In poetry and in painting, Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase these short circuits. It believes, and it will never believe in anything more wholeheartedly, in reproducing artificially this ideal moment when man, in the grips of a particular emotion, is suddenly seized by this something “stronger than himself” which projects him, in self-defense, into immortality.
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)
I posit that mimetic art (depicting places, impressions and external objects) is obsolescent and that the task of today’s art is to present an increasingly accurate depiction of mental notions, this by concerted exercise of imagination and memory. (Clearly, the matter used by these mental notions can be inadvertently accumulated by external stimuli and perceptions.) The biggest success of surrealism so far has been to reconcile dialectically two notions which, for an adult person, are implacable opposites—perception and representation—and to build a bridge over the abyss that separated them. Surrealist painting and constructions of surrealist objects enable us already to organise objective tendencies around the subjective features of perceptions. These perceptions, by their very tendency to assert themselves as objective, are of an epochal character and revolutionary in the sense of calling for something to correspond to them in outer reality. It can be surmised that, by and large, this something will be.
André Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object (1935)
It was André Breton’s contention that Surrealism was an endeavour or practice of “going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Or, as he also says, “the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone … .” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) For many, this would translate into a particular kind of art; inevitably, into some kind of aesthetic object, whether a poem, a painting, a sculpture, and the like. The movement could then be catalogued by the kind of art that it created, in different media, with their different qualities, marking it off thereby specifically as surrealist art.
Yet nothing could be further from the aims of the Surrealists, even if the sort of judgement mentioned above was and is very often made regarding Surrealism as a movement.
Breton stated repeatedly and categorically that he “did not believe in the establishment of a conventional Surrealist pattern any time in the near future.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Indeed, how could he have believed otherwise given that the sources of the imagination in the human psyche and the world could potentially express themselves in an infinite variety of ways.
“Surrealism set out to deal with the [general] problem of human expression in all its forms“, whether in the domain of the “arts”, or in that of “social action”. (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) But in whatever the domain, some kind of “object” results, some-thing or some-way is expressed by someone, an “object” that is “the possibility of a very obscure reconciliation between what he knew he had to say [do, make, create] with what, on the same subject, he didn’t know he had to say [do, make, create] and nonetheless said [did, made, created]. The most controlled thought is incapable of doing without this aid, which, from the viewpoint of rigor, is undesirable.” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)
We are forcing the argument, perhaps – or not -, but the idea is beautifully simple: the Surrealists understood the limitations of the realistic or positivistic attitude as both fetishistic and mutilating; fetishistic, because it reifies an essentially calculating and instrumentalising vision-intervention in the world, with all of its accompanying categorical divisions and hierarchies of reality, and mutilating, because it congeals these categorical distinctions in a false objectivity (including the “objectivity” of an isolated, translucent, “subjectivity” or “self”), rendering them immune to criticism and fatal to the human imagination, the source of both “objectivity” and “subjectivity”. The plane of the surreal is the overcoming of the maddening dualisms that are our prison and the surrealist object is that which is expressed-created consciously upon the grounds of what is not conscious.
The extraordinary challenge or invitation that the surrealists make to all of us is that of finding forms of expression, creation, in all of the spheres of life, that are both consciously understood as creations and recognised as beyond full conscious or rational control. It is precisely in this “obscure reconciliation” that the imagination can freely play among its marvelous creations.
Breton will state this thesis with great rigour in the essay that we share below of 1935, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object. At one point in the text, comparing painting to poetry, he says of the former something that can be extended in turn to all surreal expression.
“Painting, freed from its duty to represent substances and shapes derived from the outside world, profits from the only exterior element no art can fully do without, i.e. interior representation (la représentation intérieure), from an image residing in spirit. It confronts this interior representation with the representation of concrete forms of the real world, striving—just as Picasso’s painting has done—to capture the object in its generality. Once that has been attained, it attempts the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the (relatively) exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness.”
Let us again translate this into a more general language (with all of the risks involved): to express or create surreally is to confront representations/images of the concrete forms of the world with interior representations/images, generating thereby a representation/image of those concrete forms in their generality, a generality which can only exist in relationship to the “inner world of consciousness”. And all of this creative, sublimating or transubstantiating, activity is the work of the free imagination, conscious and unconscious.
In other words, it is we who generalise. We do so however through images, metaphors, representations, that defy any logical strictures or conscious transparency, and which are the children of our own minds. There is nothing solid in our surreal makings; nor do we fully know why we have made things as they are. But make them we do and what distinguishes the surrealist from everyone else is that s/he creates worlds knowing them to be created and knowing them to have been born and to exist beyond anything that s/he can completely control, rooted as our creations are in the passions and the imagination.
Can one then think of anarchism, or the creations of anarchists, in the same manner?
Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object (1935)
(Lecture presented on 29 March 1935, at the Mánes Gallery in Prague and, later on, at the end of April in Zurich. This translation departs from the Czech translation of the original version delivered in Prague. In the French original, the lecture was published in André Breton, Position politique du surrealisme (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1935). Translated by David Vichnar. Source: Equus Press, in four parts: 08/12/2017; 18/12/2017; 03/01/2018; 13/01/2028.)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Comrades,
I am greatly delighted to speak to you in a city outside France which yesterday was still unknown to me, but which of all the cities I had not visited, was nevertheless the least unfamiliar to me. Prague, adorned with her legendary charms, is truly one of those cities that electively pin down poetic thought, which is always more or less adrift in space.
Regardless of the various geographical, historical or economic considerations that this city and the customs of its inhabitants may evoke in me, when seen from afar, with that unique and dense bristling of her towers, Prague seems to me to be the magical capital of old Europe. By the fact that within herself, Prague preserves all the spells of the past for the imagination, it seems to me less difficult for me to make myself understood in this corner of the world than anywhere else, since if I am to speak to you on the subjects of poetry and surrealist art, I present to your judgment the very possibility of the present and past enchantment. “The artistic object,” as has been correctly observed, “is situated between the emotional and the rational realm. It is something spiritual which appears as material. When addressing senses and the imagination, art and poetry create deliberately a world of shadows, spectres and figments of phantasy, and therefore cannot be charged with ineptitude or incapability of creating anything but shapes without reality.”[1] It is my especial delight to introduce, under Prague’s skies, the world of new shadows known under the title of surrealism. I have to admit that it is not only the colour of Prague’s sky, which from afar seems to be more scintillating than many another, that makes this task of mine exceptionally easier: for many years now, I have also been fully aware of a perfect mental togetherness with people such as Vít?zslav Nezval and Karel Teige, whose trust and friendship I treasure dearly. It is thanks to their care that all pertaining to the beginnings and further development of the surrealist movement, which they keep under close and continuous scrutiny, has been elucidated in Prague. Surrealism, most vigorously interpreted by Teige and endowed with the all-powerful lyrical impetus by Nezval, can today boast of the same development in Prague as in Paris. Therefore, first of all, I salute our friends and collaborators in Prague: Štyrský, Toyen, Biebl, Makovský, Honzl, Brouk, and Ježek, not to forget Šíma, who accompanied Paul Éluard and myself on our way to Prague. My heinous ignorance of your language forces me to follow the work of many of these friends by means of translation. I should like to seize the opportunity to hail the work of Toyen, Štyrský and Makovský, which presents a wholly original contribution and at which I could marvel immediately upon my arrival in Prague. Their work has given me a new reason to hope that surrealism, today more than ever, is on its way toward discoveries, on its way of truth.
I shall like to emphasise that the activity of all whose names I have just provided is in no way distinct from mine, and that by virtue of the ever-closer ties connecting us together, just as they connect us to very mobile groups of poets and artists that have established or are in the process of establishing themselves in every country, we will be able to set in motion a truly concentrated movement. This needs to be accomplished if we wish surrealism to speak internationally some time soon, as the ruler of an area proper to it, where even those complaining that surrealism is nothing but symptom of the current momentous social evil, are now willing to admit that nothing of at least some significance can be pitted against it.
In your country, texts have been published that were written with such wonderful understanding and precise documentation as “The World of Smells” by Karel Teige, or his studies on Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Apollinaire, there have also been Czech translations of two of my works, Nadja and Vases communicants; our friends have organised, in Prague and other cities, a few discussions and conflicting lectures, a proceedings from the debates to which surrealism has recently given rise has been published under the title Surrealism in Discussion,[2] a few visual-arts and sculpture exhibitions have taken place, forthcoming is the periodical publication of Surrealism review, edited by Vít?zslav Nezval. Accepting the invitation of the “Mánes” artistic group, I therefore believed myself fortunate enough to be able to talk to an informed audience. I think I can be exempt from the task of having to adumbrate for you the history of the surrealist movement since 1920 to the present. Thus, I shall address immediately my topic at hand.
I shall remind you that in a lecture delivered ten months ago in Brussels (in June 1934), I briefly mentioned that a fundamental crisis in the object was taking place in the wake of surrealism. What I said then was as follows,
It is at the object that the open and increasingly far-seeing eyes of surrealism have recently been directed. Only a very careful examination of the many current surrealist reflections, to which this object has publicly given rise (the dreamy object, the symbolically disposed object, the real and the virtual object, the moveable and mute object, the phantom object, the found object, etc.), allow us to take full stock of the current surrealist attempts. It is absolutely essential to focus our attention on this point…
We shall see that, over the past ten months, this conclusion has lost none of its relevance. A few days ago, we have concurred that a highly suggestive proposal presented by Man Ray, deserves careful study. Before dealing with this proposal, I have to pinpoint that the greatest danger surrounding surrealism today consists in how, thanks to the world-wide, precipitate and sudden spread of surrealism—against our will, the name has caught on much faster than the idea—more and less successful products of all sorts are endeavouring to self-apply this label: thus, works of “abstractivist tendencies” in Holland, Switzerland and most recently in England, have been trying to form ambiguous neighbourly relations with surrealist works, so it could come to pass that an unnamed Mr Cocteau could infiltrate surrealist exhibitions in America and surrealist publications in Japan. In order to avoid similar misunderstandings, or to forestall any repetition of such coarse misuse, it is indispensably and urgently necessary to demarcate a line between what is surrealist by its essence, and what wants to pose as surrealist, for advertising or other reasons. It would be ideal if every authentically surrealist thing could be recognised by an external marker: Man Ray has thought of providing all of them with a seal or a stamp: just as a viewer can read on the cinema screen the inscription, “Film by Paramount” (without in this case assuming the unsatisfactory guarantee, quality-wise, of what follows), an uninitiated reader or audience member could find, added to a poem, book, painting, statue, building, an inimitable, indelible tag saying: “This is a surrealist object.” I repeat I immediately found this idea very ingenious and feasible; if in Man Ray’s formulation, it is not devoid of subtle humour, this does not make it the less effective. Supposing it can be put to effect correctly, it is hard to believe judgment regarding whether to accord any given work this label would be, even to a negligible degree, arbitrary. The best way toward agreement seems to me to be to determine theexact situation of the surrealist object. It goes without saying that this situation is correlative to another; it is correlative to the surrealist situation of the object. Only once we have understood the way surrealism introduces the object as such—this table, the photograph in that man’s pocket, the tree in the moment of getting hit by lightning, the aurora, or (if we are to venture into the realm of the impossible) the flying lion—can we raise the question of how to define the place to be taken up by the surrealist object in order for this classification to be justified.
It is never superfluous to return to a reminder that already Hegel in his Aesthetics dealt with all the issues that can be now considered the most difficult in the realms of poetry and art, and that he managed to solve most of these troubles with exemplary clairvoyance. Given that in many countries Hegel’s brilliant work is not known in its entirety, it is possible that various hack obscurantists still find in such problems reasons for concern or pretexts for continuous strife. Moreover, given that too many Marxists are too blind in submitting to the letter and not the spirit of what they generally interpret as Marx’s or Engels’ thought makes it possible for the Soviet art politics and the educational organisations under its supervision in other countries to join their plaintive voices with those of the former times and renew, or what is worse, stir up debates that have, I repeat, since Hegel’s time been utterly impertinent. You quote Hegel and see immediately how the revolutionary circles knit their brows. What, Hegel, whose dialectics walked on its head?! You fall under suspicion and – since Marxist theses on poetry and art, actually quite scarce and unconvincing, were all drafted long after Marx – the first smart-aleck can win the day by throwing at you catchphrases regarding “militant literature and painting”, “class content”, etc.
Still, Hegel came and, I would fain say like the defendant in that famous dispute could remark about the Earth “And yet it moves”, settled in advance those vain conflicts waged against us now. His views on poetry and art, the only ones so far to result from an encyclopaedic culture, are first of all the views of a miraculous historian; no prejudice departing from the system can distort them a priori, and even if so this prejudice can after all be detected during the process and thus cannot, in the eyes of the surrealist reader, lead to more than a few easily redressed errors. What is essential is that this truly unique collection of knowledge was set into motion and subjected to the workings of a machine then utterly novel—for indeed Hegel was its inventor—whose power turned out unique, i.e. the machine of dialectics. I emphasise again that the question of whether or not the surrealist activity is well or poorly grounded needs to be addressed to Hegel. Only Hegel can say if this activity had been predestined in time, only Hegel can let us know if it has any hopes for the future, and whether its duration will be counted in days or in centuries.
First of all, it is needful to recall that Hegel puts poetry above all other arts; according to him, arts form a hierarchy from the poorest to the richest in the following order: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Hegel, who regarded poetry as “the real art of the spirit”, the only “universal art” capable of producing in its own realm all modes of expression belonging to other arts, divined very precisely today’s fate of poetry. Hegel undertook a monumental elucidation of how poetry, in its effort over time to gradually surpass other arts, evinces an increasingly contradictory need 1) by its own means 2) by new means to achieve the precision of material shapes. Perfectly devoid of touch with the burdensome matter, enjoying the privilege of depicting materially and spiritually consequent states of life, and realising thanks to imagination the perfect synthesis of sound and thought, poetry has never, since its romantic liberation, renounced its supremacy over other arts; it keeps permeating them and delineating within them an area larger by the day. It seems it is indeed in the realm of fine arts that poetry has found the broadest field of activity for itself: it has settled in so firmly there that fine arts can nowadays make the high claim of sharing poetry’s widest goal, which according to Hegel lies in revealing to our consciousness the potencies of spiritual life. In the present moment there is no fundamental difference between a Paul Éluard or Benjamin Péret poem and a Max Ernst, Juan Miró or Yves Tanguy picture. Painting, freed from its duty to represent substances and shapes derived from the outside world, profits from the only exterior element no art can fully do without, i.e. interior representation (la représentation intérieure), from an image residing in spirit. It confronts this interior representation with the representation of concrete forms of the real world, striving—just as Picasso’s painting has done—to capture the object in its generality. Once that has been attained, it attempts the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the (relatively) exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness. Both art forms, poetry and painting, endeavour a fusion so close that it matters little to a Hans Arp or a Salvador Dalí whether their form of expression is the poetic or the painterly one, and if in Arp, both these expressive forms can be considered as essentially complementary, in Dalí, they can be layered one on top of the other, so that reading certain excerpts from his poetry can only enliven the visual imagery of his paintings that dazzles the eye. As long as painting was the first to traverse most of the steps that separated it as expressive mode from poetry, it is important to notice that it was immediately followed by sculpture, as has been attested by the experience of Alberto Giacometti and Hans Arp. It is remarkable that architecture, the most elementary of all art forms, was the first to set out on this journey. It cannot be forgotten how in 1900, architecture and sculpture known as “Modern-style”—despite the exceptionally fierce reaction they met with—overthrew thoroughly our accustomed idea of human buildings in space, expressing with unique, sudden, and utterly unexpected force “the desire for ideal things”, which according to the still valid received notions of the civilised world, should be beyond their scope. The first to express this was Salvador Dalí in 1930: “No other collective effort has managed to create a world of dreams as pure and confusing as those “modern-style” (art-nouveau) buildings which stand beyond the framework of architecture, themselves the true realisations of compressed desires, where the most fierce and cruel automatism painfully betrays the hatred of reality and the need for a haven in an ideal world, just as in the case of infantile neurosis.” It is worth noting that toward the end of the 19th century, an utterly uneducated Frenchman, whose social task was to deliver letters around a few villages of the Drôme department, completely unaided, governed by a faith lasting for over forty years and guided solely by inspiration derived from his dreams, Cheval the postman built a miraculous structure that cannot be attributed any purpose, a structure whose only inhabitable nook was designed only for the wheelbarrow on which he carried his building material, a structure he gave the shiny name of “Ideal Palace.” We can see how concrete irrationality was already in those days striving to break through all the frameworks (the case of Cheval the postman is far from unique), and the stern retort in this field we have hence been given as command is doubtlessly not irrevocable, as it has recently been brought to my attention that in the dorm building of Swiss students at the Parisian Cité universitaire—and it is a building externally complying with all the demands of rationality and dryness required recently, as it is the work of La Corbusier—a hall has been construed whose walls are “irrationally undulated” (!) and designed as backdrop for blown-up photographs of microscopic organisms and details of miniscule animals. It therefore seems to me that the art-form developed in the construction of the magnificent church in Barcelona, made of vegetables and crustaceans, has ever since been plotting its revenge, and that the insurmountable human need, expressed in our time more strongly than ever, the need to spread into other arts what has long been thought the privilege of poetry, will soon overcome the certain routine resistance hidden behind mock utility requirements. Salvador Dalí and I have numerously emphasised the ties connecting “Modern style” and media art, so little known and still so richly educative.
Just as poetry increasingly endeavours to govern according to its own procedure the processes of other arts and be reflected in them, it needs to be assumed it attempts to rid itself of what it suffers from as a relative shortcoming compared to every other art form. Compared to painting and sculpture poetry is at a disadvantage regarding the expression of material reality and the precision of external shapes; compared to music, it finds itself at a disadvantage regarding immediate, captivating communication of emotion. We know what means awareness of this shortcoming forced upon certain poets of the last century, who thought they could subject sense to sound under the pretext of verbal instrumentation, daring merely to compose empty shells of words. The chief error of this position lies I think in underestimating the primary expressive force of poetic speech: this speech needs first of all to be universal. I have never ceased to claim, together with Lautréamont, that “poetry is to be made by all,” and this tenet I would most prefer to be engraved on the gable of the surrealist building, for it clearly contains its necessary counterpart, that is, that poetry is to be heard by all. We do not intend to heighten the barrage separating languages. “After all,” wrote Hegel, “for poetry in the truest sense of the word it is irrelevant whether the poetic work is read in silence or out loud. The poem can also without substantial disturbance be translated into another language or even transferred from verse into prose. Its sound properties can thus be utterly altered.” The error of Stéphane Mallarmé and some symbolist poets had nevertheless the beneficial consequence of evoking a general mistrust of what had hitherto been a subservient and haphazard element, but nonetheless unjustly considered a rudder or brake indispensible for the art of poetry, i.e. of completely external systems such as metre, rhythm, rhyme etc. The poetry that consciously abandoned the hackneyed systems that had become arbitrary, had to replace them with something else; it is known that this necessity, even before Mallarmé, had given us the most beautiful parts of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, as well as almost everything deserving of the name poetry ever since. Here, verbal harmony receives immediately its rights, and what is more, I repeat, the matter of universal speech, to which poets are drawn by their revolutionary resistance, is no longer betrayed. And yet this predilection, expressed by poetry in how at a certain point of its evolution it became dependent on music, is no less distinctive. Equally distinctive is the desire later felt by Apollinaire in his Calligrammes, the desire for an expressive form at once poetic and visual, and for publishing poems of this kind under the title I Too Am a Painter. It is worth emphasising that the seduction experienced by poets in this respect was far more lasting – this seduction was also attractive to Mallarmé, as attested by his last poem, A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, and is still I think very much alive among us. Therefore I for my part believe in the possibility and immense significance of experiments consisting in incorporating within the poem ordinary utilities and other objects, or more precisely, in composing poems where visual elements are placed among words, without however images repeating words. The interplay of words and objects, whose name may or may not be expressed, could give rise to an utterly new, exceptionally exciting feeling in the reader/viewer. In order to contribute to the continuous disturbance of all the senses, a disturbance recommended by Rimbaud and incessantly pursued by surrealism, I think we must not hesitate – for this undertaking can have precisely this effect – to displace the sensation (dépayser la sensation).
I have said that poetry strives at the same time: 1) by its own means, and 2) by new means to achieve the precision of material shapes. The new means of the kind I have just exemplified, however interesting for my considerations here, cannot be utilised unless one has achieved a clear idea of the means peculiar to poetry, and unless one has attempted to exhaust the best these means provide. However, which means are these, which are—and were already in Hegel’s time—essential to poetry? It was necessary 1) that the subject be conceived neither as a rational or speculative idea, nor by way of emotion that cripples speech, nor with the precision of material objects; 2) that the subject be freed, while entering imagination, from strangeness and randomness, which cancels its unity, and from its relative dependency of those parts; 3) that imagination stay free and process everything it envisages as an independent shape. These orders, as you will see, were back then already of such unignorable character that during the last century a whole poetic battle was waged around them.
I have pointed out in my 1932 pamphlet The Poverty of Poetry that the poetic subject, complying with the necessity of increasingly avoiding the form of the real or speculative idea, had to be considered already a century ago a merely indolent matter, and cannot ever since be posited a priori. The subject could not be posited a priori after at least 1869, once Lautréamont uttered in Maldoror the unforgettable sentence: “It is a man or a stone or a tree about to begin the fourth canto. ” The mutual dependence of parts of the poetic discourse has also been continuously attacked and undermined: already in 1875 Rimbaud describes his last poem “The Dream”, a sheer triumph of pantheistic delirium, where the miraculous combines with the everyday, a poem that seems a quintessence of the most secret Elizabethan dramas or the second part of Faust:
DREAM
Someone is hungry in the barracks-room— That is true…
Emanations, explosions, A genius: I am Gruyère! Lefebvre: Keller! The genius: I am Brie! The soldiers carve on their bread: Such is life! The genius: I am Roquefort! —That’ll be the death of us… —I am Gruyère And Brie… Etc…
Waltz
They’ve put me and Lefebvre together… etc… !
Later, Apollinaire blends time and space with pleasure and strives to present the placement and details of the poem in a fashion as ambiguous as possible, to put the poem in relation to a whole series of peculiar signs, in order to erase increasingly the real events conditioning the poem. For instance, in the ultramodern framework of “The Murdered Poet,” that apparition from “another time,” we have monks cultivating the Malvern forest; or take this highly characteristic passage from one of his most beautiful poems:
THE MUSICIAN FROM SAINT-MERRY
I finally have the right to greet beings I do not know […]
On the twenty-first of the month of May, 1913 The ferryman of the dead and the death dealers of Saint-Merry Millions of flies bared a splendor When a man without eyes without a nose and without ears Leaving Sebasto entered the rue Aubry-Ie-Boucher […]
Then elsewhere What time will a train leave for Paris
At this moment The pigeons of the Spice Islands were fertilising nutmegs At the same time Catholic mission of Boma what have you done with the sculptor
In another quarter Compete then, poet, with the labels of perfume manufacturers
In short o laughers you haven’t got much out of men And you have barely extracted a little grease from their misery […]
The connecting link between Rimbaud and Apollinaire, as in so many other similar cases, is impersonated by Alfred Jarry, the first poet thoroughly permeated with the lesson presented by Lautréamont; in Jarry’s work, flaring up and reaching abruptly its decisive point is a struggle between two forces vying, in the Romantic era, for dominance over the arts: on the one hand, the force focussing attention on the events of the outside world; on the other, the force investing interest in the whims of personality. Intimate mutual interpenetration of both these tendencies, which in Lautréamont preserve their relative alternation, climaxes in Jarry’s triumphant objective humour (l’humour objectif), which presents their dialectical solution. Poetry must then willy-nilly pass in its entirety through this new category, which in turn shall blend with another category, in order to be overcome yet again. As an example of pure objective humour, let me adduce this Jarry poem:
FABLE
A can of corned-beef, on a chain like a lorgnette Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother. It was protected by a thick shell On which it was written that inside, like the can of corned-beef, it was boneless, (Boneless and economical); And underneath its curled-up tail It apparently was hiding a key to open it. Smitten with love, the sedentary corned-beef Declared to the little live self-propelling can That if it were willing to acclimate itself Next to it in earthly shop windows, It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.
I have already mentioned that objective humour has preserved to the present day almost all of its communicative value, and it is possible to ascertain that every remarkable work of the past couple of years bears, to a larger or lesser extent, its imprint: suffice it to give you the names of Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel, and later Jacques Vaché and Jacques Rigaud, who even went so far as to propose that this kind of humour should be turned into law. The entire Futurist and Dadaist movements can claim this kind of humour as their essential component. It would be a forgery of history to deny that this humour is a constant ingredient of poetry. It seems to me far more beneficial to search for that new category with which objective humour must blend in order to cease within the arts to be itself. Examining the poetry of the last few years, one can easily observe that nowadays this humour has become eclipsed.
I have already talked about the desire that overcame Apollinaire many times, making him give growth to poetic action out of the matrix of chance and haphazard circumstances: this desire is particularly felt in those of his poems called poems-conversations:
MONDAY ON THE RUE CHRISTINE
The mother of the concierge and the concierge will overlook everything If you’re a man, you’ll come with me tonight One guy would have to hold the door open, that’s all While the other one went upstairs
Three lighted gaslights The owner of the place is a consumptive When you’ve finished we’ll play a game of jaquet An orchestra leader who has a sore throat When you come to Tunis I’ll give you some kif to smoke
That seems to rhyme just fine. Piles of saucers flowers a calendar Bim bam boom I owe 300 damned francs to my landlady I would rather cut off my-that’s exactly right than give them to her
This desire seems to correspond to the return of one of the basic elements of objective humour, i.e. the observation of nature in its haphazard shapes, at the expense of subjective humour, which forms its other ingredient, also the result of the need for the person to reach its highest degree of independence. It is this desire, still quite obscure in Apollinaire, became increasingly powerful and omnipotent, especially by virtue of our reference to automatism which, as you know, has become the fundamental procedure of surrealism. The introduction of psychic automatism into all areas has broadened the field of the immediate arbitrary. After all—and this is crucial—this arbitrariness, once examined, aimed rapidly at denying itself as arbitrary. The attention I have under all circumstances tried to call to certain confusing happenings and exciting coincidences (in books like Nadja and Vases communicants and various later articles) led later on to the positing of the question of objective hazard, through which we very obscurely express the necessity that escapes us, even though we feel it as necessary. This hitherto almost unmapped territory of objective hazard is today, and in my opinion more so than any other, worth continuing in our investigations. It can be found on the very borderline of that area which Dalí consecrated with the effects of paranoiac-critical activity. This field is, after all, is the place of expression that can ignite our spirit, awash with light that can hardly be considered the glare of revelation, and so we find objective humour breaking against its steep walls. Today’s poetry faces this fundamental contradiction, and hence it needs to solve the incongruity in which resides the secret of all movement of progress.
It is necessary, I repeat, for poetic imagination to remain free. The poet keen on expressing himself in a social, constantly developing environment, is to recapture with all the means at his disposal that concrete vitality buried underneath the logical proposals of thought. He is therefore also to deepen the trench separating poetry from prose: the poet has within their power the one and only instrument with which to bore into increasing depths, i.e. the image, and of all the kinds of image, first and foremost the metaphor. The poetic nothingness of the centuries dubbed classical is consequence of the sporadic and timid use of this miraculous instrument. Let me quote Hegel one last time: “These images borrowed from nature, albeit inappropriate for representing thought, can be created with deep feeling, with a particular richness of intuition, or with a brilliant play of humor; and this tendency may develop to the point of endlessly inciting poetry on to ever new inventions.” It is necessary, now more than ever, to recall that poetic imagination, the merciless enemy of prosaic thought, has two other foes: historical narrative and eloquence. As long as imagination is to remain free, it is unconditionally necessary to rid it of the bond of faithfulness to circumstances, and especially to certain intoxicating circumstances of history; furthermore it is necessary for it not bother with whether it is pleasing or convincing, and for it to differentiate itself from eloquence by appearing free of any practical purpose or aim.
Read the following three hitherto unpublished poems, in which deep feeling, richness of intuition and combinatory verve are brought, in my opinion, to unprecedented heights:
THE MASTERS
by Paul Éluard
At the height of the spasms of laughter In a lead washtub How comfortable to have The wings of a dog Which has a live bird in its mouth Are you going to make darkness fall So as to keep that sober look on your face Or are you going to give in to us There is grease on the ceiling Saliva on the window panes The light is horrible
O night lost pearl Blind point of fall where sorrow slaves away
SPEAK TO ME
by Benjamin Péret
Black of smoke animal black black black agreed to meet each other between two monuments to the dead that can pass for my ears where the echo of your ghost voice of sea-mica repeats your name indefinitely that on the contrary so resembles an eclipse of the sun that when you look at me I believe myself to be a lark’s foot in a glacier whose door you would open In the hope of seeing a swallow of burning petrol escape from it but from the lark’s foot a stream of flaming petrol will gush out if you wish it as a swallow wishes for the hour of summer so as to play the music of storms and manufactures it like a fly who dreams of a spider web of sugar in an eye glass sometimes as blue as a falling star reflected by an eye sometimes as green as a spring oozing from a clock
DANDLED BROCHURE
by Salvador Dali
Brochure perditure while unjustly refusing a cup an ordinary Portuguese cup that today is manufactured in a tableware factory for the form of a cup resembles a soft municipal Arab antinomy mounted on the tip of the surrounding countryside like the look of my beautiful Gala the look of my beautiful Gala the smell of a liter like the epithelial tissue of my beautiful Gala her farcical lamplighter tissue
yes I’ll repeat it a thousand times
Brochure perditure while unjustly refusing a cup an ordinary Portuguese cup that today is manufactured in a tableware factory for the form of a cup resembles a soft municipal Arab antinomy mounted on the tip of the surrounding countryside like the look of my beautiful Gala the look of my beautiful Gala the smell of a liter like the epithelial tissue of my beautiful Gala her farcical lamplighter tissue
yes I’ll repeat it a thousand times
I have talked at too great a length of the conditions into whose framework the question of the poem is put historically and gradually, and of the reasons enabling us to claim that surrealism is the only valid solution to this question, for me to now be able to devote as much time in this lecture to the question of the fine arts. A substantial portion of the previous meditations could, after all, be used in this matter equally well. As long as the surrealist visual artist has the privilege of reaching the precision of certain shapes of an object really visible, making it thus necessary to take stock of their direct impact onto the material world, it is nonetheless necessary for me first of all to specify a few things and most importantly to judge several impetuses regarding the alleged idealism to whose pitfalls my opinion reportedly falls prey. In so doing I shall also attempt a brief overview of the surrealist visual method.
The basic critique to which Marx and Engels subjected the materialism of the 18th century is well-known: 1) the old materialist worldview was “mechanical”; 2) it was metaphysical (since their philosophy had an anti-dialectic bent); 3) it did not exclude idealism: idealism dwelt here “above”, in the sphere of social sciences (lack of comprehension of historical materialism). It is nonetheless understood that in all other aspects, Marx and Engels’s agreement with the old materialists is undeniable.[2]
It is not difficult to point out, within the area peculiar to surrealism, the “limits” which demarcate not only its means of expression, but even the thinking of realist writers and artists; to substantiate the historical necessity commanding surrealism to cancel these limits and prove that following this, there can no longer be any discrepancy between old realism and surrealism, as concerns the admission of the existence of reality and the emphasis on its omnipotence. As you will see, contrary to what certain detractors of surrealism may espouse, it can easily be proven that of all specifically intellectual movements so far, surrealism is the only one armed against all the appetites of idealistic imagination; the only one pondering the question of how to settle its debts with “fideism.”[3]
If two intellectual movements as different as realism and surrealism can be shown as parallel and advancing, although only through their negative viewpoints, toward a common goal, then quite clearly, arguments striving to pit the two against each other and proclaim them mutually irresolvable, must fall apart.
In the modern times, painting until recently concerned itself almost exclusively with expressing external relations that last between the “self” and the perception of the external world. The expression of this relation, it turned out, became less and less suitable and brought about more and more disappointment, the more it was forced, running around in vicious circles, to abjure the widening of human consciousness and deepening of the “perception-consciousness” configuration. This system, as it offered itself to us, was a closed one, and with the most interesting possibilities of the artist’s reaction having long been exhausted, all that remained was the eccentric care for deifying the external object, which marks the works of so many of the so-called “realist” painters. Photography, mechanising to the extreme the visual mode of representation, had to inflict on it the mortal blow. Instead of undertaking the forlorn battle with photography, painting had to retreat, hiding behind the necessity of expressing the visual perception of the inner world. It needs to be pointed out that painting was thereby forced to occupy the wasteland which had hitherto been lying barren. One cannot emphasise enough that this exile was the only refuge left for painting. One needs to find out what promises this wasteland held and whether it has kept them.
Since the reflection of the external object has been captured mechanically and its immediate similitude was satisfactory and also indefinitely perfectible, painting found itself forced not to consider henceforth as its goal the representation of this object. (Film caused a similar revolution as regards sculpture.) The only area left for the artist to draw upon has thus remained the realm of pure mental ideas, a realm beyond real perception without overlapping with the sphere of hallucination. I have to admit nonetheless that the boundaries here are poorly demarcated and that every attempt at precise distinction becomes a bone of contention. Importantly, wherever we refer to mental ideals (outside the physical presence of the object), according to Freud we gain sensations in relation to processes developing in the most diverse and deepest layers of our mental apparatus.[4] The artistic search, which is necessarily increasingly systematic, aims to dissolve “Ich” in “Es,” hence trying to allow the pleasure principle dominate the reality principle. It strives gradually to release instinctive stimuli, to destroy the barrier towering above the civilised humanity, a barrier unknown to the primitive or the child. The impact of this point of departure cannot be measured socially, considering on the one hand the general disruption of sensibility—brought about by the broadening of a strong psychic charge with elements of the perception-consciousness system—and the impossibility of returning to a previous state, on the other.
Does this mean that the reality of the exterior world has become suspect for the artist, forced to look for the elements of their own specific action in inner perception? Such statement would imply intellectual poverty or extreme malevolence. It is after all clear enough that neither in the mental nor the physical realm can one speak of “spontaneous procreation.” The seemingly freest works of the surrealist painters cannot come into the world other than by means of their return to “visual remnants” coming from outward perception. Only in working on restructuring these disorganised elements can their demands be expressed in both their individuality and collectivity. The question whether these are painters of genius will be answered judging not so much by the always relative newness of the matter out of which their works are created, but rather by the more and less powerful initiative they take in drawing upon this matter.
And so all of the technical effort of surrealism has from the beginning always consisted in multiplying penetrations into the deepest mental layers. “I mean that it is necessary to be a seer, to make yourself a seer” – at stake has been to discover the means whereby to realise Rimbaud’s creed. First and foremost among these means, whose effectiveness has been fully proven over the past few years, is psychic automatism in all its forms (a whole universe offers itself to the painter, beginning with the painter simply giving in to graphic impulses and ending with the painter rendering faithfully the pictures of the dream) just as the paranoiac-critical activity defined by Salvador Dalí as follows:
A spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations. It is through a clearly paranoiac process, that it has been possible to obtain a double image, that is to say the representation of an object which, without the least figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another object that is absolutely different, one that also is free of any type of deformation or abnormality that would reveal some sort of artificial arrangement.Obtaining such a double image has been made possible thanks to the violence of paranoiac thought which has slyly and skillfully used the necessary quantity of pretexts, coincidences, etc., exploiting them so as to cause the appearance of the second image which, in this case, takes the place of the obsessive idea. The double image (for example, the image of a horse that is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another obsessive idea then being enough to cause a third image to appear (the image of a /ion, for example) and so on until a number of images, limited only by the degree of paranoiac capacity of thought, converge.
It is also well known what a decisive role the “collages” and “frottages” of Max Ernst have played in the field of creating special optical regions. Here is Ernst himself speaking of them:
The research on the mechanism of inspiration that has been fervently pursued by the Surrealists has led to the discovery of certain procedures of a poetic nature that are capable of removing the elaboration of the plastic work from the domain of the so-called conscious faculties. These means (of bewitching reason, taste, and conscious will) have resulted in the rigorous application of the definition of Surrealism to drawing, to painting, and even in a certain degree to photography: these procedures, some of which, collage in particular, were employed before the advent of Surrealism, but were systematized and modified by Surrealism, have allowed certain artists to set down stupefying photographs of their thought and their desires on paper or canvas. Having been called upon to characterize the procedure which was the first to surprise us and put us on the track of several others, I am tempted to consider this procedure to be the exploitation of the fortuitous meeting of two distant realities on an inappropriate plane (this is said as a paraphrase and a generalization of Lautréamont’s famous phrase: “As beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”, or, to use a shorter term, the cultivation of the effects of a systematic bewildering… This procedure, which has been used, modified, and systematized by the Surrealists, both painters and poets, as they went along, has led to one surprise after another since its discovery. Among the finest results that they have been called upon to extract from it, there must be mentioned the creation of what they have called Surrealist objects. A ready-made reality, whose naive purpose seems to have been fixed once and for all (an umbrella), finding itself suddenly in the presence of another very distant and no less absurd reality (a sewing machine), in a place where both must feel out of their element) (on an operating table) will, by this very fact, escape its naive purpose and lose its identity; because of the detour through what is relative, it will pass from absolute falseness to a new absolute that is true and poetic: the umbrella and the sewing machine will make love. The way this procedure works seems to me to be revealed in this very simple example. A complete transmutation followed by a pure act such as love will necessarily be produced every time that the given facts-the coupling of two realities which apparently cannot be coupled on a plane which apparently is not appropriate to them-render conditions favorable. I must also speak of another procedure that I have been led to use through the direct influence of the specific details concerning the mechanism of inspiration to be found in the Manifesto of Surrealism. In my personal evolution this procedure, which is based on nothing other than the intensification of the irritability of the faculties of the mind and which with regard to its technical side I would like to call frottage, has perhaps played a greater role than collage, from which in my opinion it really does not differ fundamentally. Taking as my point of departure a childhood memory in which a mahogany veneer panel opposite my bed had played the role of optical stimulus for a vision while I was half asleep, and finding myself in an inn at the seashore on a rainy day, I was struck by the way that my eyes were obsessively irritated by the ceiling, whose cracks had been accentuated by many cleanings. I then decided to question the symbolism of this obsession, and to aid my reflective and hallucinatory faculties, I got a series of designs out of the boards by randomly covering them with sheets of paper that I began rubbing with a lead pencil. I emphasize the fact that the designs thus obtained progressively lose–through a series of suggestions and transmutations that occur spontaneously, as happens with hypnagogic visions-the character of the material (wood) being questioned and take on the appearance of images of an unexpected preciseness and probably of such a nature as to reveal the prime cause of the obsession or to produce a simulacrum of this cause. My curiosity being aroused and struck with amazement, I came to use the same method to question al/ sorts of materials that happened to enter my visual field: leaves and their veins, the raveled edges of a piece of sacking, the knife-strokes of a “modern” painting, a thread unwound from a spool of thread, etc. I put together the first results obtained by this process of rubbing under the title Histoire naturelle, from Mer, and Pluie, to Eve, the only one that still exists. Later, by restricting my own active participation more and more so as to thereby enlarge the active part of the faculties of the mind, I came to be present like a spectator at the birth of pictures such as Femmes traversant une rivière en criant; Vision provoquée par les mots: Ie père immobile; Homme marchant sur l’eau, prenant par la main une jeune fille et en bousculant une autre; Vision provoquée par une ficelle que j’ai trouvée sur ma table; Vision provoquée par une feuille de buvard; etc.
The surrealist object, as defined by Salvador Dalí, is an “object capable of certain mechanical actions and movements, which is based on phantasms and notions that can be evoked by carrying out unconscious acts.” Such surrealist necessarily appears as a synthesis of this set of captivations and interests. Suffice it to recall that we have conceived of the idea of construing such objects once, as Dalí again has noted,
Giacometti constructed the first mobile and mute object, a suspended ball, an object that already posed all the essential terms of the preceding definition but kept within the means proper to sculpture. Objects with a symbolic function leave no room for formal preoccupations. Corresponding to clearly defined erotic fantasies and desires, they depend only on the amorous imagination of each person and are extra-plastic.
One must not forget that from another perspective, a considerable contribution to this has been made by Marcel Duchamp. As I have pointed out at length in Minotaur (no. 6), an immensely important role here is played by his “ready-mades” (factory-produced objects elevated to the rank of artworks by having been chosen by the artist), by which Duchamp has been almost exlusively expressing himself from 1914 onwards.
In September 1912, in L’introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, I suggested that we create “some of those objects we approximate only in dreams and which evidently can be substantiated neither from the viewpoint of utility nor from the standpoint of décor.” I went on to argue:
Thus one night not long ago I got my hands on a rather curious book in my sleep, in an open air market out toward Saint-MaIo. The spine of this book was formed by a wooden gnome with an Assyrian-style white beard which came down to its feet. The statuette was of normal thickness and yet it in no way Interfered with turning the pages of the book, which were made of thick black wool. I hastened to acquire it, and when I woke up I regretted not finding it near me. It would be relatively easy to re-create it. I should like to put a few objects of this sort In circulation, for their fate seems to me to be eminently problematical and disturbing…
Who knows—perhaps I would thereby help to ruin those concrete trophies that are so detestable, and throw greater discredit on “reasonable” beings and objects. There would be cleverly constructed machines that would have no use; minutely detailed maps of immense cities would be drawn up, cities which, however many we are, we would feel forever incapable of founding, but which would at least classify present and future capitals. Absurd, highly perfected automata, which would do nothing the way anyone else does, would be responsible for giving us a correct Idea of action.
It is fairly easy to measure the distance we have traversed in this direction so far.
If one predetermines the goal one seeks to achieve (insofar as this goal falls within the realm of knowledge) and if one adjusts to this goal one’s rational means, this in itself constitutes sufficient refutation of any accusation of mysticism. I posit that mimetic art (depicting places, impressions and external objects) is obsolescent and that the task of today’s art is to present an increasingly accurate depiction of mental notions, this by concerted exercise of imagination and memory. (Clearly, the matter used by these mental notions can be inadvertently accumulated by external stimuli and perceptions.) The biggest success of surrealism so far has been to reconcile dialectically two notions which, for an adult person, are implacable opposites—perception and representation—and to build a bridge over the abyss that separated them. Surrealist painting and constructions of surrealist objects enable us already to organise objective tendencies around the subjective features of perceptions. These perceptions, by their very tendency to assert themselves as objective, are of an epochal character and revolutionary in the sense of calling for something to correspond to them in outer reality. It can be surmised that, by and large, this something will be.
[1] Breton is here quoting from Charles Bénard’s “Introduction” to his two-volume version of G.W.F. Hegel’s Poétique, an extract from the Aesthetics, supplemented by texts from the German romantics such as Schiller, Goethe and Jean-Paul Richter.
[2] Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, chap. IV.7.
[3] “Fideism: a doctrine that replaces science with faith, or more broadly, accords faith a certain importance” (Lenin).
Surrealism and the art of making surrealist objects
Poetry must be made by all, not by one.
Comte de Lautréamont
In poetry and in painting, Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase these short circuits. It believes, and it will never believe in anything more wholeheartedly, in reproducing artificially this ideal moment when man, in the grips of a particular emotion, is suddenly seized by this something “stronger than himself” which projects him, in self-defense,
into immortality.
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)
I posit that mimetic art (depicting places, impressions and external objects) is obsolescent and that the task of today’s art is to present an increasingly accurate depiction of mental notions, this by concerted exercise of imagination and memory. (Clearly, the matter used by these mental notions can be inadvertently accumulated by external stimuli and perceptions.) The biggest success of surrealism so far has been to reconcile dialectically two notions which, for an adult person, are implacable opposites—perception and representation—and to build a bridge over the abyss that separated them. Surrealist painting and constructions of surrealist objects enable us already to organise objective tendencies around the subjective features of perceptions. These perceptions, by their very tendency to assert themselves as objective, are of an epochal character and revolutionary in the sense of calling for something to correspond to them in outer reality. It can be surmised that, by and large, this something will be.
André Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object (1935)
It was André Breton’s contention that Surrealism was an endeavour or practice of “going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Or, as he also says, “the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone … .” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) For many, this would translate into a particular kind of art; inevitably, into some kind of aesthetic object, whether a poem, a painting, a sculpture, and the like. The movement could then be catalogued by the kind of art that it created, in different media, with their different qualities, marking it off thereby specifically as surrealist art.
Yet nothing could be further from the aims of the Surrealists, even if the sort of judgement mentioned above was and is very often made regarding Surrealism as a movement.
Breton stated repeatedly and categorically that he “did not believe in the establishment of a conventional Surrealist pattern any time in the near future.” (Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) Indeed, how could he have believed otherwise given that the sources of the imagination in the human psyche and the world could potentially express themselves in an infinite variety of ways.
“Surrealism set out to deal with the [general] problem of human expression in all its forms“, whether in the domain of the “arts”, or in that of “social action”. (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930) But in whatever the domain, some kind of “object” results, some-thing or some-way is expressed by someone, an “object” that is “the possibility of a very obscure reconciliation between what he knew he had to say [do, make, create] with what, on the same subject, he didn’t know he had to say [do, make, create] and nonetheless said [did, made, created]. The most controlled thought is incapable of doing without this aid, which, from the viewpoint of rigor, is undesirable.” (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)
We are forcing the argument, perhaps – or not -, but the idea is beautifully simple: the Surrealists understood the limitations of the realistic or positivistic attitude as both fetishistic and mutilating; fetishistic, because it reifies an essentially calculating and instrumentalising vision-intervention in the world, with all of its accompanying categorical divisions and hierarchies of reality, and mutilating, because it congeals these categorical distinctions in a false objectivity (including the “objectivity” of an isolated, translucent, “subjectivity” or “self”), rendering them immune to criticism and fatal to the human imagination, the source of both “objectivity” and “subjectivity”. The plane of the surreal is the overcoming of the maddening dualisms that are our prison and the surrealist object is that which is expressed-created consciously upon the grounds of what is not conscious.
The extraordinary challenge or invitation that the surrealists make to all of us is that of finding forms of expression, creation, in all of the spheres of life, that are both consciously understood as creations and recognised as beyond full conscious or rational control. It is precisely in this “obscure reconciliation” that the imagination can freely play among its marvelous creations.
Breton will state this thesis with great rigour in the essay that we share below of 1935, Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object. At one point in the text, comparing painting to poetry, he says of the former something that can be extended in turn to all surreal expression.
“Painting, freed from its duty to represent substances and shapes derived from the outside world, profits from the only exterior element no art can fully do without, i.e. interior representation (la représentation intérieure), from an image residing in spirit. It confronts this interior representation with the representation of concrete forms of the real world, striving—just as Picasso’s painting has done—to capture the object in its generality. Once that has been attained, it attempts the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the (relatively) exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness.”
Let us again translate this into a more general language (with all of the risks involved): to express or create surreally is to confront representations/images of the concrete forms of the world with interior representations/images, generating thereby a representation/image of those concrete forms in their generality, a generality which can only exist in relationship to the “inner world of consciousness”. And all of this creative, sublimating or transubstantiating, activity is the work of the free imagination, conscious and unconscious.
In other words, it is we who generalise. We do so however through images, metaphors, representations, that defy any logical strictures or conscious transparency, and which are the children of our own minds. There is nothing solid in our surreal makings; nor do we fully know why we have made things as they are. But make them we do and what distinguishes the surrealist from everyone else is that s/he creates worlds knowing them to be created and knowing them to have been born and to exist beyond anything that s/he can completely control, rooted as our creations are in the passions and the imagination.
Can one then think of anarchism, or the creations of anarchists, in the same manner?
Surrealist Situation of the Object/Situation of the Surrealist Object (1935)
(Lecture presented on 29 March 1935, at the Mánes Gallery in Prague and, later on, at the end of April in Zurich. This translation departs from the Czech translation of the original version delivered in Prague. In the French original, the lecture was published in André Breton, Position politique du surrealisme (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1935). Translated by David Vichnar. Source: Equus Press, in four parts: 08/12/2017; 18/12/2017; 03/01/2018; 13/01/2028.)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Comrades,
I am greatly delighted to speak to you in a city outside France which yesterday was still unknown to me, but which of all the cities I had not visited, was nevertheless the least unfamiliar to me. Prague, adorned with her legendary charms, is truly one of those cities that electively pin down poetic thought, which is always more or less adrift in space.
Regardless of the various geographical, historical or economic considerations that this city and the customs of its inhabitants may evoke in me, when seen from afar, with that unique and dense bristling of her towers, Prague seems to me to be the magical capital of old Europe. By the fact that within herself, Prague preserves all the spells of the past for the imagination, it seems to me less difficult for me to make myself understood in this corner of the world than anywhere else, since if I am to speak to you on the subjects of poetry and surrealist art, I present to your judgment the very possibility of the present and past enchantment. “The artistic object,” as has been correctly observed, “is situated between the emotional and the rational realm. It is something spiritual which appears as material. When addressing senses and the imagination, art and poetry create deliberately a world of shadows, spectres and figments of phantasy, and therefore cannot be charged with ineptitude or incapability of creating anything but shapes without reality.”[1] It is my especial delight to introduce, under Prague’s skies, the world of new shadows known under the title of surrealism. I have to admit that it is not only the colour of Prague’s sky, which from afar seems to be more scintillating than many another, that makes this task of mine exceptionally easier: for many years now, I have also been fully aware of a perfect mental togetherness with people such as Vít?zslav Nezval and Karel Teige, whose trust and friendship I treasure dearly. It is thanks to their care that all pertaining to the beginnings and further development of the surrealist movement, which they keep under close and continuous scrutiny, has been elucidated in Prague. Surrealism, most vigorously interpreted by Teige and endowed with the all-powerful lyrical impetus by Nezval, can today boast of the same development in Prague as in Paris. Therefore, first of all, I salute our friends and collaborators in Prague: Štyrský, Toyen, Biebl, Makovský, Honzl, Brouk, and Ježek, not to forget Šíma, who accompanied Paul Éluard and myself on our way to Prague. My heinous ignorance of your language forces me to follow the work of many of these friends by means of translation. I should like to seize the opportunity to hail the work of Toyen, Štyrský and Makovský, which presents a wholly original contribution and at which I could marvel immediately upon my arrival in Prague. Their work has given me a new reason to hope that surrealism, today more than ever, is on its way toward discoveries, on its way of truth.
I shall like to emphasise that the activity of all whose names I have just provided is in no way distinct from mine, and that by virtue of the ever-closer ties connecting us together, just as they connect us to very mobile groups of poets and artists that have established or are in the process of establishing themselves in every country, we will be able to set in motion a truly concentrated movement. This needs to be accomplished if we wish surrealism to speak internationally some time soon, as the ruler of an area proper to it, where even those complaining that surrealism is nothing but symptom of the current momentous social evil, are now willing to admit that nothing of at least some significance can be pitted against it.
In your country, texts have been published that were written with such wonderful understanding and precise documentation as “The World of Smells” by Karel Teige, or his studies on Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Apollinaire, there have also been Czech translations of two of my works, Nadja and Vases communicants; our friends have organised, in Prague and other cities, a few discussions and conflicting lectures, a proceedings from the debates to which surrealism has recently given rise has been published under the title Surrealism in Discussion,[2] a few visual-arts and sculpture exhibitions have taken place, forthcoming is the periodical publication of Surrealism review, edited by Vít?zslav Nezval. Accepting the invitation of the “Mánes” artistic group, I therefore believed myself fortunate enough to be able to talk to an informed audience. I think I can be exempt from the task of having to adumbrate for you the history of the surrealist movement since 1920 to the present. Thus, I shall address immediately my topic at hand.
I shall remind you that in a lecture delivered ten months ago in Brussels (in June 1934), I briefly mentioned that a fundamental crisis in the object was taking place in the wake of surrealism. What I said then was as follows,
We shall see that, over the past ten months, this conclusion has lost none of its relevance. A few days ago, we have concurred that a highly suggestive proposal presented by Man Ray, deserves careful study. Before dealing with this proposal, I have to pinpoint that the greatest danger surrounding surrealism today consists in how, thanks to the world-wide, precipitate and sudden spread of surrealism—against our will, the name has caught on much faster than the idea—more and less successful products of all sorts are endeavouring to self-apply this label: thus, works of “abstractivist tendencies” in Holland, Switzerland and most recently in England, have been trying to form ambiguous neighbourly relations with surrealist works, so it could come to pass that an unnamed Mr Cocteau could infiltrate surrealist exhibitions in America and surrealist publications in Japan. In order to avoid similar misunderstandings, or to forestall any repetition of such coarse misuse, it is indispensably and urgently necessary to demarcate a line between what is surrealist by its essence, and what wants to pose as surrealist, for advertising or other reasons. It would be ideal if every authentically surrealist thing could be recognised by an external marker: Man Ray has thought of providing all of them with a seal or a stamp: just as a viewer can read on the cinema screen the inscription, “Film by Paramount” (without in this case assuming the unsatisfactory guarantee, quality-wise, of what follows), an uninitiated reader or audience member could find, added to a poem, book, painting, statue, building, an inimitable, indelible tag saying: “This is a surrealist object.” I repeat I immediately found this idea very ingenious and feasible; if in Man Ray’s formulation, it is not devoid of subtle humour, this does not make it the less effective. Supposing it can be put to effect correctly, it is hard to believe judgment regarding whether to accord any given work this label would be, even to a negligible degree, arbitrary. The best way toward agreement seems to me to be to determine the exact situation of the surrealist object. It goes without saying that this situation is correlative to another; it is correlative to the surrealist situation of the object. Only once we have understood the way surrealism introduces the object as such—this table, the photograph in that man’s pocket, the tree in the moment of getting hit by lightning, the aurora, or (if we are to venture into the realm of the impossible) the flying lion—can we raise the question of how to define the place to be taken up by the surrealist object in order for this classification to be justified.
It is never superfluous to return to a reminder that already Hegel in his Aesthetics dealt with all the issues that can be now considered the most difficult in the realms of poetry and art, and that he managed to solve most of these troubles with exemplary clairvoyance. Given that in many countries Hegel’s brilliant work is not known in its entirety, it is possible that various hack obscurantists still find in such problems reasons for concern or pretexts for continuous strife. Moreover, given that too many Marxists are too blind in submitting to the letter and not the spirit of what they generally interpret as Marx’s or Engels’ thought makes it possible for the Soviet art politics and the educational organisations under its supervision in other countries to join their plaintive voices with those of the former times and renew, or what is worse, stir up debates that have, I repeat, since Hegel’s time been utterly impertinent. You quote Hegel and see immediately how the revolutionary circles knit their brows. What, Hegel, whose dialectics walked on its head?! You fall under suspicion and – since Marxist theses on poetry and art, actually quite scarce and unconvincing, were all drafted long after Marx – the first smart-aleck can win the day by throwing at you catchphrases regarding “militant literature and painting”, “class content”, etc.
Still, Hegel came and, I would fain say like the defendant in that famous dispute could remark about the Earth “And yet it moves”, settled in advance those vain conflicts waged against us now. His views on poetry and art, the only ones so far to result from an encyclopaedic culture, are first of all the views of a miraculous historian; no prejudice departing from the system can distort them a priori, and even if so this prejudice can after all be detected during the process and thus cannot, in the eyes of the surrealist reader, lead to more than a few easily redressed errors. What is essential is that this truly unique collection of knowledge was set into motion and subjected to the workings of a machine then utterly novel—for indeed Hegel was its inventor—whose power turned out unique, i.e. the machine of dialectics. I emphasise again that the question of whether or not the surrealist activity is well or poorly grounded needs to be addressed to Hegel. Only Hegel can say if this activity had been predestined in time, only Hegel can let us know if it has any hopes for the future, and whether its duration will be counted in days or in centuries.
First of all, it is needful to recall that Hegel puts poetry above all other arts; according to him, arts form a hierarchy from the poorest to the richest in the following order: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Hegel, who regarded poetry as “the real art of the spirit”, the only “universal art” capable of producing in its own realm all modes of expression belonging to other arts, divined very precisely today’s fate of poetry. Hegel undertook a monumental elucidation of how poetry, in its effort over time to gradually surpass other arts, evinces an increasingly contradictory need 1) by its own means 2) by new means to achieve the precision of material shapes. Perfectly devoid of touch with the burdensome matter, enjoying the privilege of depicting materially and spiritually consequent states of life, and realising thanks to imagination the perfect synthesis of sound and thought, poetry has never, since its romantic liberation, renounced its supremacy over other arts; it keeps permeating them and delineating within them an area larger by the day. It seems it is indeed in the realm of fine arts that poetry has found the broadest field of activity for itself: it has settled in so firmly there that fine arts can nowadays make the high claim of sharing poetry’s widest goal, which according to Hegel lies in revealing to our consciousness the potencies of spiritual life. In the present moment there is no fundamental difference between a Paul Éluard or Benjamin Péret poem and a Max Ernst, Juan Miró or Yves Tanguy picture. Painting, freed from its duty to represent substances and shapes derived from the outside world, profits from the only exterior element no art can fully do without, i.e. interior representation (la représentation intérieure), from an image residing in spirit. It confronts this interior representation with the representation of concrete forms of the real world, striving—just as Picasso’s painting has done—to capture the object in its generality. Once that has been attained, it attempts the sublime procedure which lies at the heart of poetics: it seeks to exclude the (relatively) exterior object as such and to view nature solely in its relation to the inner world of consciousness. Both art forms, poetry and painting, endeavour a fusion so close that it matters little to a Hans Arp or a Salvador Dalí whether their form of expression is the poetic or the painterly one, and if in Arp, both these expressive forms can be considered as essentially complementary, in Dalí, they can be layered one on top of the other, so that reading certain excerpts from his poetry can only enliven the visual imagery of his paintings that dazzles the eye. As long as painting was the first to traverse most of the steps that separated it as expressive mode from poetry, it is important to notice that it was immediately followed by sculpture, as has been attested by the experience of Alberto Giacometti and Hans Arp. It is remarkable that architecture, the most elementary of all art forms, was the first to set out on this journey. It cannot be forgotten how in 1900, architecture and sculpture known as “Modern-style”—despite the exceptionally fierce reaction they met with—overthrew thoroughly our accustomed idea of human buildings in space, expressing with unique, sudden, and utterly unexpected force “the desire for ideal things”, which according to the still valid received notions of the civilised world, should be beyond their scope. The first to express this was Salvador Dalí in 1930: “No other collective effort has managed to create a world of dreams as pure and confusing as those “modern-style” (art-nouveau) buildings which stand beyond the framework of architecture, themselves the true realisations of compressed desires, where the most fierce and cruel automatism painfully betrays the hatred of reality and the need for a haven in an ideal world, just as in the case of infantile neurosis.” It is worth noting that toward the end of the 19th century, an utterly uneducated Frenchman, whose social task was to deliver letters around a few villages of the Drôme department, completely unaided, governed by a faith lasting for over forty years and guided solely by inspiration derived from his dreams, Cheval the postman built a miraculous structure that cannot be attributed any purpose, a structure whose only inhabitable nook was designed only for the wheelbarrow on which he carried his building material, a structure he gave the shiny name of “Ideal Palace.” We can see how concrete irrationality was already in those days striving to break through all the frameworks (the case of Cheval the postman is far from unique), and the stern retort in this field we have hence been given as command is doubtlessly not irrevocable, as it has recently been brought to my attention that in the dorm building of Swiss students at the Parisian Cité universitaire—and it is a building externally complying with all the demands of rationality and dryness required recently, as it is the work of La Corbusier—a hall has been construed whose walls are “irrationally undulated” (!) and designed as backdrop for blown-up photographs of microscopic organisms and details of miniscule animals. It therefore seems to me that the art-form developed in the construction of the magnificent church in Barcelona, made of vegetables and crustaceans, has ever since been plotting its revenge, and that the insurmountable human need, expressed in our time more strongly than ever, the need to spread into other arts what has long been thought the privilege of poetry, will soon overcome the certain routine resistance hidden behind mock utility requirements. Salvador Dalí and I have numerously emphasised the ties connecting “Modern style” and media art, so little known and still so richly educative.
Just as poetry increasingly endeavours to govern according to its own procedure the processes of other arts and be reflected in them, it needs to be assumed it attempts to rid itself of what it suffers from as a relative shortcoming compared to every other art form. Compared to painting and sculpture poetry is at a disadvantage regarding the expression of material reality and the precision of external shapes; compared to music, it finds itself at a disadvantage regarding immediate, captivating communication of emotion. We know what means awareness of this shortcoming forced upon certain poets of the last century, who thought they could subject sense to sound under the pretext of verbal instrumentation, daring merely to compose empty shells of words. The chief error of this position lies I think in underestimating the primary expressive force of poetic speech: this speech needs first of all to be universal. I have never ceased to claim, together with Lautréamont, that “poetry is to be made by all,” and this tenet I would most prefer to be engraved on the gable of the surrealist building, for it clearly contains its necessary counterpart, that is, that poetry is to be heard by all. We do not intend to heighten the barrage separating languages. “After all,” wrote Hegel, “for poetry in the truest sense of the word it is irrelevant whether the poetic work is read in silence or out loud. The poem can also without substantial disturbance be translated into another language or even transferred from verse into prose. Its sound properties can thus be utterly altered.” The error of Stéphane Mallarmé and some symbolist poets had nevertheless the beneficial consequence of evoking a general mistrust of what had hitherto been a subservient and haphazard element, but nonetheless unjustly considered a rudder or brake indispensible for the art of poetry, i.e. of completely external systems such as metre, rhythm, rhyme etc. The poetry that consciously abandoned the hackneyed systems that had become arbitrary, had to replace them with something else; it is known that this necessity, even before Mallarmé, had given us the most beautiful parts of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror, as well as almost everything deserving of the name poetry ever since. Here, verbal harmony receives immediately its rights, and what is more, I repeat, the matter of universal speech, to which poets are drawn by their revolutionary resistance, is no longer betrayed. And yet this predilection, expressed by poetry in how at a certain point of its evolution it became dependent on music, is no less distinctive. Equally distinctive is the desire later felt by Apollinaire in his Calligrammes, the desire for an expressive form at once poetic and visual, and for publishing poems of this kind under the title I Too Am a Painter. It is worth emphasising that the seduction experienced by poets in this respect was far more lasting – this seduction was also attractive to Mallarmé, as attested by his last poem, A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, and is still I think very much alive among us. Therefore I for my part believe in the possibility and immense significance of experiments consisting in incorporating within the poem ordinary utilities and other objects, or more precisely, in composing poems where visual elements are placed among words, without however images repeating words. The interplay of words and objects, whose name may or may not be expressed, could give rise to an utterly new, exceptionally exciting feeling in the reader/viewer. In order to contribute to the continuous disturbance of all the senses, a disturbance recommended by Rimbaud and incessantly pursued by surrealism, I think we must not hesitate – for this undertaking can have precisely this effect – to displace the sensation (dépayser la sensation).
I have said that poetry strives at the same time: 1) by its own means, and 2) by new means to achieve the precision of material shapes. The new means of the kind I have just exemplified, however interesting for my considerations here, cannot be utilised unless one has achieved a clear idea of the means peculiar to poetry, and unless one has attempted to exhaust the best these means provide. However, which means are these, which are—and were already in Hegel’s time—essential to poetry? It was necessary 1) that the subject be conceived neither as a rational or speculative idea, nor by way of emotion that cripples speech, nor with the precision of material objects; 2) that the subject be freed, while entering imagination, from strangeness and randomness, which cancels its unity, and from its relative dependency of those parts; 3) that imagination stay free and process everything it envisages as an independent shape. These orders, as you will see, were back then already of such unignorable character that during the last century a whole poetic battle was waged around them.
I have pointed out in my 1932 pamphlet The Poverty of Poetry that the poetic subject, complying with the necessity of increasingly avoiding the form of the real or speculative idea, had to be considered already a century ago a merely indolent matter, and cannot ever since be posited a priori. The subject could not be posited a priori after at least 1869, once Lautréamont uttered in Maldoror the unforgettable sentence: “It is a man or a stone or a tree about to begin the fourth canto. ” The mutual dependence of parts of the poetic discourse has also been continuously attacked and undermined: already in 1875 Rimbaud describes his last poem “The Dream”, a sheer triumph of pantheistic delirium, where the miraculous combines with the everyday, a poem that seems a quintessence of the most secret Elizabethan dramas or the second part of Faust:
DREAM
Someone is hungry in the barracks-room—
That is true…
Emanations, explosions,
A genius: I am Gruyère!
Lefebvre: Keller!
The genius: I am Brie!
The soldiers carve on their bread:
Such is life!
The genius: I am Roquefort!
—That’ll be the death of us…
—I am Gruyère
And Brie… Etc…
Waltz
They’ve put me and Lefebvre together… etc… !
Later, Apollinaire blends time and space with pleasure and strives to present the placement and details of the poem in a fashion as ambiguous as possible, to put the poem in relation to a whole series of peculiar signs, in order to erase increasingly the real events conditioning the poem. For instance, in the ultramodern framework of “The Murdered Poet,” that apparition from “another time,” we have monks cultivating the Malvern forest; or take this highly characteristic passage from one of his most beautiful poems:
THE MUSICIAN FROM SAINT-MERRY
I finally have the right to greet beings I do
not know […]
On the twenty-first of the month of May, 1913
The ferryman of the dead and the death dealers
of Saint-Merry Millions of flies bared a splendor
When a man without eyes without a nose and
without ears
Leaving Sebasto entered the rue Aubry-Ie-Boucher […]
Then elsewhere
What time will a train leave for Paris
At this moment
The pigeons of the Spice Islands were fertilising
nutmegs
At the same time
Catholic mission of Boma what have you done with
the sculptor
In another quarter
Compete then, poet, with the labels of perfume
manufacturers
In short o laughers you haven’t got much out
of men
And you have barely extracted a little grease
from their misery […]
The connecting link between Rimbaud and Apollinaire, as in so many other similar cases, is impersonated by Alfred Jarry, the first poet thoroughly permeated with the lesson presented by Lautréamont; in Jarry’s work, flaring up and reaching abruptly its decisive point is a struggle between two forces vying, in the Romantic era, for dominance over the arts: on the one hand, the force focussing attention on the events of the outside world; on the other, the force investing interest in the whims of personality. Intimate mutual interpenetration of both these tendencies, which in Lautréamont preserve their relative alternation, climaxes in Jarry’s triumphant objective humour (l’humour objectif), which presents their dialectical solution. Poetry must then willy-nilly pass in its entirety through this new category, which in turn shall blend with another category, in order to be overcome yet again. As an example of pure objective humour, let me adduce this Jarry poem:
FABLE
A can of corned-beef, on a chain like a lorgnette
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like
a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside, like the can
of corned-beef, it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned-beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.
I have already mentioned that objective humour has preserved to the present day almost all of its communicative value, and it is possible to ascertain that every remarkable work of the past couple of years bears, to a larger or lesser extent, its imprint: suffice it to give you the names of Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel, and later Jacques Vaché and Jacques Rigaud, who even went so far as to propose that this kind of humour should be turned into law. The entire Futurist and Dadaist movements can claim this kind of humour as their essential component. It would be a forgery of history to deny that this humour is a constant ingredient of poetry. It seems to me far more beneficial to search for that new category with which objective humour must blend in order to cease within the arts to be itself. Examining the poetry of the last few years, one can easily observe that nowadays this humour has become eclipsed.
I have already talked about the desire that overcame Apollinaire many times, making him give growth to poetic action out of the matrix of chance and haphazard circumstances: this desire is particularly felt in those of his poems called poems-conversations:
MONDAY ON THE RUE CHRISTINE
The mother of the concierge and the concierge will overlook everything
If you’re a man, you’ll come with me tonight
One guy would have to hold the door open, that’s all
While the other one went upstairs
Three lighted gaslights
The owner of the place is a consumptive
When you’ve finished we’ll play a game of jaquet
An orchestra leader who has a sore throat
When you come to Tunis I’ll give you some kif to smoke
That seems to rhyme just fine.
Piles of saucers flowers a calendar
Bim bam boom
I owe 300 damned francs to my landlady
I would rather cut off my-that’s exactly right
than give them to her
This desire seems to correspond to the return of one of the basic elements of objective humour, i.e. the observation of nature in its haphazard shapes, at the expense of subjective humour, which forms its other ingredient, also the result of the need for the person to reach its highest degree of independence. It is this desire, still quite obscure in Apollinaire, became increasingly powerful and omnipotent, especially by virtue of our reference to automatism which, as you know, has become the fundamental procedure of surrealism. The introduction of psychic automatism into all areas has broadened the field of the immediate arbitrary. After all—and this is crucial—this arbitrariness, once examined, aimed rapidly at denying itself as arbitrary. The attention I have under all circumstances tried to call to certain confusing happenings and exciting coincidences (in books like Nadja and Vases communicants and various later articles) led later on to the positing of the question of objective hazard, through which we very obscurely express the necessity that escapes us, even though we feel it as necessary. This hitherto almost unmapped territory of objective hazard is today, and in my opinion more so than any other, worth continuing in our investigations. It can be found on the very borderline of that area which Dalí consecrated with the effects of paranoiac-critical activity. This field is, after all, is the place of expression that can ignite our spirit, awash with light that can hardly be considered the glare of revelation, and so we find objective humour breaking against its steep walls. Today’s poetry faces this fundamental contradiction, and hence it needs to solve the incongruity in which resides the secret of all movement of progress.
It is necessary, I repeat, for poetic imagination to remain free. The poet keen on expressing himself in a social, constantly developing environment, is to recapture with all the means at his disposal that concrete vitality buried underneath the logical proposals of thought. He is therefore also to deepen the trench separating poetry from prose: the poet has within their power the one and only instrument with which to bore into increasing depths, i.e. the image, and of all the kinds of image, first and foremost the metaphor. The poetic nothingness of the centuries dubbed classical is consequence of the sporadic and timid use of this miraculous instrument. Let me quote Hegel one last time: “These images borrowed from nature, albeit inappropriate for representing thought, can be created with deep feeling, with a particular richness of intuition, or with a brilliant play of humor; and this tendency may develop to the point of endlessly inciting poetry on to ever new inventions.” It is necessary, now more than ever, to recall that poetic imagination, the merciless enemy of prosaic thought, has two other foes: historical narrative and eloquence. As long as imagination is to remain free, it is unconditionally necessary to rid it of the bond of faithfulness to circumstances, and especially to certain intoxicating circumstances of history; furthermore it is necessary for it not bother with whether it is pleasing or convincing, and for it to differentiate itself from eloquence by appearing free of any practical purpose or aim.
Read the following three hitherto unpublished poems, in which deep feeling, richness of intuition and combinatory verve are brought, in my opinion, to unprecedented heights:
THE MASTERS
by Paul Éluard
At the height of the spasms of laughter
In a lead washtub
How comfortable to have
The wings of a dog
Which has a live bird in its mouth
Are you going to make darkness fall
So as to keep that sober look on your face
Or are you going to give in to us
There is grease on the ceiling
Saliva on the window panes
The light is horrible
O night lost pearl
Blind point of fall where sorrow slaves away
SPEAK TO ME
by Benjamin Péret
Black of smoke animal black black black
agreed to meet each other between two monuments to the dead
that can pass for my ears
where the echo of your ghost voice of sea-mica
repeats your name indefinitely
that on the contrary so resembles an eclipse of the sun
that when you look at me I believe myself to be
a lark’s foot in a glacier whose door you would open
In the hope of seeing a swallow of burning petrol escape from it
but from the lark’s foot a stream of flaming petrol will gush out
if you wish it
as a swallow
wishes for the hour of summer so as to play the music of storms
and manufactures it like a fly
who dreams of a spider web of sugar
in an eye glass
sometimes as blue as a falling star reflected by an eye
sometimes as green as a spring oozing from a clock
DANDLED BROCHURE
by Salvador Dali
Brochure perditure
while unjustly refusing
a cup
an ordinary Portuguese cup
that today is manufactured
in a tableware factory
for the form of a cup
resembles
a soft municipal Arab antinomy
mounted on the tip of the surrounding countryside
like the look of my beautiful Gala
the look of my beautiful Gala
the smell of a liter
like the epithelial tissue of my beautiful Gala
her farcical lamplighter tissue
yes I’ll repeat it a thousand times
Brochure perditure
while unjustly refusing
a cup
an ordinary Portuguese cup
that today is manufactured
in a tableware factory
for the form of a cup
resembles
a soft municipal Arab antinomy
mounted on the tip of the surrounding countryside
like the look of my beautiful Gala
the look of my beautiful Gala
the smell of a liter
like the epithelial tissue of my beautiful Gala
her farcical lamplighter tissue
yes I’ll repeat it a thousand times
I have talked at too great a length of the conditions into whose framework the question of the poem is put historically and gradually, and of the reasons enabling us to claim that surrealism is the only valid solution to this question, for me to now be able to devote as much time in this lecture to the question of the fine arts. A substantial portion of the previous meditations could, after all, be used in this matter equally well. As long as the surrealist visual artist has the privilege of reaching the precision of certain shapes of an object really visible, making it thus necessary to take stock of their direct impact onto the material world, it is nonetheless necessary for me first of all to specify a few things and most importantly to judge several impetuses regarding the alleged idealism to whose pitfalls my opinion reportedly falls prey. In so doing I shall also attempt a brief overview of the surrealist visual method.
The basic critique to which Marx and Engels subjected the materialism of the 18th century is well-known: 1) the old materialist worldview was “mechanical”; 2) it was metaphysical (since their philosophy had an anti-dialectic bent); 3) it did not exclude idealism: idealism dwelt here “above”, in the sphere of social sciences (lack of comprehension of historical materialism). It is nonetheless understood that in all other aspects, Marx and Engels’s agreement with the old materialists is undeniable.[2]
It is not difficult to point out, within the area peculiar to surrealism, the “limits” which demarcate not only its means of expression, but even the thinking of realist writers and artists; to substantiate the historical necessity commanding surrealism to cancel these limits and prove that following this, there can no longer be any discrepancy between old realism and surrealism, as concerns the admission of the existence of reality and the emphasis on its omnipotence. As you will see, contrary to what certain detractors of surrealism may espouse, it can easily be proven that of all specifically intellectual movements so far, surrealism is the only one armed against all the appetites of idealistic imagination; the only one pondering the question of how to settle its debts with “fideism.”[3]
If two intellectual movements as different as realism and surrealism can be shown as parallel and advancing, although only through their negative viewpoints, toward a common goal, then quite clearly, arguments striving to pit the two against each other and proclaim them mutually irresolvable, must fall apart.
In the modern times, painting until recently concerned itself almost exclusively with expressing external relations that last between the “self” and the perception of the external world. The expression of this relation, it turned out, became less and less suitable and brought about more and more disappointment, the more it was forced, running around in vicious circles, to abjure the widening of human consciousness and deepening of the “perception-consciousness” configuration. This system, as it offered itself to us, was a closed one, and with the most interesting possibilities of the artist’s reaction having long been exhausted, all that remained was the eccentric care for deifying the external object, which marks the works of so many of the so-called “realist” painters. Photography, mechanising to the extreme the visual mode of representation, had to inflict on it the mortal blow. Instead of undertaking the forlorn battle with photography, painting had to retreat, hiding behind the necessity of expressing the visual perception of the inner world. It needs to be pointed out that painting was thereby forced to occupy the wasteland which had hitherto been lying barren. One cannot emphasise enough that this exile was the only refuge left for painting. One needs to find out what promises this wasteland held and whether it has kept them.
Since the reflection of the external object has been captured mechanically and its immediate similitude was satisfactory and also indefinitely perfectible, painting found itself forced not to consider henceforth as its goal the representation of this object. (Film caused a similar revolution as regards sculpture.) The only area left for the artist to draw upon has thus remained the realm of pure mental ideas, a realm beyond real perception without overlapping with the sphere of hallucination. I have to admit nonetheless that the boundaries here are poorly demarcated and that every attempt at precise distinction becomes a bone of contention. Importantly, wherever we refer to mental ideals (outside the physical presence of the object), according to Freud we gain sensations in relation to processes developing in the most diverse and deepest layers of our mental apparatus.[4] The artistic search, which is necessarily increasingly systematic, aims to dissolve “Ich” in “Es,” hence trying to allow the pleasure principle dominate the reality principle. It strives gradually to release instinctive stimuli, to destroy the barrier towering above the civilised humanity, a barrier unknown to the primitive or the child. The impact of this point of departure cannot be measured socially, considering on the one hand the general disruption of sensibility—brought about by the broadening of a strong psychic charge with elements of the perception-consciousness system—and the impossibility of returning to a previous state, on the other.
Does this mean that the reality of the exterior world has become suspect for the artist, forced to look for the elements of their own specific action in inner perception? Such statement would imply intellectual poverty or extreme malevolence. It is after all clear enough that neither in the mental nor the physical realm can one speak of “spontaneous procreation.” The seemingly freest works of the surrealist painters cannot come into the world other than by means of their return to “visual remnants” coming from outward perception. Only in working on restructuring these disorganised elements can their demands be expressed in both their individuality and collectivity. The question whether these are painters of genius will be answered judging not so much by the always relative newness of the matter out of which their works are created, but rather by the more and less powerful initiative they take in drawing upon this matter.
And so all of the technical effort of surrealism has from the beginning always consisted in multiplying penetrations into the deepest mental layers. “I mean that it is necessary to be a seer, to make yourself a seer” – at stake has been to discover the means whereby to realise Rimbaud’s creed. First and foremost among these means, whose effectiveness has been fully proven over the past few years, is psychic automatism in all its forms (a whole universe offers itself to the painter, beginning with the painter simply giving in to graphic impulses and ending with the painter rendering faithfully the pictures of the dream) just as the paranoiac-critical activity defined by Salvador Dalí as follows:
A spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations. It is through a clearly paranoiac process, that it has been possible to obtain a double image, that is to say the representation of an object which, without the least figurative or anatomical modification, is at the same time the representation of another object that is absolutely different, one that also is free of any type of deformation or abnormality that would reveal some sort of artificial arrangement.Obtaining such a double image has been made possible thanks to the violence of paranoiac thought which has slyly and skillfully used the necessary quantity of pretexts, coincidences, etc., exploiting them so as to cause the appearance of the second image which, in this case, takes the place of the obsessive idea. The double image (for example, the image of a horse that is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another obsessive idea then being enough to cause a third image to appear (the image of a /ion, for example) and so on until a number of images, limited only by the degree of paranoiac capacity of thought, converge.
It is also well known what a decisive role the “collages” and “frottages” of Max Ernst have played in the field of creating special optical regions. Here is Ernst himself speaking of them:
The research on the mechanism of inspiration that has been fervently pursued by the Surrealists has led to the discovery of certain procedures of a poetic nature that are capable of removing the elaboration of the plastic work from the domain of the so-called conscious faculties. These means (of bewitching reason, taste, and conscious will) have resulted in the rigorous application of the definition of Surrealism to drawing, to painting, and even in a certain degree to photography: these procedures, some of which, collage in particular, were employed before the advent of Surrealism, but were systematized and modified by Surrealism, have allowed certain artists to set down stupefying photographs of their thought and their desires on paper or canvas. Having been called upon to characterize the procedure which was the first to surprise us and put us on the track of several others, I am tempted to consider this procedure to be the exploitation of the fortuitous meeting of two distant realities on an inappropriate plane (this is said as a paraphrase and a generalization of Lautréamont’s famous phrase: “As beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”, or, to use a shorter term, the cultivation of the effects of a systematic bewildering… This procedure, which has been used, modified, and systematized by the Surrealists, both painters and poets, as they went along, has led to one surprise after another since its discovery. Among the finest results that they have been called upon to extract from it, there must be mentioned the creation of what they have called Surrealist objects. A ready-made reality, whose naive purpose seems to have been fixed once and for all (an umbrella), finding itself suddenly in the presence of another very distant and no less absurd reality (a sewing machine), in a place where both must feel out of their element) (on an operating table) will, by this very fact, escape its naive purpose and lose its identity; because of the detour through what is relative, it will pass from absolute falseness to a new absolute that is true and poetic: the umbrella and the sewing machine will make love. The way this procedure works seems to me to be revealed in this very simple example. A complete transmutation followed by a pure act such as love will necessarily be produced every time that the given facts-the coupling of two realities which apparently cannot be coupled on a plane which apparently is not appropriate to them-render conditions favorable. I must also speak of another procedure that I have been led to use through the direct influence of the specific details concerning the mechanism of inspiration to be found in the Manifesto of Surrealism. In my personal evolution this procedure, which is based on nothing other than the intensification of the irritability of the faculties of the mind and which with regard to its technical side I would like to call frottage, has perhaps played a greater role than collage, from which in my opinion it really does not differ fundamentally. Taking as my point of departure a childhood memory in which a mahogany veneer panel opposite my bed had played the role of optical stimulus for a vision while I was half asleep, and finding myself in an inn at the seashore on a rainy day, I was struck by the way that my eyes were obsessively irritated by the ceiling, whose cracks had been accentuated by many cleanings. I then decided to question the symbolism of this obsession, and to aid my reflective and hallucinatory faculties, I got a series of designs out of the boards by randomly covering them with sheets of paper that I began rubbing with a lead pencil. I emphasize the fact that the designs thus obtained progressively lose–through a series of suggestions and transmutations that occur spontaneously, as happens with hypnagogic visions-the character of the material (wood) being questioned and take on the appearance of images of an unexpected preciseness and probably of such a nature as to reveal the prime cause of the obsession or to produce a simulacrum of this cause. My curiosity being aroused and struck with amazement, I came to use the same method to question al/ sorts of materials that happened to enter my visual field: leaves and their veins, the raveled edges of a piece of sacking, the knife-strokes of a “modern” painting, a thread unwound from a spool of thread, etc. I put together the first results obtained by this process of rubbing under the title Histoire naturelle, from Mer, and Pluie, to Eve, the only one that still exists. Later, by restricting my own active participation more and more so as to thereby enlarge the active part of the faculties of the mind, I came to be present like a spectator at the birth of pictures such as Femmes traversant une rivière en criant; Vision provoquée par les mots: Ie père immobile; Homme marchant sur l’eau, prenant par la main une jeune fille et en bousculant une autre; Vision provoquée par une ficelle que j’ai trouvée sur ma table; Vision provoquée par une feuille de buvard; etc.
The surrealist object, as defined by Salvador Dalí, is an “object capable of certain mechanical actions and movements, which is based on phantasms and notions that can be evoked by carrying out unconscious acts.” Such surrealist necessarily appears as a synthesis of this set of captivations and interests. Suffice it to recall that we have conceived of the idea of construing such objects once, as Dalí again has noted,
Giacometti constructed the first mobile and mute object, a suspended ball, an object that already posed all the essential terms of the preceding definition but kept within the means proper to sculpture. Objects with a symbolic function leave no room for formal preoccupations. Corresponding to clearly defined erotic fantasies and desires, they depend only on the amorous imagination of each person and are extra-plastic.
One must not forget that from another perspective, a considerable contribution to this has been made by Marcel Duchamp. As I have pointed out at length in Minotaur (no. 6), an immensely important role here is played by his “ready-mades” (factory-produced objects elevated to the rank of artworks by having been chosen by the artist), by which Duchamp has been almost exlusively expressing himself from 1914 onwards.
In September 1912, in L’introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, I suggested that we create “some of those objects we approximate only in dreams and which evidently can be substantiated neither from the viewpoint of utility nor from the standpoint of décor.” I went on to argue:
Thus one night not long ago I got my hands on a rather curious book in my sleep, in an open air market out toward Saint-MaIo. The spine of this book was formed by a wooden gnome with an Assyrian-style white beard which came down to its feet. The statuette was of normal thickness and yet it in no way Interfered with turning the pages of the book, which were made of thick black wool. I hastened to acquire it, and when I woke up I regretted not finding it near me. It would be relatively easy to re-create it. I should like to put a few objects of this sort In circulation, for their fate seems to me to be eminently problematical and disturbing…
Who knows—perhaps I would thereby help to ruin those concrete trophies that are so detestable, and throw greater discredit on “reasonable” beings and objects. There would be cleverly constructed machines that would have no use; minutely detailed maps of immense cities would be drawn up, cities which, however many we are, we would feel forever incapable of founding, but which would at least classify present and future capitals. Absurd, highly perfected automata, which would do nothing the way anyone else does, would be responsible for giving us a correct Idea of action.
It is fairly easy to measure the distance we have traversed in this direction so far.
If one predetermines the goal one seeks to achieve (insofar as this goal falls within the realm of knowledge) and if one adjusts to this goal one’s rational means, this in itself constitutes sufficient refutation of any accusation of mysticism. I posit that mimetic art (depicting places, impressions and external objects) is obsolescent and that the task of today’s art is to present an increasingly accurate depiction of mental notions, this by concerted exercise of imagination and memory. (Clearly, the matter used by these mental notions can be inadvertently accumulated by external stimuli and perceptions.) The biggest success of surrealism so far has been to reconcile dialectically two notions which, for an adult person, are implacable opposites—perception and representation—and to build a bridge over the abyss that separated them. Surrealist painting and constructions of surrealist objects enable us already to organise objective tendencies around the subjective features of perceptions. These perceptions, by their very tendency to assert themselves as objective, are of an epochal character and revolutionary in the sense of calling for something to correspond to them in outer reality. It can be surmised that, by and large, this something will be.
[1] Breton is here quoting from Charles Bénard’s “Introduction” to his two-volume version of G.W.F. Hegel’s Poétique, an extract from the Aesthetics, supplemented by texts from the German romantics such as Schiller, Goethe and Jean-Paul Richter.
[2] Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, chap. IV.7.
[3] “Fideism: a doctrine that replaces science with faith, or more broadly, accords faith a certain importance” (Lenin).
[4] Freud, “Ich und Es.”
(Source: Equus Press, in four parts: 08/12/2017; 18/12/2017; 03/01/2018; 13/01/2028)