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How does Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love present the surrealistic "real dream"?
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Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love embodies the surrealistic "real dream" by challenging conventional theater norms and presenting a narrative that blends dreams with reality, aligning with Andre Breton's surrealist manifesto. The play disrupts expectations with non-linear action, ambiguous character roles, and uncertain plot developments. It explores themes such as madness and love, suggesting that emotional experiences transcend typical definitions, thus achieving Breton's concept of "absolute reality" or surreality.
The idea of "real dreams" can be traced to Andre Breton's surrealist manifesto. As the eNote summary of the manifesto puts it,
Breton believes that Freud has shown that dreams must be respected as coherent sources of truth and of practical assistance in life. Indeed, despite what is often believed, it may be reality that interferes with dreams rather than the reverse. Hence, Breton recommends that one give oneself up to one’s dreams, allowing oneself to be satisfied by what is received from dream states instead of applying the criteria of reason to dreams. Here, Breton’s analysis takes on the language of religious fervor when he insists that if one reconciles dreams and reality, one will attain an absolute reality: surreality.
(See this eNote for more.)
Vitrac's play attempts to recreate this dream-truth as theatre. One of the key ways he does this is by violating all the expectations an...
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audience would have of a theatrical production. Not only does the action occur all over the theatre, instead of strictly on stage, ordinary assumptions about characters, motivations, and plot are not fulfilled. For instance, the author appears several times in the play, but not as the same "character;" at one point he is shot by another character, but does not die; the author's intentions, or even his repsonsibility for the proceedings, are thrown into doubt. In a sense, the play can be understood as the story of Lea's descent into madness, but by the end of the play her "madness," or even whether "madness" is possible, is called into question. In short, the play attempts to present Breton's "absolute reality" by positing that the intense emotional reactions of the characters transcend the narrow definitions we might have for concepts like "love" or "sanity." As Vitrac himself put it, the play attempts to show "the disquiet, double solitude, dissembled criminal thoughts, and eroticism of lovers."
Source: Auslander, Philip. “Surrealism in the Theatre: The Plays of Roger Vitrac”. Theatre Journal 32.3 (1980): 357–369.