a few years, through the whole
historic development of modern thought. It came normally to Marx through Hegel, just as it came normally to Hegel through
Berkeley and Hume. These latter influences offer a certain particularity in that, contrary to certain poetic influences undergone in
the same way, and accommodated to those of the French materialists of the eighteenth century, they yielded a residuum of
practical action. To try and hide these influences would be contrary to my desire to show that surrealism has not been drawn
up as an abstract system, that is to say, safeguarded against all contradictions. It is also my desire to show how surrealist
activity, driven, as I have said, to ask itself what
were its proper resources, had in some way or
another to reflect upon itself its realization, in
1925, of its relative insufficiency; how surrealist
activity had to cease being content with the results
(automatic texts, the recital of dreams, improvised
speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions)
which it had originally planned; and how it came to
consider these first results as being simply so much
material, starting from which the problem of
knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new
form.
As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing a constant process of becoming and, what is more, solidly relying
on concrete facts, surrealism has brought together and is still bringing together diverse temperaments individually obeying or
resisting a variety of bents. The determinant of their enduring or short-lived adherence is not to be considered as a blind
concession to an inert stock of ideas held in common, but as a continuous sequence of acts which, propelling the doer to more
or less distant points, forces him for each fresh start to return to the same starting-line. These exercises not being without peril,
one man may break a limb or - for which there is no precedent - his head, another may peaceably submerge himself in a
quagmire or report himself dying of fatigue. Unable as yet to treat itself to an ambulance, surrealism simply leaves these
individuals by the wayside. Those who continue in the ranks are aware of course of the casualties left behind them. But what of
it? The essential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has not forfeited the burning desire for beauty, truth and
justice, toilingly to go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of fresh landscapes, and to continue doing so indefinitely
and without coercion to the end, that others may afterwards travel the same spiritual road, unhindered and in all security.
Penetration, to be sure, has not been as deep as one would have wished. Poetically speaking, a few wild, or shall we say
charming, beasts whose cries fill the air and bar access to a domain as yet only surmised, are still far from being exorcized. But
for all that, the piercing of the thicket would have proceeded less tortuously, and those who are doing the pioneering would have
acquitted themselves with unabating tenacity in the service of the
cause, if, between the beginning and the end of the
spectacle which they provide for themselves and
would be glad to provide for others, a change had
not taken place.
In 1936, more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself to defend the postulate of the necessity of change. It is amusing,
indeed, to see how the more spiteful and silly of our adversaries affect to triumph whenever they stumble on some old statement
we may have made and which now sounds more or less discordantly in the midst of others intended to render comprehensible
our present conduct. This insidious maneuver, which is calculated to cast a doubt on our good faith, or at least on the
genuineness of our principles, can easily be defeated. The development of surrealism throughout the decade of its existence is,
we take it, a function of the unrolling of historical realities as these may be speeded up between the period of relief which
follows the conclusion of a peace and the fresh outbreak of war. It is also a function of the process of seeking after new values
in order to confirm or invalidate existing ones. The fact that certain of the first participants in surrealist activity have thrown in the
sponge and have been discarded has brought about the retiring from circulation of some ways of thinking and the putting into
circulation of others in which there were implicit certain general dissents on the one hand and certain general assents on the
other. Hence it is that this activity has been fashioned by the events. At the present moment, contrary to current biased
rumor according to which surrealism itself is supposed, in its cruelty of disposition, to have sacrificed nearly all the blood first vivifying
it, it is heartening to be able to point out that it has never ceased to avail itself of the perfect teamwork of René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and the present writer, all of whom can attest that from the
inception of the movement - which is also the date of our enlistment in it - until now, the initial principle of their covenant has
never been violated. If there have occurred differences on some points, it was essentially within the rhythmic scope of the
integral whole, in itself a least disputable element of objective value. The others, they whom we no longer meet, can they say as
much? They cannot, for the simple reason that since they separated from us they have been incapable of achieving a single
concerted action that had any definite form of its own, and they have confined themselves, instead, to a reaction against
surrealism with the greatest wastage to themselves - a fate always overtaking those who go back on their past. The history of
their apostasy and denials will ultimately be read into the great limbo of human failings, without profit to any observer - ideal
yesterday, but real today - who, called upon to make a pronouncement, will decide whether they or ourselves have brought the
more appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution of the many problems surrealism has propounded.
Although there can be no question here of going through the history of the surrealist movement - its history has been told many a
time and sometimes told fairly well; moreover, I prefer to pass on as quickly as possible to the exposition of its present attitude -
I think I ought briefly to recall, for the benefit of those of you who were unaware of the fact, that there is no doubt that before
the surrealist movement properly so called, there existed among the promoters of the movement and others who later rallied
round it, very active, not merely dissenting but also antagonistic dispositions which, between 1915 and 1920, were willing to
align themselves under the signboard of Dada. Post-war disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchic that guided that cycle's
many manifestations, a deliberate refusal to judge - for lack, it was said, of criteria - the actual qualifications of individuals, and,
perhaps, in the last analysis, a certain spirit of negation which was making itself conspicuous, had brought about a dissolution of
the group as yet inchoate, one might say, by reason of its dispersed and heterogeneous character, a group whose germinating
force has nevertheless been decisive and, by the general consent of present-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of
ideas. It may be proper before passing rapidly - as I must - over this period, to apportion by far the handsomest share to
Marcel Duchamp (canvases and glass objects still to be seen in New York), to Francis Picabia (reviews
"291'' and "391''),
Jacques Vaché (Lettres de Guerre) and Tristan Tzara (Twenty-five Poems, Dada Manifesto 1918).
Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there was seeking to organize itself in 1920 what - as yet on a basis
of confidential exchange - assumed the name of surrealism, a word fallen from the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted
from the rather general and very confusing connotation he had given it. What was at first no more than a new method of poetic
writing broke away after several years from the much too general theses which had come to be expounded in the Surrealist
Manifesto - Soluble Fish, 1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to them, whereby the whole was raised to a vaster
ideological plane; and so there had to be revision.
In an article, "Enter the Mediums'', published in Littérature, 1922, reprinted in Les Pas Perdus, 1924, and subsequently in the
Surrealist Manifesto, I explained the circumstance that had originally put us, my friends and myself, on the track of the
surrealist activity we still follow and for which we are hopeful of gaining ever more numerous new adherents in order to extend it
further than we have so far succeeded in doing. It reads:
It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences
more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by very
meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fall asleep,
I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all
quality of vocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which came to me bearing - in sober truth - not a trace of any
relation whatever to any incidents I may at that time have been involved in; an insistent sentence, it seemed to me,
a sentence I might say, that knocked at the window. I was prepared to pay no further attention to it when the
organic character of the sentence detained me. I was really bewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember
the exact sentence at this distance, but it ran approximately like this: ``A man is cut in half by the window.'' What
made it plainer was the fact that it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of
walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Definitely, there was the
form, re-erected against space, of a man leaning out of a window. But the window following the man's locomotion,
I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea came to me to use it as material for
poetic construction. I had no sooner invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession of all but
intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in a state, I would say, of extreme detachment.
Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had
practiced occasionally upon the sick during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain
from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject's critical faculty has
no control - the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds - and which as much as possible represents
spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and
hence does not exceed the flow of either tongue or pen. It was in such circumstances that, together with Philippe
Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I began to cover sheets of paper with writing,
feeling a praiseworthy contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the
rest. By the end of the first day of the experiment we were able to read to one another about fifty pages obtained
in this manner and to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole striking. There were
similar faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve,
much emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we should never have been able to obtain
in the normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there, a few pieces of out and
out buffoonery. The only differences which our two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our
respective temperaments, Soupault's being less static than mine, and, if he will allow me to make this slight
criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of certain pages - doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification - various
words under the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having always forcibly opposed the
least correction of any passage that did not seem to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.
It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value the various elements in the result obtained; one
may even say that it is entirely impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may be writing them,
these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you are yourself naturally distrustful of them.
Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar
quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in
the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than the
others. The word "surrealism'' having thereupon become descriptive of the generalizable
undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I
thought it indispensable, in 1924, to define this
word once and for all:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it
is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by
other means, the real process of thought. Thought's
dictation, in the absence of all control exercised
by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected
heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to do away
with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.
Have professed absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos,
Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.
These till now appear to be the only ones.... Were one to
consider their output only superficially, a goodly
number of poets might well have passed for
surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare at
his best. In the course of many attempts I have made
towards an analysis of what, under false pretences,
is called genius, I have found nothing that could in
the end be attributed to any other process than
this.
There followed an enumeration that will gain, I
think, by being clearly set out thus:
. . . Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic. . . .
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism. . . .
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere. . . .
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense. . . .
Picasso is surrealist in cubism. . . .
Etc.
They were not always surrealists - on this I insist - in the sense that one can disentangle in each of them a number
of preconceived notions to which - very naïvely! - they clung. And they clung to them so because they had not
heard the surrealist voice, the voice that exhorts on the eve of death and in the roaring storm, and because they
were unwilling to dedicate themselves to the task of no more than orchestrating the score replete with
marvelous things. They were proud instruments; hence the sounds they
produced were not always harmonious sounds.
We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work
have been content to be the silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not
hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are
perhaps serving a yet much nobler cause. So we
honestly give back the talent lent to us. You may
talk of the "talent'' of this yard of platinum, of
this mirror, of this door and of this sky, if you
wish.
We have no talent. . . .
The Manifesto also contained a certain number of
practical recipes, entitled: "Secrets of the Magic
Surrealist Art,'' such as the following:
Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft.
Having settled
down in some spot most conducive to the mind's
concentration upon itself, order writing material to
be brought to you. Let your state of mind be as
passive and receptive as possible. Forget your
genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents
of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is
pretty well the sorriest road that leads to
everywhere. Write quickly without any previously
chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and
not to be tempted to read over, what you have
written. The first sentence will come of itself; and
this is self-evidently true, because there is never
a moment but some sentence alien to our conscious
thought clamors for outward expression. It is rather
difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since
it doubtless comes in for a share of our conscious
activity and so the other sentences, if it is
conceded that the writing of the first sentence must
have involved even a minimum of consciousness. But
that should in the long run matter little, because
therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the
surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course
necessarily hinders the stream of absolute
continuity which preoccupies us. But you should
particularly distrust the prompting whisper. If
through a fault ever so trifling there is a
forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say,
of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line
that has become too lucid. After the word whose
origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any
letter, l for example, always the letter l, and
restore the arbitrary flux by making that letter the
initial of the word to follow.
I believe that the real interest of that book - there
was no lack of people who were good enough to
concede interest, for which no particular credit is
due to me because I have no more than given
expression to sentiments shared with friends,
present and former - rests only subordinately on the
formula above given. It is rather confirmatory of a
turn of thought which, for good or ill, is
peculiarly distinctive of our time. The defense
originally attempted of that turn of thought still
seems valid to me in what follows:
We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the resolution of
problems of secondary in tersest. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit consideration of
any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say
that even experience has had limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and more
difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common sense is its keeper. Under
color of civilization, under pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or
superstition has been banished from the mind, all
uncustomary searching after truth has been
proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck
that there has recently been brought to light an
aspect of mental life - to my belief by far the most
important - with which it was supposed that we no
longer had any concern. All credit for these
discoveries must go to Freud. Based on these
discoveries a current of opinion is forming that
will enable the explorer of the human mind to
continue his investigations, justified as he will be
in taking into account more than mere summary
realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point
of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our minds
harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on
the surface, or of successfully contending with
them, then it is all in our interest to canalize
them, to canalize them first in order to submit them
later, if necessary, to the control of the reason.
The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such
a proceeding. But it should be observed that there
are no means designed a priori for the bringing
about of such an enterprise, that until the coming
of the new order it might just as well be considered
the affair of poets and scientists, and that its
success will not depend on the more or less
capricious means that will be employed. . . .
Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealist techniques (theatrical, philosophical, scientific, critical)
appears to me the application of surrealism to action. Whatever reservations I might be inclined to make with
regard to responsibility in general, I should quite particularly like to know how the first
misdemeanors whose surrealist character is indubitable will be judged. When surrealist methods extend from writing to action, there will
certainly arise the need of a new morality to take
the place of the current one, the cause of all our
woes.
The Manifesto of Surrealism has
improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must
turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to
manifest through life those new sentiments which the
gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within
his reach. . . .
Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force. The freedom it possesses is a perfect freedom in the sense
that it recognizes no limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on the cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste,
"it will be necessary to draw up a new declaration of the Rights of Man.'' The concept of surreality, concerning which quarrels
have been sought with us repeatedly and which it was
attempted to turn into a metaphysical or mystic rope
to be placed afterwards round our necks, lends
itself no longer to misconstruction, nowhere does it
declare itself opposed to the need of transforming
the world which henceforth will more and more
definitely yield to it.
As I said in the Manifesto:
I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of
absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I shall never
share in it, but death would matter little to me
could I but taste the joy it will yield ultimately.
After years of endeavor and perplexities, when a variety of opinions had disputed amongst themselves the direction of the craft
in which a number of persons of unequal ability and varying powers of resistance had originally embarked together, the surrealist
idea recovered in the Second Manifesto all the brilliancy of which events had vainly conspired to despoil it. It should be
emphasized that the First Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up the conclusions we had drawn during what one may call
the heroic epoch of surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923. The concerted elaboration of the first automatic texts and
our excited reading of them, the first results obtained by Max Ernst in the domain of
"collage'' and of painting, the practice of
surrealist "speaking'' during the hypnotic experiments introduced among us by René Crevel and repeated every evening for
over a year, uncontrovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration during this first phase. After that, up till the taking
into account of the social aspect of the problem round about 1925 (though not formally sanctioned until 1930), surrealism began
to find itself a prey to characteristic wranglings. These wranglings account very clearly for the expulsion orders and
tickets-of-leave which, as we went along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions of the first and second hour. Some
people have quite gratuitously concluded from this that we are apt to overestimate personal questions. During the last ten
years, surrealism has almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself against deviations to the right and to the left. On the one
hand we have had to struggle against the will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely speculative level and
treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane (Artaud, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the
hope for subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those who would place it on a purely practical basis,
available at any moment to be sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville,
Aragon) - at the cost, this time, of what
constitutes the originality and reality of its
researches, at the cost of the autonomous risk that
it has to run. Agitated though it was, the epoch
that separates the two Manifestos was none the less
a rich one, since it saw the publication of so many
works in which the vital principles of surrealism
were amply accounted for. . . .
It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution et les Intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les
surréalistes? (1926), [Pierre Naville] demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the face of the human
exploitation which results from the wage-earning system. These declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and,
at tempting for the first time to justify surrealism's social implications, I desired to put an end to it in Légitime Défense.
This pamphlet set out to demonstrate that there is
no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist
thought. In reality, we are faced with two problems,
one of which is the problem raised, at the beginning
of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the
relations between the conscious and the unconscious.
That was how the problem chose to present itself to
us. We were the first to apply to its resolution a
particular method, which we have not ceased to
consider both the most suitable and the most likely
to be brought to perfection; there is no reason why
we should renounce it. The other problem we are
faced with is that of the social action we should
pursue. We consider that this action has its own
method in dialectical materialism, and we can all
the less afford to ignore this action since, I
repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine
qua non condition of the liberation of the mind, and
we can expect this liberation of man to result only
from the proletarian Revolution. These two problems
are essentially distinct and we deplore their
becoming confused by not remaining so. There is good
reason, then, to take up a stand against all
attempts to weld them together and, more especially,
against the urge to abandon all such researches as
ours in order to devote ourselves to the poetry and
art of propaganda. Surrealism, which has been the
object of brutal and repeated summonses in this
respect, now feels the need of making some kind of
counter-attack. Let me recall the fact that its very
definition holds that it must escape, in its written
manifestations, or any others, from all control
exercised by the reason. Apart from the puerility of
wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to
bear on the immediate aspect of such manifestations,
this control cannot be envisaged in principle. And
how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it
does from men who declare themselves Marxists, that
is to say possessed not only of a strict line in
revolutionary matters, but also of a marvelously
open mind and an insatiable curiosity!
This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to be put an end to, and for that purpose it was
indispensable that we should proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or less openly hostile to one
another, whose intentions did not, in the final analysis, appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have
been desired. An important part of the work was
devoted to a statement of the reasons which moved
surrealism to dispense for the future with certain
collaborators. It was attempted, on the same
occasion, to complete the specific method of
creation proposed six years earlier, and thoroughly
to tidy up surrealist ideas. . . .
From 1930 until today the history of surrealism is that of successful efforts to restore to it its proper becoming by gradually
removing from it every trace both of political opportunism and of artistic opportunism. The review La Révolution Surréaliste,
(12 issues) has been succeeded by another, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (6 issues). Owing particularly to
influences brought to bear by new elements, surrealist experimenting. which had for too long been erratic, has been unreservedly
resumed; its perspectives and its aims have been made perfectly clear; I may say that it has not ceased to be carried on in a
continuous and enthusiastic manner. This experimenting has regained momentum under the master-impulse given to it by
Salvador Dali, whose exceptional interior "boiling'' has been for surrealism, during the whole of this period, an invaluable
ferment. As Guy Mangeot has very rightly pointed out in his History of Surrealism . . . Dali has endowed surrealism with an
instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of
being applied with equal success to painting,
poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical
surrealist objects, to fashions, to sculpture and
even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis.
He first announced his convictions to us in La
Femme Visible (1930):
I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible
(simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit
completely the world of reality.
In order to cut short all possible
misunderstandings, it should perhaps be said:
"immediate'' reality.
Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea and has the disturbing characteristic of
making others accept this idea's reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and proof, and so
comes to serve the reality of our mind.
Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery
that seemed only to involve poetic language, has
spread like wildfire, on pursuing its course, not
only in art but in life. It has provoked new states
of consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond
which it was immemorially supposed to be impossible
to see; it has - as is being more and more generally
recognized - modified the sensibility, and taken a
decisive step towards the unification of the
personality, which it found threatened by an ever
more profound dissociation. Without attempting to
judge what direction it will ultimately take, for
the lands it fertilizes as it flows are those of
surprise itself, I should like to draw your
attention to the fact that its most recent advance
is producing a fundamental crisis of the "object.''
It is essentially upon the object that surrealism
has thrown most light in recent years. Only the very
close examination of the many recent speculations to
which the object has publicly given rise (the
enteric object, the object functioning symbolically,
the real and virtual object, the moving but silent
object, the phantom object, the discovered object,
etc.), can give one a proper grasp of the
experiments that surrealism is engaged in now. In
order to continue to understand the movement, it is
indispensable to focus one's attention on this
point.
I must crave your indulgence for speaking so technically, from the inside. But there could be no question of concealing any
aspect of the persuasions to which surrealism has been and is still exposed. I say that there exists a lyrical element that
conditions for one part the psychological and moral structure of human society, that has conditioned it at all times and that will
continue to condition it. This lyrical element has
until now, even though in spite of them, remained
the fact and the sole fact of specialists. In the
state of extreme tension to which class antagonisms
have led the society to which we belong and which we
tend with all our strength to reject, it is natural
and it is fated that this solicitation should
continue, that it should assume for us a thousand
faces, imploring, tempting and eager by turns. It is
not within our power, it would be unworthy of our
historic role to give way to this solicitation. By
surrealism we intend to account for nothing less
than the manner in which it is possible today to
make use of the magnificent and overwhelming
spiritual legacy that has been handed down to us. We
have accepted this legacy from the past, and
surrealism can well say that the use to which it has
been put has been to turn it to the routing of
capitalist society. I consider that for that purpose
it was and is still necessary for us to stand where
we are, to beware against breaking the thread of our
researches and to continue these researches, not as
literary men and artists, certainly, but rather as
chemists and the various other kinds of technicians.
To pass on to the poetry and art called (doubtless
in anticipation) proletarian: No. The forces we have
been able to bring together and which for fifteen
years we have never found lacking, have arrived at a
particular point of application: the question is not
to know whether this point of application is the
best, but simply to point out that the application
of our forces at this point has given us up to an
activity that has proved itself valuable and
fruitful on the plane on which it was undertaken and
has also been of a kind to engage us more and more
on the revolutionary plane. What it is essential to
realize is that no other activity could have
produced such rich results, nor could any other
similar activity have been so effective in combating
the present form of society. On that point we have
history on our side.
A comrade, Claude Cahun, in a striking pamphlet published recently: Les Paris Sont Ouverts, a pamphlet that attempts to
predict the future of poetry by taking account both of its own laws and of the social bases of its existence, takes Aragon to task
for the lack of rigor in his present position (I do not think anyone can contest the fact that Aragon's poetry has perceptibly
weakened since he abandoned surrealism and undertook to place him self directly at the service of the proletarian cause, which
leads one to suppose that such an undertaking has defeated him and is proportionately more or less
unfavorable to the Revolution).... It is of particular interest that the author of Les Paris Sont Ouverts has taken the opportunity of expressing
himself from the "historic'' point of view. His
appreciation is as follows:
The most revolutionary experiment in poetry under the capitalist regime having been incontestably, for France and
perhaps for Europe the Dadaist-surrealist experiment, in that it has tended to destroy all the myths about art that
for centuries have permitted the ideologic as well as economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature, etc.
(e.g. the frottages of Max Ernst, which, among other things, have been able to upset the scale of values of
art-critics and experts, values based chiefly on technical perfection, personal touch and the lastingness of the
materials employed), this experiment can and should serve the cause of the liberation of the
proletariat. It is only when the proletariat has become aware of the myths on which capitalist culture depends, when they have become
aware of what these myths and this culture mean for them and have destroyed them, that they will be able to pass
on to their own proper development. The positive lesson of this negating experiment, that is to say its transfusion
among the proletariat, constitutes the only valid revolutionary poetic propaganda.
Surrealism could not ask for anything better. Once the cause of the movement is understood, there is perhaps some hope that,
on the plane of revolutionary militantism proper, our turbulence, our small capacity for adaptation, until now, to the necessary
rules of a party (which certain people have thought proper to call our
"blanquism''), may be excused us. It is only too certain that an activity such as ours, owing to its particularization, cannot be pursued within the limits of any one of the existing
revolutionary organizations: it would be forced to come to a halt on the very threshold of that organization. If we are agreed that
such an activity has above all tended to detach the intellectual creator from the illusions with which bourgeois society has sought
to surround him, I for my part can only see in that tendency a further reason for continuing our activity.
None the less, the right that we demand and our desire to make use of it depend, as I said at the beginning, on our remaining
able to continue our investigations without having to reckon, as for the last few months we have had to do, with a sudden attack
from the forces of criminal imbecility. Let it be clearly understood that for us, surrealists, the interests of thought can not cease to
go hand in hand with the interests of the working class, and that all attacks on liberty, all fetters on the emancipation of the
working class and all armed attacks on it cannot fail to be considered by us as attacks on thought likewise. I repeat, the danger
is far from having been removed. The surrealists cannot be accused of having been slow to recognize the fact, since, on the very
next day after the first fascist coup in France, it was they amongst the intellectual circles who had the
honor of taking the initiative in sending out an Appel à la lutte, which appeared on February 10th, 1934, furnished with twenty-four signatures.
You may rest assured, comrades, that they will not confine themselves, that already they have not confined themselves, to this
single act.
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