André Breton

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An introduction to Dada/Surrealism

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SOURCE: An introduction to Dada/Surrealism, No. 17, 1988, pp. 1-11.

[This excerpt was taken from Balakian's introduction to an issue of Dada/Surrealism that was devoted entirely to Breton. Balakian offers an overview of Breton's major poems and his best-known poetic techniques.]

Viewed in its totality, the work of André Breton falls into three categories: the theoretical and philosophical essays, his narrative prose, and his poetry. The last two facets of his writing substantiate his modernism, which the first category announces. In a somewhat gothically constructed eighteenth-century prose, the theoretical texts belie automatism; they are sometimes a rebuttal to hypothetical abuses, personal and impersonal, creating a one-sided debate, expressing personal passion, critical, existential, and political, in a tone eloquent and didactic. Unlike Mallarmé's theoretical prose, which consists primarily of an a posteriori ars poetica composed after his major poems were written, Breton's are a priori for the most part and as such very deceptive, because they do not totally predict the direction his own creative powers were to take in their subsequent development….

[I] consider the poetry the most important part of the Breton corpus, although Breton was very modest about his poetic writings. He did not even mention them in a form he filled out for Biography News Services: Who's News, in 1962. He considered his poetry per se a lesser manifestation of his poetic act than his political pronouncements and his ideological writings, but authors are not necessarily the best judges of their works. Without hesitation I would posit that it is the poetry that makes Breton eligible for greatness, placing him in the lineage of the esoteric poets of Western civilization from Shakespeare to Blake, to Novalis, Hugo and Yeats. This poetic work beckons to literary critics for commentary on its structure and modus operandi. Stamos Metzidakis makes a move in that direction … in his essay on Breton's poetic originality as he probes Breton's propensities toward the primordial ["Breton and Poetic Originality," Dada/Surrealism, Vol. 17, 1988]. To date, commentaries on the poetry have been primarily thematic: love, death, liberty, types of imagery, and a few insights into his lexicon….

The main target of close analysis has been the Ode à Charles Fourier, probably because its references are tangible and Breton's attraction to Fourier explicable; but one comes away from these exhaustive studies with more knowledge about Fourier than about Breton. Michel Beaujour's essay ["Breton's Ode à Charles Fourier and the Poetics of Genre," Dada/Surrealism, No. 17, 1988] points out a new direction. The fact that Breton tackled the epic genre and gave it a modern adaptation in this and in other post-World War II writings needs not only to be recognized but compared to the efforts of other modern poets engaged in this type of genre-mutation.

In responding to this dense, esoteric, erotic, semantically compact poetry one has to realize that its automatism is very partial, coming in spurts, that there is indeed dynamic variation in Breton's poetics, that his major poems belie many of his theoretical assumptions, and that there are affinities between Mallarmé and Breton in terms of structural premeditation and metaphoric progression in the construction of palimpsestic imagery in spite of the great differences in lifestyle and attitudes about life that have set them apart.

Following Breton's autoanalysis of his reconstruction of "Tournesol" we discover that his perception of reality has three concurrent registers. First, there is the objectification of desire, which makes him identify with objects in his aleatory path and brings him into confrontation with passing human figures. The second register consists of hermetic messages found hidden in Paris landmarks of statues and fountains serving as semiotic emblems. These and other hermetic images can generally be decoded by close reading of Fulcanelli's Les Demeures philosophales or other gnostic source books. His "one in the other" analogies, of which one part has its reference base in hermeticism, as in the case of the layered meanings of "Tournesol," have not yet been explored in any extensive way. The third level lies in his analysis of his state of psychological motivation at each stage of his life. Most of the automatism of his early poetry involves references to this third and personal level, which in his analysis of "Tournesol" remains admittedly enigmatic even to himself.

When we come to his later poems, we find that they are much more structured, and the third and automatic level less innocent and more contrived. Michael Riffaterre has illustrated this structuring in relation to "Guerre" and Fata Morgana in an essay, "Intertextualité surréaliste" [in Mélusine, 1, 1979]. In fact, Fata Morgana is perhaps the best example of a technique which gives the illusion of automatism but turns out to be tightly structured. It is a tapestry of interwoven referential systems, representing war, exile, recuperation, without having direct reference to circumstantial data. In the absence of appreciable critical commentary on this major poem, it is appropriate to reveal here the response of Léon Pierre-Quint, his editor and prominent critic of his time, upon receipt of the poem on October 2, 1941: "Fata Morgana enchanted me; the poem has a rare gentleness and is perhaps the one where you express yourself the most completely. The rich and beautiful themes which succeed each other are impressive."

And what of Les États généraux, the poem of cataclysm and revolution, written in New York in 1943? Silence on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in regard to a spiritual landmark so pertinent to both sides and a tribute to modern man's struggle for liberty. As for his final prose poem, Constellations, it was difficult of access for academic study before Breton's death except in Gérard Legrand's exquisite but rare anthology of Breton, Poésie et autre. This extraordinary serial response to Miró's gouaches by the same name is now readily available in Signe ascendant, a paperback collection of his later poetry. This prose poem should invite much critical attention since it is most indicative of the structuring methodology of Breton, illustrating his definition of poetry according to other than rhetorical gauges. It reflects his ultimate commitment to a monistic philosophy embracing the artist's ecological and cosmic habitat. It is in this vision that the linkage between Breton and Octavio Paz, as well as many remarkable and neglected poets of Latin America, becomes manifest. The sociologist-philosopher Michel Maffesoli, a half-century younger than Breton and one of the few writers outside of the literary and art disciplines aware of Breton's work as well as that of Paz, has written two books on the functioning of the human imagination in its responses to the activities of the cosmos. He concludes with his observation of what he calls "transcendent immanence": "The precarious and the aleatory are in step with the irresistible continuation of things. The cosmic eroticism involved expresses in its own fashion the duality of death and life within a mixed infinite…. They [the generating divinities] remind us in a perfect manner, suggestive of the cosmic union which integrates the collective individual in a globality that surpasses him" [L'ombre de Dionysos, 1982]. He also gives an undiluted definition of the surreal: "a form of the real that is particularly concrete, which is involved to the highest point with everyday existence" [La Conquête du present, 1979].

In applying his philosophy of immanence to poetics, Breton's greatest contribution is probably his revolutionary modification of the art of representation—a field of highest interest to the end-of-the-century critics. That much maligned poem, "L'Union libre," myopically taken to refer "poetically to his wife's private parts" (note that it was written at a time when Breton had no wife!), implements the most important of Breton's aesthetic theories: that of poetic representation, whereby he transformed a stereotype blason into a courtship between human form and function and the ecology. Scholars currently searching for distinctions between mimetic versus transformational representation and so-called re-presentation are rethinking André Breton, yet most of them are admittedly unaware of Breton's work in this area. Any thinking on this subject could profitably use as preliminary texts "L'Union libre" and the essay "Signe ascendant."

Among those who have written on Breton there have been two strong lines of approach: the ecstatic and the belligerent. On the one hand there occurs such an overwhelming empathy that the commentary assumes the very language of the commentated text and assimilates Breton's ideology. Such commentary often becomes heavy with Breton's intentionalities. The other tone is that of those who embrace Dada and Surrealism as part of the larger avantgrade movements of the time but are uncomfortable with Breton. They are apt to accuse him of hypocrisy, of superhuman posturing. They attack his point sublime but sound as if they discovered the expression in secondary sources. Were they to go to L'Amour fou they would realize that in that supremely moving letter of Breton to his little daughter point sublime had to do with Breton's humble perception of the unattainable mountain peak: "There was never any question of my settling there. Besides, in that respect, it would have ceased to be sublime and I would have ceased to be a man."

What has not yet been clearly recognized is the role André Breton played in the global literary adjustment to the modern world. He started as an avant-grade writer but consolidated his position in a comprehensive accommodation to the concept of the relativity of reality over and above the ancient dichotomy between the real and the unreal. He was perhaps the only one in that first wave of the avant-garde of the twentieth century to proceed to the formation of a guard, knowing that this avant-garde is always preliminary.

Instead of rejecting beauty, as did many avant-garde writers and painters, Breton tried to redefine it in terms of "convulsive" beauty. Instead of rejecting mimesis, he established a non-anthropocentric relationship with the ecology, absorbing it into an elaborate, intricate system of analogies with the human sensorial system and in a deeper understanding of what nature has come to mean; and he also endeavored to explain the unpredictable manifestations of chance. In the questionnaire he was asked to fill out—that unique document I mentioned above—he stressed under the caption "Major areas of vocational interests, etc." his lifelong "struggle which aims to recast human understanding, starting with the proposition to modify sensibility." He ends the statement with an upbeat sense of success. Contrary to his initial instinct to abandon the notion of "literary" completely, he ultimately came to terms with a redefinition which he believed necessary to the term "literary" to make it acceptable in this age. It could survive as the expression of a close linkage with sociology to reveal a "passionate" knowledge of human behavior. This interest included a strong commitment to the salutary potential of women, which anti-Bretonian feminists might want to read before they accuse Breton of being antifeminist. "This eternal power of woman, the only one before which I have ever bowed," he wrote in L'Amour fou, and he elaborated on this statement in Arcane 17 after having written some of the most passionate love poems of this century. These two prose texts should be required reading in every bibliography of women's studies. José Pierre's essay in [Dada/Surrealism, Vol. 17, 1988], "Such Is Beauty," focuses on this motivating interface of Breton's life and work.

It is clear that scholarly activity on Breton is increasing although among academics in the U.S.A. he does not enjoy the popularity of Georges Bataille or Raymond Roussel. One might also note that a comprehensive avant-garde conference at Hofstra University in November 1986 demonstrated that among younger scholars interest in Duchamp and Dada far surpassed interest in Breton.

But among poets and artists, empathy with Breton runs much higher than among scholars. Linguists, psychocritics and reception theoreticians will no doubt enlarge our knowledge and enjoyment of Breton's work or assess Breton's contribution to the modern mentality and to the direction of intellectual change when they begin to treat his poetry—as they have Mallarmé's—with the methodology suitable for a polysemantic work, prohibitive of unilateral deciphering. Michael Riffaterre's explication of an excerpt from Poisson soluble illustrates here how far afield such decoding virtuosity can lead. Let us keep in mind in reading him that what he attributes to the reader's detective capacity is his own particular and personal interpretation, or as Dali would say, "delirium of interpretation," through "intertexts" which are of his choosing, spring out of his mind, and which do not have to limit the much broader range of the poetic field which Breton opens up to his readers. The power of the poetry of Breton to survive is precisely due to its dense character, which allows reception on multiple levels and is sustainable in different historical eras. Standard analytic methodologies are unlikely to reduce to rational, linear structures Breton's prisms and mosaics. The circularity of his work leaves him forever impermeable if he does not at the same time provoke passion in the respondent.

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