[In the following essay, Balakian discusses André Breton's disregard for artificial stimulants in favor of the "natural intoxicants" of the human mind and the use he made of this belief in the development of his surrealism.]

Chaque homme porte en lui sa dose d'opium naturel, incessamment secrétée et renouvelée.

Baudelaire

Agreeing with Baudelaire that every man had a powerhouse of natural intoxicants. André Breton made of this hypothesis the apex of surrealism.

Instances of his personal disapproval¹ of all artificial stimulants can be found in the pages of Entretiens, 1913-1952, avec André Parinaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) and in other personal accounts of his own and of his friends' experimental activities in the field of the expansion of consciousness. His quarrels with Artaud and Desnos stemmed largely from Breton's suspicions that pathological and artificial aberration of the psycho-sensory mechanism made certain of the surrealist colleagues unsuitable subjects for surrealist exploration of the human psyche.

Breton's basic departure from Freud and his alignment with Dr. Pierre Janet were based precisely on Breton's conviction that the exploration of the unconscious was not necessarily to be motivated by the desire to normalize sensual and mental deviations observed in the abnormal or pathological subject; the objective was, rather, to demolish the preestablished norm and to ascertain the possibility of what Baudelaire had called "l'expansion des choses infinies." Dr. Janet had indicated this new direction when he had said:

All this teaches us that we are richer than we think, we have more ideas and sensations than we thought. . . . To limit the life of man to this clear and distinct thought process Descartes speaks about, is to suppress in my opinion, three quarters of this human life and to leave what is most attractive, the shadows and the clair-obscur. It is one of the merits of contemporary psychology to have tried to know the mysterious side of thought.²

In approval of Janet's attitude, Breton ventured on a sane man's colonization of a platform of awareness heretofore allocated only to the lunatic, hysteric, ascetic, and the narcotic. In his departure from the abnormal, he had to isolate his experiment from the other states previously involved in this form of study. Breton entered the field of psychic expansion as a neophyte medical student and with the approach of a man of science rather than as a literary escapist or a lay sensation seeker. That much for the personal circumstances!

In terms of literary history, Breton derives his concept of the "voyant" from Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In Romantic connotation the word signified intimations of otherwordly vision here on earth; in the context of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises it came to mean the power of transformation of existing reality by its distortion and contorsion; the re-created dimensions of time and place, and the objectification of the subjective conveyed the sense of paradise under the effect of hashish. Although the poet as "voyant" became a "director and transformer of dreams,"³ Baudelaire, in conclusion, minimized the attraction of such trips into evanescent eternity by balancing the ecstasy of vision against the slavery involved in the involuntary nature of the acquisition. In a parallel recital of the pleasures and agonies of drug addiction, Théophile Gautier had given still another definition of the "voyant" in his Club des Haschischins: an "adept who remained sober."⁴ It is this definition of the nonaddicted visionary that Rimbaud conveyed in theory if not always in practice in his famous statement: "Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dégèglement de tous les sens."⁵ Although Rimbaud underlined "dérèglement" the word that is interesting in the context of surrealism is "raisonné." Breton was to adopt rational derangement as the pivotal plank of his program to "remake human understanding."⁶

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: "Je n'ai jamais été porté que vers ce qui ne se tenait pas à carreau."⁷

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. In summing himself up in the poem Les États Généraux, he says: "Ce que j'ai connu de plus beau c'est le vertige."⁸ But he never thought that he needed drugs to achieve that state.

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:

Surrealism does not permit those who have indulged in it to drop it when they please. Everything leads us to believe that it acts on the mind in the manner of narcotics; like them it creates a state of need and can lead man to terrible revolts. . . . In many ways surrealism looms as a new vice. . . . Like hashish there is enough there to satisfy the most delicate systems. . . . The case of the surrealist images is very much like that of the images of opium that man no longer evokes because they 'are offered spontaneously, despotically. He cannot dismiss them; for free will no longer has any power and does not govern his faculties.'⁹

Breton's description of the surrealist state seems to parallel so closely what Baudelaire had described as the narcotic state that Breton ends his observation with a quotation from Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises.

The artificial stimulant was unnecessary for Breton because of the built-in mechanism that he was cultivating to provide him with powers of provocation and reception all at once. The surrealist interest in this powerhouse is in terms of the strength and intensity of its productive energy rather than in regard to the particular quality of the resulting product, whereas all accounts of drug trips in literary context put their emphasis on the visions attained rather than on the process of the attainment. In other words, what interested Breton was not the poppy seed but the fertility of the poppy field which he situated within that inner space previously occupied by the immortal soul.

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. Let us remember his self-interrogation in Nadja:

"Qui vive?" "Qui vive?" Est-ce vous Nadja? Estil vrai que l'au-delà tout l'au-delà soit dans cette vie? Je ne vous entends pas. Qui vive? Est-ce moi seul? Est-ce moi-même.¹⁰

For Breton poetry was a form of epistemology as it had been at least in theory for Rimbaud and Apollinaire. Early in his career he outlined his objectives in this direction in "Les Mots sans rides":

To restore to language its full destination . . . to make knowledge take a great step forward, and in so doing to provide life with a measure of exaltation.¹¹

Poetry was a path of knowledge about man, and literature was viable only as a human science. In Le Surréalisme et la peinture he tells us:

When I learn where I am to see in me the end of the terrible struggle between what I have already lived and what is viable, when I lose all hope of increasing in stupefying¹² proportions the field of reality, heretofore extremely limited, of my endeavors, when my imagination becomes selfcontained and restricted to the orbit of memory, I will consent to indulge like others in a few relative satisfactions. I will then rank myself among the embroiderers. I will forgive them. But only then and not before.¹³

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.¹⁴ 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. The basis of his quarrel with the communist system of the Stalin regime was his disappointment in the fact that men allegedly interested in the betterment of the socio-economic condition of everyman presumed this possible while retaining the strictures of an inhibitory rationalism inherited from previous nonegalitarian ideologies. Ironically, Breton was, at his death, light years away from having in any way affected the sensibility of everyman.

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. All the words associated with luminosity are part of his paradigmatic metaphors: étincelant, éblouissant, luisant, scintillant, flambée, phosphorescent, sphères de lucioles, verticale d'étincelles, nuit des éclairs, constellation, incandescence, maillot de lumière, lustre irisé, to name only a few of the qualifications of light, fire, crystal, all part of the extra-lucidity achieved.

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. An expression such as "Monde dans un baiser" is not simply an affective expression of love for Breton as it might be for Lamartine or Musset. It is a basis of reconstruction of disparate elements that his senses regroup into the chosen focus of the immediate moment. 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."¹⁵

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."¹⁶ 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: "Ta bouche est volontiers la nielle";¹⁷ 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:

Des taillis où couve une chanson ensorcelante perce par éclairs et ondule la pointe du sein de la belladone.¹⁸

If these are two illustrative examples of actual textual designation, the more general hallucinatory and exalted state associated with the erotic is the normal assumption for Breton: "le luxe est dans la volupté" he generalizes in another of the Constellations called "Femmes au bord d'un lac à la surface irisée par le passage d'un cygne."¹⁹ But the intoxication occurs only when the sensual stimulation of sex is accompanied by the emotional one of love; one without the other remains nonintoxicating for Breton.

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. His very vocabulary conciliates the contradictions of high and low: "elles montaient vers moi soulevées par les vapeurs d'un abîme" (Pleine Marge).²⁰ In a more general perspective we find in Constellations:

Une vie protoplasmique profuse se taille dans la voie lactée, à hauteur de soupir, une amande qui germe.²¹

The image integrates several levels: the cosmic ascension to the Milky Way, the human height inherent in the sigh, and the almond at the level of germination in the soil. In the throes of the poetic trance he achieves the "certain point of the mind" which he had proposed in the Second Manifesto where "the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory."²²

If the bird images of Breton's poetic universe are a source of ecstasy and exhilaration, so are the stones and agates that he culls from the recesses of the earth: "It is not doubtful that the obstinate pursuit of light and sign, which the 'visionary mineralogist' maintains, acts on the mind like a narcotic," he says in one of his final articles entitled "Langue de pierres."²³ The expression "visionary mineralogist" 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."²⁴

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.²⁵ 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. The essential anguish—for can any man be without one?—was caused by the knowledge that the number of our years was not commensurate with the possibilities and varieties of stimulation available to the mortal senses without recourse to anything but the peaks of mountains, and the soaring of birds, and the glow of stones, charged with eternity, and the crystal iridescence of the waters of Oceania, and the vertiginous flash of lightning produced by the movement of a loved woman, and the savage eye of Breton.

Surrealism is, in fact, intoxication . . .

¹ In my own last encounter with Breton in 1964, I remember the sardonic disdain with which he explained the attempt that had been recently made to set his apartment on fire: "C'était des gens très drogués" ["They were highly drugged persons"].

² Pierre Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique, 9^th ed. (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1921), p. 421. I have treated the differences in the method of Freud as opposed to that of Janet in my critical biography of Breton; my information was based on a close reading of Pierre Janet's L'Automatisme psychologique and of De l'Angoisse à l'extase in the original French; the present translation is my own. Cf. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1971) for development of the subject.

³ A. Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 43; for detailed study of Baudelaire's treatment of the subjects of drugs, see my chapter on Baudelaire, in Literary Origins of Surrealism (New York: N. Y. U. Press, 1966).

⁴ "Le Club des haschischins," Revue des Deux Mondes, 1er février, 1846, p. 487 (collected in œuvres: Romans et Contes, [Paris: Lemerre, 1897]).

⁵ In Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny: "The poet makes himself a seer by means of a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses." (œuvres complètes [Paris: Pléiade, 1951], p. 254. In "Le Message automatique," Breton talks of the reeducation of the senses along the lines advocated by Rimbaud. Cf. "Le Message automatique," Point du jour, new edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 196-7. Original edition, 1933.)

⁶ "Comète surréaliste," La Clé des champs (Paris: Sagittaire, 1953), p. 105.

⁷ "I have never been drawn toward anything that did not throw caution to the winds." "Pleine Marge," Poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 171. (Originally appeared as a separate work, Salon Martigues, 1940.)

⁸ "The most beautiful thing I have ever known is vertigo." Poèmes, op. cit., p. 215. "Les Etats-Généraux" was written in N.Y. in 1943.

⁹ "Premier Manifeste," Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1962), p. 51. (Original edition, 1924.)

¹⁰ "'Who is there?' 'Who is there?' Is it you Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, all the beyond is in this life? I don't hear you. Who is there? Is it I alone? Is it myself?" Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), p. 190.

¹¹ "Les Mots sans rides," Les Pas perdus (Paris: Idées, 1969), p. 138. (Original edition, 1924.)

¹² The underlining is mine.

¹³Le Surréalisme et la peinture (New York: Bretano's, 1943), p. 23. (Original edition, Paris, 1928.)

¹⁴ Cf. "Position politique de l'art d'aujourd'hui," Manifestes du surréalisme, op. cit., p. 272.

¹⁵ "Langue de pierres," Poésie et autre, Gérard Legrand, ed. (Paris: Le Club du meilleur livre, 1960), p. 324. (Original printing in Le Surréalisme même, No. 3, Autumn 1957.)

¹⁶ "A jour," Arcane 17 (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1965), p. 148. (Original edition, N. Y., 1945.)

¹⁷L'Air de l'eau (included in Poèmes, op. cit., p. 137. (Original edition, 1934.)

¹⁸ "La Poétesse," Constellations, unnumbered section of Poésie et autre, op. cit. (Original edition, N. Y.: Pierre Matisse, 1959.)

¹⁹ This title means: "The lady at the edge of a lake iridized by the passage of a swan." Ibid.

²⁰ " . . . they rose toward me uplifted by the vapors of an abyss"; it could also mean: "lifted by the ships of an abyss." What is important in the untranslatable Breton is the junction of the two seemingly contradictory movements of up and down. "Pleine Marge," op. cit., p. 171.

²¹ "A protoplasmic life cuts for itself in the Milky Way, at the level of a sigh, a germinating almond." "Femmes dans la nuit," Constellations, op. cit.

²² "Second Manifeste," Manifestes du surréalisme, op. cit., p. 154.

²³ "Langue de pierres." Poésie et autre, op. cit., p. 320.

²⁴Ibid., p. 230.

²⁵ "Signe ascendant," La Clé des champs, op. cit., p. 115.