[Balakian is an author and educator who has contributed many articles and reviews to language and literature journals. She has also published several book-length studies on Surrealism and Breton, including Breton: Magus of Surrealism (1971). In the excerpt below, Balakian explores Breton's poetical representation of the hermetic belief in metamorphosis and differentiates it from the theory of transcendentalism, two ideas that she feels are "too often and too carelessly… linked as part of a continuous chain in the history of poetics."]

One of the major tenets of hermetism is metamorphosis. The occult art of the alchemist consists of transforming one type of material into another, and by extension one form of existence into the next. When Rimbaud talked of the alchemy of 'le Verbe' he saw in the power of words an effective agent of transmutation. Previously Baudelaire had been attracted to the theory of correspondences. Too often and too carelessly the two concepts are linked as part of a continuous chain in the history of poetics. They are, rather, opposite faces of the poetic coin. Correspondences imply a dualistic concept of the universe. During our sojourn here on earth certain emblems of nature give intimations of another plane of existence, and as we saunter along the pathways of our forest we recognize signs of a possible transcendence: 'the earth apparelled in celestial light', as Wordsworth so beautifully expressed it. In becoming more and more astute, the living creature comes closer and closer to this transcendence. Life, thus considered, consists of progressive steps rising higher and higher toward the kind of 'distant spheres' that Rossetti visualized. This transcendence is achieved through a moral purification in the case of many of the romanticists, or by virtue of a sharpening of the senses and an ultimate synaesthesia, as with the symbolists. Hence, among the symbols much in evidence to convey a poetic vision based on a dualistic philosophy, are the ladder, the wing or the chain in Hugo, the octave in the work of Claudel.

When we observe the alchemistic notion of life and its corresponding translation into poetry, we find something quite different. Although there is much unresolved discussion regarding the original character of the philosophy of Hermes, hermetism, as it is appropriated by modern poets and artists, is based on a monistic notion of the universe. It is not the same kind of alchemy as Shelley suggested in his Defense of Poetry, where it consisted of the purification of the objects around us and the cleansing of polluted waters. On the contrary, essence and substance become one, the material entity assumes a mystical function; Coleridge's 'milk of human paradise' has to be found here below. It is no longer a rising motion, but one of change and transformation. Transcendence is replaced by metamorphosis. The universe is not an octave, but, as André Breton puts it, a great circuit. The poet's mission is not to discover the signs that are reflections of another world, but to penetrate the disguises that obscure the way in the labyrinth or cryptograph of earthly existence. The act of interpreting reality actually consists of transforming it, as Breton suggests in Les Vases Communicants. One of the primary reasons for confusion of two so divergent poetic outlooks is that the power of metamorphosis is as dependent as that of transcendence upon the keenness of the senses and through the senses on the power of imagery. The means is similar, the goal quite different.

In the world of correspondences intuitive memory recalls previous existence to aid in the comprehension of the spiritual meaning of things. On the contrary, Breton considers memory an obstacle in the way of transformation. Memory can keep us in static form, while forgetting facilitates the passage to new experience and even to new existence. According to him it has been a fallacy to consider memory as a by-product of the imagination. Imagination reverts in his thinking to its original meaning, the act of creating images and making dreams become reality. It is the key with which man may attain whatever degree of liberty is possible here on earth.

A rebours de l'opinion admise on n'était pas autorisé à tenir la mémoire
Et tout ce qui se dépose de lourd avec elle
Pour les sous-produits de l'imagination
Comme si j'étais fondé le moins du monde
A me croire moi d'une manière stable
Alors qu'il suffit d'une goutte d'oubli ce n'est pas rare
Pour qu'à l'instant où je me considère je vienne d'être tout autre et d'une autre goutte
Pour que je me succède sous un aspect hors de conjecture
Comme si même le risque avec son imposant appareil de tentations et de syncopes
En dernière analyse était sujet à caution
Les États Généraux

At the time when Breton unleashed his poetic fervour, all literature was suffering from an anaemia of the imagination. In the plastic arts alone there seemed to have been discovered a climate for creative ferment. Apollinaire sensed this, and Breton translated the disfigurations produced by the artists into a poetic credo of transfiguration; he attempted thereby to restore the faculty of imagination to its primary position in the literary act: a difficult position to hold against the popular, tried and tested means of literary communications, such as descriptive statement, symbolic interpretation, reminiscence, and confessional.

How did Breton's adherence to hermetism contribute to the art of writing poetry? Various technical procedures are used to suggest the metamorphosis latent in the imagery. There is a reversal of the correspondence technique: we find that instead of the concrete becoming abstract, the abstract is crystallized into the concrete. Disguise is another device much in use, the lifting of which produces poetic revelation. Here are a few examples from Le Revolver à Cheveux Blancs:

Nous sommes les soupirs de la statue de verre qui se soulève sur le coude quand l'homme dort
Et que des brèches brillantes s'ouvrent dans son lit…
Nous te précédions alors nous les plantes sujettes à métamorphoses
'Facteur Cheval'

Les meubles font alors place à des animaux de même taille qui me regardent fraternellement
Lions dans les crinières desquels achèvent de se consumer les chaises
'Vigilance'

Ces lumières qui bercent les choses irréelles
Ces animaux dont les métamorphoses m'ont fait une raison
'Dernière Levée'

The distinct divisions separating the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds are broken down and a fluid passage occurs from one to the other as the barriers are dissolved. The physical elements, such as sun, wind, air, water, act as conjunctions between these various forms of existence. The most important among the key expressions on which the alchemy centres are all the words that suggest fire, for it is indeed the most basic agent of transformation, which does not destroy but turns one substance or form into another. Heat, high flame, lightning, burning coals are some of the variations. Light in its various forms, such as flares, lanterns, beacons, astral illuminations, are adjuncts to fire. The other important word is water. If fire transforms, water illuminates in turning the opaque translucent. Ice, crystal, glass are also transforming agents in the constant mutation which occurs.

In the world of correspondences the analogy is the axis of the poetic representation. The simile most faithfully translates the parallel between the material and its spiritual counterpart. Quite to the contrary, Breton tells us that comme is a word which does not mean 'such as'. Things and beings are not like other qualities or states; through the alchemy of the word they become something else, and the metaphor through which they are transformed draws them not from parallel spheres but from forms that are logically unrelated. For André Breton the same life-element penetrates all the ramifications of form, but without overflowing into the supernatural.

This state of mutation and fusion is produced by the sharpening and integration of the senses and the images which they conjure up. Breton wakens the drowsy senses with a beacon light, to borrow his metaphor, and plays on all of them. Synaesthesia occurs in the intermingling of sense perceptions, or, on the single plane of perception, one image flows into the other: a subterranean passage unites all perfumes, colours are diffused, sounds are prolonged, muted into rhythms perceptible only to the touch. A cluster of these can be gleaned in Le Revolver:

Cette femme passe imperceptiblement dans un bruit de fleurs
… des chanteuses dont la voix a la couleur du sable sur des rivages tendres et dangereux
'Les Écrits s'en vont'

Les réverbères mouillés bruissent encadrés d'une nuée d'yeux bleus
'Le Sphynx vertébral'

L'air de la chambre est beau comme des baguettes de tambour
'Le Verbe Être'

And in the beautiful beginning of Fata Morgana:

Ce matin la fille de la montagne tient sur ses genoux un accordéon de chauves-souris blanches

The resulting effect is a universal conciliation which even touches such concepts as presence and absence, manæuvering a complicity. The primary quality of life becomes the awareness of the inner rhythm produced by the unrelenting moulding of forms. The wider the radius of recognition of this interrelation, the more intense is the life-experience. And death is simply the prolongation of the radius beyond comprehensible limits. The process can also be reversed whereby resurrection may occur on a purely material basis. The poet's work thus envisaged is in a constant state of flux, producing unexpected transfigurations as they pertain to all the principal meditations of man: life, love, time, death, destiny, and social concern.

Life is ubiquitous and unconstrained. It is dynamic and ever in transition. Leaving its imprints in the same places as death, it is as a tangent to it rather than its antithesis. Form is a variable of life and not an identification. Life is an ever restless aspiration toward transformation, which can make the earth more translucid than water and let the metal ooze out of its shell. Such are the generalizations one can deduce from the galaxy of images expressed by brisk verbs suggesting change, such as cutting, escaping, throwing, flying, digging, overthrowing, or those which express penetration: diffusing, radiating, seeping, oozing, flowing, and all the fluids ranging from the blood of man to the sap of the tree. And words like cosse, coque, écorce suggest the soluble confines that the life force is constantly breaking through.

J'entends se déchirer le linge humain comme une grande feuille
Sous l'ongle de l'absence et de la présence qui sont de connivence
Tous les métiers se fanent il ne reste d'eux qu'une dentelle parfumée
Une coquille de dentelle qui a la forme parfaite d'un sein
Je ne touche plus que le cœur des choses je tiens le fil
'Vigilance', Le Revolver à Cheveux Blancs

To produce a powerful metaphor the long arms of the analogy do not merely touch but bear one on the other, and the interaction is expressed by the skilful manipula tion of the verb at the centre of the image. This constant becoming rather than static being makes of vitality the primary theme.

Love is a magnetic process which draws the lovers into a conjugation with the varying forms of the earth. Instead of being raised above the material framework, here, on the contrary, they seem to become more entrenched in it, effecting an intimate communion with the earth. 'L'Union Libre' is the most flamboyant example of this. But in the collection of L'Air de l'eau, there is a more subtle metamorphosis. When the poet says: 'monde dans un baiser', it is not a new world, but a fuller possession and a more concrete apprehension of the already familiar one. The loved one like a magnet draws to herself plants, insects, rocks, precious stones. On the surface it is the theme utilized by both Baudelaire and Verlaine wherein the beloved is compared to a beautiful landscape. But in the case of Breton love is a transformer almost in the technical, mechanical sense of the word. The loved one does not evoke but actually produces 'the far-off country', new suns, volcanoes steaming with snow. In one of these poems the erotic act is cadenced with ice, fire, and darkness, is freed of all evil with the appearance of a blossoming apple tree on the high seas. The meaning in terms of a conventional love poem would be, I suppose, that the love act transposes the poet to the threshold of a lost paradise and that original sin is erased in the vision of a new apple tree attired in pure blossoms. Vision would thus have proceeded from substance to essence and to quintessence. But no such gradation seems intended here. We first view the images resulting from the alchemy of love, and then we trace back to the generating force and the source of light, and thus we are encompassed in the entire magnetic field of operation. The most striking images of love are in L'Air de l'eau and in Clair de Terre:

J'eus le temps de poser mes lèvres
Sur tes cuisses de verre
L'Air de l'eau

Tes bras au centre desquels tourne le cristal de la rose des vents,

Ma fontaine vivante de Sivas
L'Air de l'eau

Ta chair arrosée de l'envol de mille oiseaux de paradis
Est une haute flamme couchée dans la neige
L'Air de l'eau

ses lèvres qui sont des pierres au fond de la rivière rapide
'Amour parcheminé', Clair de Terre

Several poems in the collection Le Revolver à Cheveux Blancs suggest the metamorphosis from life to death. In 'La Mort Rose', for example, we witness the passage of a living form from one state into another in a double metamorphosis: that of the being and that of the earth. One of the themes developed here was already suggested in Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin: 'the gift of living has passed into the flowers'. In Breton's poem the beloved's hair mingles with the sun and her hands are projected into a peach-tree in bloom. The echoes of voices linger in the landscapes and her footsteps are entrapped in the moss. But the earth changes in form and texture as well, as the comets burn down the forests, the horizon is enlarged and river beds overflow. The two transfigured beings move within a vegetation grown transparent and penetrate into each other's dreams and probe the depths of each other's tears.

In the 'Forêt dans la Hache' we have an image of death in which it is the soul that disappears. The body becomes a transparent cavity in which doves and daggers fly. From this dwelling of his consciousness, the soul has been banished and with it the notion of duality; the physical world is freed of its arbitrary laws. He retains a sense of heat and cold, but the colours of the spectrum have been amalgamated and his body is inhabited by living forms, his brow is covered with crows, his eyes are made of mistletoe, his mouth is a dead leaf, and he takes on the characteristics of glass. In conformity with the notion that death is change rather than destruction, Breton has eloquently advised in the Premier Manifeste that at his own death he would wish to be carried away not by a hearse but by a moving-van.

Too little attention has been given to what is perhaps one of the truly philosophical poems of our age. Fata Morgana, written at Marseilles in December 1940, contains all the themes that have preoccupied Breton, as well as variations of his basic techniques. He celebrates the birth of a new day as he formulates the central concern: if I should escape my destiny. He ponders upon all the impossible metamorphoses and unreasonable states of being, which become plausible when, as he puts it: 'the lucid wind brings me the lost perfume of existence released at last of its limits', when yesterday is cast off with its contents like a miserable chest of drawers, and he sets out in his magnetized boat to decipher the great algebra of the universe where everything is pertinent to him and in which perfection is envisaged as 'the incessant fusion of imperfect creatures'. In an apostrophe to the hermetic bird of Egypt, the Ibis, he discovers his inner unity 'with all that no longer is and waits to be'. And like a great spectacle, the convulsions of the natural world take place, impelled by the multiple appearances that water, fire, and light can assume.

Le vent lucide m'apporte le parfum perdu de l'existence
Quitte enfin de ses limites …
tout est là pour quelque chose qui me concerne …
la perfection qui appelle la fusion incessante des créatures imparfaites
Dans l'obliquité du dernier rayon le sens d'une révélation mystérieuse
Fata Morgana

Finally in Les États Généraux and Ode à Fourier the metamorphosis conveys social meaning. Allusions abound to nineteenth-century Utopians, such as Fabre d'Olivet and Fourier (whose concepts of universal harmony were inspired by theories of magnetic attraction). In these poems Breton defied the tone of despair of the time. The words abattre and bâtir are drawn to each other, surmounting as it were their contradiction in meaning. The conflagration takes on a mystical power of purification and the scattering of things and beings hastens the reorganization, the unveiling of the secrets of the universe. Above all, the peoples of the world rise to a universal and harmonious interdependence among nations and races:

Il suffisait que le peuple se conçût en tant que tout et le devînt
Pour qu'il s'élève au sens de la dépendance universelle dans l'harmonie
Et que la variation par toute la terre des couleurs de peau et des traits
L'avertisse que le secret de son pouvoir
Est dans le libre appel au génie autochtone de chacune des races
Les États Généraux

Again the verb is devenir, and the changes suggested in the images are the burning of the phœnix, the fire of the anvil, followed by the advent of the new magi and a sun man, as the poet contemplates the present and foresees the future:

En haut l'avenir il porte des cornes jaunes de taureau dardant des plumes de flamant
Il est surmonté d'un éclair de paille pour la transformation du monde
Les États Généraux

Amid a war-devastated humanity, Breton, the incorrigible dreamer, called upon poetry to rise from the ruins and bring about the most significant metamorphosis of all: the transformation of the world.