Breton and Drugs
Regardless of what other surrealist colleagues have done with the basic premises of surrealism, Breton's own major statements were without ambiguity, and he adhered to them very closely throughout his life. Surrealism's major hypothesis was that man, in his status as everyman, was naturally endowed not merely with a grain of opium but with a psycho-sensory mechanism of utmost flexibility, which modern civilization had reduced more and more to rigor and uniformity of performance, thus adding to the insufferable human condition of brevity and mortality the burden of conformity and tedium. If it was futile to rebel against the mortality, he could confront the tedium of human experience….
To revive his powers of natural intoxication Breton explored dreams, automatic writing, aleatory walking, the free play of eidetic association of natural entities and man-made objects; these activities involved the auto-psychoanalysis of the non-psychotic and the non-neurotic, and aimed to recuperate the state of grace of childhood. With the drug cult Breton shared a common objective: that of provoking vertigo, which for him was synonymous with rapture. (pp. 98-9)
For him there was a stimulus much more potent than drugs, and that was the provocative power of language. All the terminology that Breton used to describe the surrealist function of language in his First Manifesto is derived from the lexicon of drug users, along with the misuse of the word "stupéfiant" or in its English equivalent of "narcotic," which technically applies to the benumbing character of drugs, whereas Breton—as well as Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris—uses the word as a synonym of stimulant. In fact, Breton's characterization of surrealism, surrealist language and image are in the context of "drug," "narcotic," and "hashish" not in the pharmaceutical precision of their meanings but of the general connotation reminiscent of literary descriptions of experience with drugs; it is to be noted that among the attributes which relate surrealism to drug addiction are not only the potency of effect but the habit forming character as well…. (p. 99)
Breton's view of the expansion of consciousness and enrichment of sensory experience is the crux of the socio-ethical character of surrealism over and above any literary results it has or may have wanted to achieve. The basic metaphor of surrealism evokes intoxication, its essential definition is the natural state of hallucination attained by "the education of all the senses" and the recuperation of their primal unity with the power of perception, as Breton elaborates the doctrines of the Manifestoes in "Le Message automatique." One can go so far as to conclude from Breton's tautological and imperative warnings about the perils of depriving man of his natural opium, that this privation may indeed have resulted in acute symptoms of withdrawal in modern man, manifest in the drug cult crisis of our time.
Before Breton, the purpose of stimulants in the life of the literary man was to provoke literary inspiration and to satisfy his nostalgia for the mystical state. Breton was committed to no particular literary destiny and believed in no possible transcendence into another world…. Poetry was a path of knowledge about man, and literature was viable only as a human science. (pp. 100-01)
The ethics of this poetry were involved not in good or evil, but in the relative extension of the spectrum of feeling and vision. As he saw no dichotomy between sensation and representation, the deepening and enlarging of the one invariably fed into its connecting vessel: not in the case only of superman but of everyman. In Political Position of Art Today (1935) he explains that the right to reach and utilize the forces of the unconscious is inalienable for it provides access to a common treasure. Perhaps everyman's eventual recovery of the hallucinatory power will make bourgeois societies untenable and communist structures inadequate. Breton gives the impression that evil and brutality are the results of tension and of the impediment of these rights; a return to the processes of nature would restore man's benign consideration of the rights of others and the sense of freedom he would acquire would not be wasted in self-indulgence and destruction. There would result a clearer understanding of the "moi" in the perspective of the "soi" and in the elimination of the "surmoi." In other words, the cultivation of the individual essence would strengthen the existential functioning of the group. (pp. 101-02)
Actually, the results of his having treated surrealism as a form of stimulant to latent human energies made its impact explicit in that literature which he deemed secondary to the transformation of society. If not for everyman, then for the student of literature the textual stimulants he furnished are fertile and productive in their psychedelic effects. His lucid mind gave in its verbalization the evidences of how the literary text may be affected by its use as a channel for intensified sensory reception and a medium for hallucination. As we peruse his poetic writings from the point of view of stimulation and psychic expansion, we find some of the terminology of exaltation, convulsion, elation, and eidetic perception, but never of depression.
The sensory apparatus of Breton may be compared to an octopus, the body its transformer, the tentacles sucking into the far reaches of the natural human, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms that are intricately knit together in his ecstatic approach to reality.
Illumination, which is one of the significants of the hashish experience, is the basic key to Breton's nonpharmaceutical sharpening of vision. (p. 102)
Another transformation generally brought about by the drug habit is distortion. Here Breton deviates. Although closely sympathetic to Marcel Duchamp and to Cubist friends, he does not employ the dehumanization process as a feature of his metaphor; nor does he go back to the earlier distortions of perspective evidenced by De Quincey, Gautier, or Baudelaire. For him the transformational operation on reality does not occur through an alteration of proportions but through relocation or substitution, the corollary of which is incorporation. Relying on the alchemistic philosophy that all is in all, and that the arrangement of objects, and subsequently of the relation of their images to each other is an arbitrary one, he expends his creative ability on the act of subjective selection, which actually means the reception of the unconscious selection; in this way he puts his own personal ontological imprint upon the universe…. His philosophy of immanence is in fact possible because of this power to shuffle an ever wider scale of physical stimuli into a personal synthesis which constitutes the paradise of the moment. As he says in "Langue de pierres": "One finds only what one needs profoundly."
The paradisiacal state of love is the chief instance of union with the universe, whose elements are redistributed to make the human pair the center of luminosity. Again the vocabulary used to describe the effect is one generally associated with the power of drugs. In his "A jour" to Arcane 17 he says: "The act of love, on the same basis as the picture or the poem, is disqualified if the person involved does not suppose himself to be entering into a trance. Nowhere else is the capture of eternity so instantaneous." Most illustrative of his contention that there is to be no distinction between the functions of the sensory system and the intellectual working of the mind is the erotic stimulus, which has on Breton the power of a most potent potion; in L'Air de l'eau, a series of poems to the "scandalously beautiful Jacqueline," whom he had just married, he compares her mouth to a hallucinatory herb,… and many years later in his last series of prose poems, Constellations, he again puts love in the context of a stimulant when he uses the word "belladona" in the double sense of the drug and the lady who arouses him…. (pp. 103-04)
The hallucinatory vision or feelings of Breton, contrary to that induced by drugs, never falls into the nightmare phase; dream and hallucination are always pleasure producing agents. The need, therefore, of transcendence is overcome by the satisfaction in an immanent reality where depth and summit are points not of a vertical pattern that might range from elation to dejection, but part of a circumference of ever widening euphoria. (pp. 104-05)
[The] stones and agates that he culls from the recesses of the earth [are a source of ecstasy and exhilaration for Breton]: "It is not doubtful that the obstinate pursuit of light and sign, which the 'visionary minerologist' maintains, acts on the mind like a narcotic," he says in one of his final articles entitled "Langue de pierres." The expression "visionary minerologist" is taken from Novalis' Henry Ofterdingen, where the poet seeks luminosity in the [bowels] of the earth, and Breton's search for stone is described in terms used by Baudelaire to depict the pharmaceutical trip. As in Baudelaire, the description has several phases: the first hallucinatory, the second extra-lucid, the last stage a total experience of dream and reality producing the "illusion of having come upon the soil of the terrestrial paradise."
If Breton's self-induced qualities of the visionary do not transport him to a nonterrestrial heaven of virtue or to a burning hell of sin, it is because Breton is basically the poet of innocence, his vision benign, and the earth the terrestrial paradise. He finds here all that he needs to keep him generally "high"—or at least that is the impression he apparently wished to convey. As each vision is translated into a poem or prose, the aftermath of the dream is not a stage of attrition and self-torture as in the case of the drug addict. For the images that produce the state of euphoria are "a vital tension turned to the highest degree of health, pleasure, serenity, restored state of grace, consented practices. Its [the analogical metaphor's] mortal enemies are the deprecative and the depressant," he says in "Signe Ascendant," one of the essays collected in La Clé des champs. Again, the qualifying adjectives have pharmaceutical connotations. Instead of the state of vacuity that follows the narcotic trip, Breton's natural one results in action and creation as the dream or hallucination, or the extra-lucid vision enter into either the personal life, as he demonstrated in Les Vases communicants or in L'Amour fou, or in the verbal image of a poem.
The early automatism of Breton's writing was a form of stimulation that was intended to launch his power of psychic association into free play much as the taking of a hallucinatory drug is supposed to achieve. His later writing was less dependent on automatic exercise of words since the practice had refined and flexed this ability sufficiently to provide evocatory association on demand.
As he grew older his need to write decreased; it had not been primarily literary but rather a very human necessity for self-illumination. The Word had been only one of his hallucinatory stimulants; the others had been people, objects, nature's manifestations. Breton's relationship with nature, a very close one, was distinctly different from that of Romantic poets. Its complicity was not the pathetic fallacy or the objective correlative, but served as a smoldering fire, the ignition, the bountiful and gratuitous replenisher of human energy.
Breton became ever more aware and more the master of his force, which made him one of that small category of writers for whom life was a state of grace and a cause for intoxication. Although it is an aphorism to say that to be a poet is to be intoxicated, few poets have had the frame of reference of intoxication so invade their linguistic code as Breton. (pp. 105-07)
Anna Balakian, "Breton and Drugs," in Yale French Studies (copyright © Yale French Studies 1974), No. 50, 1974, pp. 96-107.
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