The Communicating Labyrinth: Breton's 'La Maison d'Yves' as a Micm-Manifeste
[Below, Zuern reads Breton's poem "La Maison d'Yves" as a surrealist manifesto.]
André Breton's "La Maison d'Yves," in which Breton pays tribute to Yves Tanguy, presents itself as an inviting venue for the exploration of the surrealist aesthetic both in literature and the visual arts. The poem's interest lies not only in its testimony to Breton's enthusiastic support of the work of fellow avant-garde artists, but a careful reading reveals that in "La Maison d'Yves" Breton's tribute to Tanguy develops into an expression of the fundamental principles of surrealist aesthetics. The structure of the "Maison" shows itself to be essentially labyrinthine. The form of the labyrinth has close affinities to the images Breton himself uses to describe the surrealist orientation to the world, in particular the "tissu capillaire" which lies between the realms of the unconscious and external reality. The labyrinth has been observed as an organizational principle in a wide range of surrealist productions in the visual arts. An examination of the grammar in "La Maison d'Yves" reveals that the poem, in spite of its title, is as much concerned with a process as with a static structure; the process it describes is precisely the activity of the surrealist artist. The association of images in the poem is closely linked to its labyrinthine structure, and particular images, namely the references to mythological heroes, expand the parameters of the poem so that it will admit a reading which takes into account Breton's conviction that the surrealist world view is not limited to aesthetics, but has profound social ramifications. These considerations support a view of "La Maison d'Yves" as a comprehensive statement—and formal emblem—of the surrealist vision.
One variety of the labyrinth is a closed structure which contains within its parameters a number—ideally, an infinite number—of variables. In "La Maison d'Yves," the closure is provided by the inaugurating rhymed couplet, "La maison d'Yves Tanguy / Où l'on n'entre que la nuit," and the final line, "C'est la maison d'Yves Tanguy," which, in fusing with the initial line to form the sentence "La maison d'Yves Tanguy, c'est la maison d'Yves Tanguy," effectively seals the poem: the poem's maze unfolds in the copula of this sentence. The five rhymed couplets which follow the first at intervals throughout the poem can be seen as additional structural support. It is in the intervals between the couplets that the volatile, variable, and potentially infinite dimension of the poem develops the pattern, reminiscent of certain children's songs, of cumulative, repeating lines that do not rhyme and, at first, seem to bear no semantic relation to one another. The couplets, formally closed and finite, contain the essentially open and perpetual form of the cumulative pattern. Thus, the most superficial observation of the physical "building" of "La Maison d'Yves" reveals the poem's labyrinthine nature.
If we focus our attention on the images contained both in the couplets and in the accumulating lines, we can observe a relationship between the two forms that is more than structural and spatial. The couplets do not simply contain the cumulative lines, but determine their content. The image set forward in each of the seven couplets in the series exerts an influence on the images contained in the next line in the accruing series; the image that bears no apparent relation to its immediate neighbors harks back to the foregoing couplet. From the standpoint of the distribution of images in the poem, the couplets might be likened to bar magnets placed under a page in a classroom demonstration of the gravitational force: metal filings spread over the page arrange themselves in looping patterns, clustering at the poles of the magnet; in a similar manner, each new image that appears, seemingly at random, in the cumulative sequence loops upward along a line of thematic force to the affiliated image in the couplet above it. The images that build "La Maison d'Yves" arrange themselves along three very general lines of force: the first encompassing the ideas of entry, piercing, and seeking; the second the ideas of enclosure, restriction, and the confounding of external and internal space; the third the idea of a guiding line.
The relationship between the first couplet and the first line in what will become the cumulative sequence is not difficult to determine. The lines "La maison d'Yves Tanguy / Où l'on n'entre que la nuit / Avec la lampe tempête" comprise the ideas of entry, darkness, and the light with which one pierces the darkness. These lines prescribe the conditions under which one may enter the "house": night, of course, is associated with dreams, the unconscious, and the unknown—the domain of the surrealist artist which he seeks to bring into contact with the external world. The "lampe tempête" is a source of light in unusual, perhaps dangerous circumstances, and may indicate the Surrealist's supernormal vision, which is his guide as he enters the unknown and occasionally perilous realm of the unconscious and of dream.
The image of piercing vision is continued in the next couplet/line unit, "Dehors le pays transparent / Un devin dans son élément…. Avec la scierie si laborieuse qu'on ne la voit plus." The first line introduces the important opposition of inside and outside space. Here, the external appears to be clearly separate from the internal; the "pays" is "dehors." The image of the couplet is not difficult to understand; its first line calls to mind the limpid atmosphere of Tanguy's enigmatic landscapes, its second the frequent association of the surrealist artist with the seer, as well as the title of Breton's tribute to another of his contemporaries, Picasso dans son èlèment. The "scierie" is more startling, but it can be seen as a radical combination of the ideas of the couplet—transparency and piercing. The sawmill reminds us, too, that a house is being built—as a sawmill supplies the lumber for actual houses, "the scierie" here supplies another image in the structure that becomes the house of Yves Tanguy.
The third couplet is puzzling in that its lines seem unrelated: "Et la toile de Jouy du ciel / Vous, chassez le surnaturel." These lines, however, begin the enfolding of images of space that render the poem a labyrinth, as well as introduce the mythical figures who people it. The union of the decorative fabric "toile du Jouy" with the sky confounds inner, furnished space with the "pays" outside. The "toile de Jouy" may also refer to the "toiles" of Tanguy, which almost always depict objects distributed in an indeterminate space. The "vous" who is commanded to "hunt the supernatural" emerges, upon a rereading of the poem, as Theseus, who, aided by Ariadne, solves the labyrinth and defeats the Minotaur. The imperative here serves to reinforce the foregoing idea of entry: Theseus (and the surrealist artist, and the reader) is compelled to enter the labyrinth which is at this point in the poem beginning to take shape. The line associated with this couplet, "Avec toutes les étoiles de sacrebleu," takes up the sky image of the "toile de Jouy" and, with its confounded stars from which one cannot get one's bearings, continues to construct the maze. At this point in the poem the cumulative sequence has taken shape, and generates its own sense of imperative: the insistence of the repetition drives the reader onward to the anticipated new image and thus deeper into the poem and the poem's maze.
The relationship between the images in the couplets and those in the cumulative lines was described above as a loop; in the fourth—and therefore the central—couplet, the loop itself appears as an image: "Elle est de lassos et de jambages / Couleur d'écrivesse à la nage." In combination with its companion line in the sequence, "Avec les tramways en tous sens ramenés à leur seules antennes," this central couplet describes the actual structure of the poem's linked images—for "elle," that is, "la maison d'Yves," indeed reveals itself to be of "lassos and curlicues"—as well as introduces the motif of the guiding line. The reference to the color of a swimming crayfish may relate to a particular painting's colors, but it would appear that the reference to a crayfish in motion contributes to the image of movement of—or is determined by—a line, whether a lasso, a written curl, the antennae of a crayfish or the guiding poles of the tramcar that attach it to its guiding wire. Connecting wires and antenna-like extensions can be found in many of Tanguy's paintings, particularly those which he produced around the time of this poem's composition, Arrières pensées (1939) and Les Mouvements et les actes (1937). The verb ramener, with its sense of bringing back, recalling, may play a part in the image of restriction to a particular space which is overtly stated in the following couplet.
As in the third couplet, both the labyrinth and the mythological adventurers associated with quests for the supernatural are presented in the fifth couplet/line conjunction. "L'espace lié, le temps réduit" describes the labyrinthine structure. A labyrinth "binds" space in that it concentrates it in a limited area; the radii of the plane are bent and folded in on themselves. In a like manner, the linear progress of time is enfolded in the structure of the labyrinth. Both "Ariane dans sa chambre étui" and "l'argonaute" of the line "Avec la crinière sans fin de l'argonaute" are figures involved in journeys ending in a confrontation with the surreal. The "crinière" picks up the image of the line, and here it is "endless," running through the infinite permutations of the labyrinth. The "chambre étui" in which we find Ariane is perplexing, for it seems to indicate that Ariane, rather than waiting outside the labyrinth as she does in the legend, is herself enclosed. The pattern of enclosing and enfolding may extend so far that that which proposes itself to be a guide through the maze is itself confounded in the maze. I will pick up this thread at a later point.
Interior and exterior space are confounded in the sixth couplet/line pair. The couplet, "Le service est fait par les sphinges / Qui se couvrent les yeux de linges," suggests, with its image of riddling attendants who cover their eyes with the linens, the interior space of the puzzling "house" the poem is constructing. This whimsical image gains a great deal of energy from the companion line in the accumulating sequence, "Avec le mobilier fulgurant du désert," which combines an image of great space, "désert," with a domestic image, "le mobilier." When brought together, the couplet and the line create an interconnected double image of the expanse of the Egyptian desert with the pyramids and the enigmatic sphinx and of a bizarrely furnished household maintained by servants whose only wish is to confound. Both of these physical spaces are contained in the maze that is the house of Yves Tanguy: "le mobilier fulgarant du désert," of course, refers to Tanguy's painted landscapes, in which strikingly clear—if puzzling—objects furnish an otherwise vacant and seemingly limitless plain.
In the final couplet the "on" of the first lines reappears: "On y meurtrit on y guérit / On y complote sans abri." This sudden description of activity effects an urgency, as does the "Vous, chassez le surnaturel" of the third couplet, and unites this "vous" with the impersonal pronoun of the first couplet. The actor here is Theseus, and Theseus is the surrealist artist who must confront the Minotaur of the unconscious, the unknown, the dreamt. That the Minotaur is a compelling figure to the surrealist imagination is testified to by the title of one of the movement's longest-running reviews, Minotaure, which appeared with covers on which leading surrealist artists depicted the beast. The ambivalence with which Surrealism seems to regard its mascot is indicative of its recognition of the precariousness of the unconscious realm in which one can either achieve liberation or descend into madness. The Minotaur is attractive but dangerous, potentially both creative and destructive, a wounding and a healing force. This dialectical approach to the unconscious may well be figured in the line "On y meurtrit on y guérit." If the verbs are taken as transitive, however, the line can be read as a formula for the surrealist method: the Surrealist's "plot" against the mundane external world, involving a kind of violence, a radical dissociation and reassociation of elements which then "heal" into a fresh vision. This couplet is linked to the final line in the cumulative series, "Avec les signes qu'échangent de loin les amoureux," by means of the Theseus/Ariane theme. The words "de loin," the distance across which these lovers communicate, are particularly resonant, given the previous images of expanses in the poem—expanses which have been enfolded in the poem's labyrinth. As the last unit in a potentially infinite series, this line bears a great deal of weight. It consolidates the image of the labyrinth as an enfolded space—Theseus and Ariane are connected across its distance by the guiding line; it extends the human element of the poem to include "les amoureux," not only Theseus and Ariane but the poem's readers; and it returns us to Tanguy's paintings, in which indeterminate objects or beings stand at tremendous distances from one another but appear to "communicate," either along connecting lines or by means of unifying spatial relationships. Finally, the line closes the sequence with the idea of exchange, a dynamic activity that provides a clue to the function of this imaginary labyrinth.
"If Breton envisages himself as a Theseus forever closed within a labyrinth of crystal, at least he intends to confer upon the labyrinth a movement as perpetual as his within it," writes Mary Ann Caws in her biography of Breton. And indeed, Breton's labyrinth in "La Maison d'Yves" is in motion. In fact, a consideration of the grammar of the first lines and of the cumulative sequence will show that the poem is essentially about an activity. Each accumulating line is predicated grammatically on the first couplet, "La maison d'Yves / Où l'on n'entre que la nuit," in that each, beginning with "avec," indicates something brought into "la maison d'Yves." The additive sequences refer to the mode of entry into the "house," although at the end of the poem the "house" is built of their images, with the couplets—with their own images and oblique references to structure—serving as a formal skeleton. Thus, one constructs "la maison d'Yves" in the very act of entering it. This feature of the poem, highly satisfying from a surrealist point of view, depends upon the repetition/accumulation line pattern reminiscent of children's songs such as the English "House that Jack Built" and the French "Petit Bricou," which relate a process made up of linked actions in sequence. Breton adopts this pattern, but fractures the sequence and creates a looping maze rather than a linear progression. Yet the urgent tempo of the pattern maintains the notion of activity and movement. "La Maison d'Yves" is ultimately a portrayal of surrealist liminality, of the process of creation and the artist's approach to the "pointe sublime" or the "point de l'esprit" at which oppositions "cessent d'être per us contradictoirement."
That the combinatory process of surrealist creation can be at least partially visualized with the image of a maze is evident in reading Breton's theoretical writings on Surrealism. In his discussions of the objectives of the movement, Breton himself often turns to images suggestive of labyrinthine structures. In Les Vases communicants, in which he attempts to lay the groundwork for a union of the external, physical realm with the realm of the unconscious and of dreams, he describes the unifying agent as a "tissu capillaire":
Le rôle de ce tissu est, on l'a vu, d'assurer l'échange constant qui doit se produire dans la pensée entre le monde extérieur et le monde intérieur, échange qui nécessite l'interpénétration continue de l'activité de veille et de l'activité de sommeil. Toute mon ambition a été de donner ici un aperçu de sa structure.
Breton makes the statement, also in Les Vases communicants: "Je souhaite qu'il [le surréalisme] passe pour n'avoir tenté rien de mieux que de jeter un fil conducteur entre les mondes pas trop dissociés de la veille et du sommeil, de la réalité extérieure et intérieure, de la raison et de la folie, du calme de la connaissance et de l'amour, de la vie pour la vie et de la révolution, etc." The "fil conducteur" can be read as a "conducting wire," participating in the imagery of electricity of which Breton was fond, or as a "conducting thread," suggesting a "fil d'Ariane" that traverses the space between the two opposing realms, a dynamic in the surrealist dialectic. If the "tissu capillaire," suggestive of a conduit composed of convoluted passages, and the "fil conducteur" indicate the structure of the sur-realist orientation to the two opposing "worlds," Breton's references to "le vertige" describe the experiential, active dimension of this orientation. The surrealist imagination must break down the accepted structures of the exterior world and reestablish them in new and unexpected combinations with elements from the interior world of the unconscious, and must always dismiss the actual in favor of the possible. The "ideal atmosphere," Breton writes in "L'Introduction sur le peu de réalité," "… would be one in which what could exist destroys at every step what does exist." In Manifeste du surréalisme Breton indicates that the imagination itself is labyrinthine in nature, and upholds the value of this quality:
La seule imagination me rend compte de ce qui peut être, et c'est assez pour lever un peu le terrible interdit; assez aussi pour que je m'abandonne à elle sans crainte de me tromper (comme si l'on pouvait se tromper davantage). Où commence-t-elle à devenir mauvaise et où s'arrête la sécurité de l'esprit? Pour l'esprit, la possibilité d'errer n'est-elle pas plutôt la contingence du bien?
The surrealist imagination's process of disorientation and reorientation simultaneously builds and unravels the labyrinth, but since the labyrinthine "tissu capillaire" is necessary to unite the two worlds in which the surrealist finds elements for his combinations, the imagination must immediately enter a new field of unlimited possibility. In his efforts to clarify a surrealist method in the visual arts, Hans Holländer provides two visualizations of the creative process, which, he argues, are detectable in surrealist productions, especially those of Tanguy and Max Ernst: "The methods of inventing and finding unknown, not visible constellations from elements of reality reflect themselves as models in surrealist iconography. One of their leitmotifs is the labyrinth, another is the game of chess, and the two are connected." The labyrinth, like the chessboard, presents a field of vast possibility, and it is this quality, as well as its ability to fuse contradictions, to muddle the ideas of interiority and exteriority, of progress and stasis, beginning and ending, that renders the labyrinth a useful metaphor for the dialectic at the heart of surrealist aesthetics.
Thus far, the form of the labyrinth as it develops in "La Maison d'Yves" has been regarded as a visualization of surrealist consciousness, of the Surrealist's way of seeing as it is acted upon in his creative production. To leave off here, and thus to limit the implications of the labyrinth to the realm of artistic creation, would be to insult Breton's vision of Surrealism. Breton viewed the movement not only as a revolution in artistic consciousness, but also as a participant in a revolution in political conscience. Although Surrealism had broken with the Communist party by the time Breton composed "La Maison d'Yves," the movement maintained much of its revolutionary fervor, and a commitment to social change, perhaps even a utopian vision, is articulated in particular images in the poem.
The mythological figures named in the poem—Ariane, the Argonaut, and Theseus, who is implied in the "vous"—are all associated with an adventurous quest for the marvelous. In the case of Theseus, the marvelous is the Minotaur; for the Argonaut it is the Golden Fleece. The original myths in which these figures appear are folded into the labyrinth of the poem. Beyond the somewhat facile analogy of the quest lie the implications of the myths themselves: one must consider the social conditions within which these quests were undertaken. In the case of these two stories, the quest for the marvelous is an effort to effect liberating social change: the capture of the Golden Fleece permits Jason to unseat his pretender uncle; Theseus's victory over the Minotaur frees Athens from its terrible annual tribute of human lives to the government of Crete. Breton's particular adaptation of the Theseus myth in "La Maison d'Yves" retains the ultimate goal of the quest—liberation from tyranny—but changes the terms of the adventure.
It has already been noted that the Surrealists could not view the figure of the Minotaur as a wholly negative force. (The Minotaur itself is an instance of radical recombination.) For the Surrealists the beast embodies the elements of the unconscious and the unknown, inhabiting the inviting and yet threatening world of dream. Associated thus with "le monde intérieur," the Minotaur in the surrealist myth is not so much imprisoned by the labyrinth as connected via the labyrinth to "le monde extérieur." In the poem, as was noted above, Ariane is enclosed, "dans sa chambre étui." Perhaps the "chambre étui," like the "lassos" and "jambages," offers a description of the poem itself—it is not outside the bounds of surrealist imagination to picture a labyrinth of vast possibilities reduced to a tiny box—so that Ariane, like Theseus, is within the labyrinth. This implies that the guiding line does not lead out of the maze, but itself originates in the maze—for it was Ariane who provided Theseus with the skein of thread—and can lead only back into the maze. So it is with the reader: upon reaching what he considers the end of the poem he finds himself at the beginning: the final line loops back to the first. As figured in "La Maison d'Yves," the surrealist Theseus, the revolutionary, does not free the world from tyranny by entering the labyrinth and destroying the beast, but by taking the entire world into the labyrinth with him, where, confounded with the liberated unconscious, the world is transformed and "l'homme" is released from "le tour des objets dont il a été amené à faire usage, et que lui a livrés sa nonchalance, ou son effort, son effort presque toujours, car il a consenti à travailler…." The labyrinth of "La Maison d'Yves" can be seen, then, not only as a "communicating vessel" joining the interior and exterior worlds for the purpose of the production of art, but as a region of consciousness in which the two worlds of human experience are combined so that the outside world, the political realm, is changed for the better as it is assumed into the structure of a revolutionary, freedom-affirming imagination.
"La Maison d'Yves" is much more than Breton's playful tribute to a fellow Surrealist: not only does it stand as an exemplar of Breton's verbal artistry, but it articulates, more through its intrinsic structure than by direct statement, the theoretical foundations and social conscience of the movement of which it is a product. "La Maison" is a communicating labyrinth within which the external world and the internal realm of dream are intertwined, and in which, in turn, the reader is confounded. As such it may serve as an emblem of "l'intuition poètique… débridée dans le surréalisme," which, Breton writes in a late essay, "se veut non seulement assimilatrice de toutes les formes connues mais hardiment créatrice de nouvelles formes—soit en posture d'embrasser toutes les structures du monde, manifesté ou non. Elle seule nous pourvoit du fil qui remet sur le chemin de la Gnose, en tant que connaissance de la Réalité suprasensible, 'invisiblement visible dans un éternel mystère.'"
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