Savage and Civilized
[Cardinal is an English educator who specializes in French studies, surrealism, symbolism, and psychopathological creation. In the following excerpt, he assesses Breton's poetry as a brilliant exploration of the power of language.]
Towards the end of his life, André Breton published a tiny book as his poetic testament. Le La consists simply of four enigmatic sentences which popped into Breton's mind while he was on the verge of sleep. Such samples of preconscious language are presented as touchstones of the poetic, inasmuch as they spring unmediated from the source and stimulate the incantatory process of surrealist automatism. These four brief phrases from the 1950s are the direct descendants of that celebrated dream-phrase of 1919 which first made Breton think about doing automatic writing: "Il y a un homme coupé en deux par la fenêtre".
What can now be seen as Breton's lifelong commitment to the principle of automatism or subliminal inspiration has been the locus of a series of misunderstandings and unjustified accusations. To refute some of the charges, it should simply be said: no, Breton didn't only write in an automatic manner; no, he didn't place unintelligibility above meaningfulness; no, he didn't sabotage beauty to protect a rigid ideological principle.
What Breton did do, as Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws's anthology amply demonstrates, was to explore language throughout his career in the light of a precept of unconstrained expression inseparable from the essentially ethical position on which the whole project of Surrealism is predicated. The automatic message floating into consciousness is nothing less than a signal from that reservoir of primal spontaneity which is the hidden or libidinal self in all its fertility. Breton's "man sliced in two" is the surrealist seeking to unite the two aspects of his being, the unconscious and the conscious, instinct and intelligence. Surrealist art in all its forms is an attempt to release the dormant savage within—but equally to reconcile him with the civilized man living with his eyes open to the real world.
Breton therefore prized the dream-utterance not because it was marvellously unintelligible, but because it was nonsense in transition towards sense—a form of language which epitomizes the expressive act as the passage from the shadows of inarticulacy to the light of communication and understanding. Again and again in his poems, Breton turns the tiller of his "phantom vessel" over to the obscure hand of automatism. Again and again, sense veers towards the rocks of meaninglessness; and yet it is out of this repeated veering that Breton is able to discover the shapes of a new meaning, mapping the precise outline of each island in the hitherto uncharted archipelago of emotion and intuition.
Flamboyant and disquieting images are, of course, the bestknown features of Breton's poetic style, and [Poems of André Breton] offers a ready selection of those "free unions" of discrepant realities which he so cherished as disruptive of mental fixities. The "vertebral sphinx", the "glass-toothed wolf and the "algebra-nostriled horses" are so many experimental species spawned in defiance of what seems reasonable.
More importantly, though, such images need to be read in context, as flashes or spasms in a dynamic of provocations. And, as Breton grew to understand the implications of his poetics, he tended more and more to relinquish arbitrary shock effects and to develop a grand style of long, oracular lines which set up a momentum below the flickering figures of the surface, stimulating an alertness to analogy and compatibility that goes beyond the bounds of prosaic literalness. This is Utopian poetry on the Rimbaldian model, one that announces a new harmony lying on the far side of "present appearances".
Some readers of Breton's work will find his approach simply irritating. It is true that he has a penchant for flapdoodle. "It seems that the statue near which the wormwood of my nerve endings / Arrives at its destination is tuned every night like a piano" is a statement long on mischievous incongruity but rather short on lyrical resonance. On the other hand Breton's insistent word-spinning (often enhanced by the ritualistic insertion of rare words) can also summon the attentive—or acquiescent—reader to encounter something magnetizing and poignant, a convincing "presence" within the verbal concatenation. This occurs most often in his queerly de-centred effusions of sexual desire.
Je caresse tout ce qui fut toi
Dans tout ce qui doit l'être encore
J'écoute siffler mélodieusement
Tes bras innombrables
Serpent unique dans tous les arbres
("I caress all that was you / In all that shall still be you / I can hear the melodious whistling / Of your numberless arms / Snake unique amid all the trees".)
There are, in fact, moments of true poetic revelation lying in wait in Breton's most unsettled texts. Perhaps his most assured longer poem is Fata Morgana, which he composed in Marseille in 1940, on the verge of exile; the poem employs an authoritative blend of automatism and willed structure that successfully mimes the attitudes of a mind hovering between anxiety and wisdom, puzzlement and discernment. Here lies Breton's achievement as a poet: he brings his reader into touch with the raw energy of words as they flow and cohere, to produce, image by image, a constellation of intuitively focused meanings and insights which allow him to glide over local incongruities.
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