The Pope of Surrealism himself—an informative, intelligent, readable study



https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/30/archives/andre-breton-magus-of-surrealism-by-anna-balakian-illustrated-289.html

By Leo Bersani
May 30, 1971

Our favorite intellectual game is to announce revolutions of consciousness. From Charles Reich's parlor game theory of consciousness‐on‐the move to the cataclysmic view of history implied in Michel Foucault's brilliant “Words and Things,” con temporary thinkers have been generously satisfying the appetite for conclusive endings and wholly fresh beginnings which, as Frank Kermode has argued, characterizes Western attempts to impose design and purpose on experience. As it becomes more and more difficult to imagine solutions—for the self and for society—which are not merely repeti tions of the problems they are meant to solve, modes of magical thought help to smother our painful sense of historical entrapment. Apocalyptic thinking provides a glamorous fiction of escape from inescapable history.

To return to surrealism now is a little like looking at ourselves from a distance. Surrealism was the most spectacular announcement in our century of a revolution both psychic and social, and it is no accident that the slogans and manifestoes of May, 1968, in Paris were more reminiscent of surrealist verbal fireworks than of the more austere dialectical re flections on revolution and rebellion of either Sartre or Camus. Contem porary recipes for revolution often blend attacks against capitalism and nationalism, psychic trips designed to expand consciousness, the deter mination to free women from their economic and psychological enslave ment to the “bourgeois rationalism” of a male‐dominated society, and an interest in the occult, in mysterious, correspondences between personal destiny and objective forces or laws. These ingredients, so familiar to us today, were also the principal ele ments of a surrealist program in which the exploration of dreams, the reading of Tarot cards and a battle against economic oppression often seemed to have equal dignity in an enterprise of total human liberation.

For all its “relevance,” surrealism has been rather neglected in Amer ica. Anna Balekian's new book is therefore particularly welcome. Miss Balakian, professor of French and comparative literature at New York University, has written an informative, intelligent and commendably readable study about the Pope of Surrealism himself— its uncompro mising, often tyrannical director and most articulate spokesman, André Breton. Miss Balakian surveys both the life and the work, with a strong emphasis on the exposition of Bre ton's thought. Her point of view is almost unreservedly sympathetic, and while I would myself have been in clined totake a more critical per spective on both Breton's personality and his achievements, Miss Balak ian's judicious book bath documents her own admiration and gives us the evidence for a somewhat less sym pathetic appraisal.

Surrealism as a movement had its ups and dawns, but from 1919—the year of “Les Champs Magnétiques,” the experiment in automatic writing which Breton called the first surreal ist text—to Breton's death in 1966, the continuity of surrealism was guaranteed by the leader's active faith. Through all the defections and the heresies, the Church was always alive in his person. Even after World War II, when the fortunes of sur realism were particularly low, Bret on's apartment in Paris once again became the central office for surreal ist research. And among the recent recruits or admirers were some of the major figures in contemporary French writing: Yves Bonnefoy, Julien Gracq, Malcolm de Chazal, and André Pievre de Mandiargues. Breton could add these names to the extraordinarily impressive list of writers and painters who had already been attracted, however briefly, to surrealism. To mention just a few of these artists—Paul Eluard, René Char, René Magritte, Giorgio di Chirico, Max Ernst—is to recognize at once the unique importance of surrealism in twentieth‐century cul tural life. It was the most powerful magnet for artistic genius in our century. And the magnetizing power of surrealism—its ability to draw so much original talent into its field— is, as Miss Balakian rightly suggests, inseparable from the intellectual and moral authority of its charismatic leader.

Breton had always emphasized the collective nature of the surrealist adventure. Indeed, the originality of surrealism as an artistic movement lies partly in its effort to erase the traditional hierarchy of individual talents which helps us to give a ebherent shape to literary history. Nevertheless, it is of course difficult to avoid a certain violation of the surrealist spirit and to refrain from any assessment of Breton's own literary achievement. Miss Balakian proposes a useful division of Breton's writings into what she calls three distinct structures: “free verse...; logical prose, which is the structure under which can be classified all his critical writings, philosophical essays, and manifestoes and addresses; and finally — perhaps his most original farm—analogical prase, which unlike the prose poem takes on vast propor tions, and often the dimensions of a short novel.”

I have never felt comfortable with the heavy, frequently pompous elo quence of Breton's “logical prose” (especially in the manifestoes). On the other hand, I think Miss Balakian is right to suggest that Breton has been underestimated as a poet. She argues convincingly for his verse, while recognizing its difficulties. We may be put off by the longwinded and harsh‐sounding lines of Breton's poetry, the archaic verb structures, the scientific terminology and occult ist imagery; but at its best his verse has a startlingly fresh shock quality. Still, Breton's particular literary gifts are perhaps most evident in the “analogical prose,” especially in “Nadja” (published in 1928 and avail able in an English translation by Richard Howard) and in “Arcane 17” (written in 1944 and 1947). The dif ferences between these two texts are considerable. If, as Michel Beau jour has written, all of Breton's other works can be thought of as “only fragments” of the triumphant syn thesis of his thought achieved in “Arcane 17,” “Nadja” is perhaps the more appealingly tentative quest of the younger Breton — through his meetings in Paris with the mysterious Nadja—for signs and signals of his own identity. But in spite of differ ences, both “Nadja” and “Arcane 17” illustrate Breton's talent for narra tives in which richly criss crossing networks of anal ogy provide a unified structure saved from rigidity by the unpredictable, open‐ended na ture of the mental processes of association.

Breton was, then, a signifi cant literary figure in his own right, as well as the leader of a movement which func tioned as a major source of inspiration for twentieth ‐ cen tury poetry and painting. Even Sartre, in his famous attack in 1947 on surrealism's view of itself as a revolutionary move ment, conceded that it was “the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century.” But to take Breton and surrealism seriously, we must dismiss—or at least sus pend—our appreciation of its importance in the arts, and consider the surrealist art prod uct as an almost negligible by product in a collective experi ment designed to transform radically the self and society. Surrealism in the libraries and in the museums is the defeat of its revolutionary ambitions — another victory, as we would say, for “repressive tolerance.”

What did surrealism propose in the way of psychic and so cial transformations? Breton wished, as Miss Balakian puts it, “to see how far objective necessity could be made to coincide with the desires of the human will.” The im portance of this lies in an attempted revision of Freudian ideas about the relation be tween desires, dreams or fan tasies and a reality apparently distinct from those fantasies. Breton was interested not in how we adjust our desires to a reality incompatible with them, but rather in the as yet unexplored ways in which the desires expressed in dreams, for example, seek to be satis fied in our waking life. De sire, as he writes in “Les Vases Communicants,” pursues in the external world the objects nec essary for its own fulfillment. The surrealist's availability to chance is not simply a passive stance. The discovery of our techniques for coercing people and things into a conformity with desires we may not even be consciously aware of re quires that state of mind which the surrealists brought to their tireless walks through Paris: a leisurely but attentive observa tion of those movements by which we attempt to make physical space coincide with psychic space. The surrealist stroll is part of a scientific investigation into the mind's power to change the world.

But the “marvelous” coin cidences which Breton records in “Les Vases Communicants” and in “Nadja” leave the larger social world intact. The com plex and at times stormy his tory of surrealism's relation with Communism expresses the group's understandable but no less telling failure to imagine specific ways in which the psychic and the social revolu tions might be coordinated. Aragon abandoned the psychic laboratory for the party. Breton, after a brief period in the party, resolutely returned to more pri vate revolutionary programs.

In discussing this aspect of surrealism, Miss Balakian al lows her sympathy for Breton to silence her critical intelli gence. She assures us that Breton refused to write a paper for the party on the conditions of Italian workers “not due to any dislike of Italian workers but because it jarred with the basic principles of autonomy he maintained in politics as in private life.” The fact that “Breton had not taken orders from anybody since the day he left his father's house” may make us think of him as a very lucky man, but it is hardly an argument for his refusing to take orders. Also, it's clear enough that the assignment “jarred” with Breton's “basic principles of autonomy,” but this intransigent commitment to his own autonomy led to decisions (not to fight with his friends on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, not to join the Resistance in France but to spend the war years in America) which make revolu tionary personal freedom look suspiciously dike social quietism (as Sartre called it) if not po litical conservatism. The sur realists were for a time after World War I the bad boys of French cultural life, but to shock the bourgeoisie is not to destroy the structures of bour geois society.

Finally, there was a certain authoritarianism and even in tolerance in Breton's personal ity. His psychological and moral openness had definite limits. I'm thinking of Breton's pen chant for excommunicating “fal len” members of the group, of his exclusion of homosexuals from the surrealist coterie, of his dismissal of Artaud large ly because of the latter's use of drugs, and of the curious discrepancy in Breton's writ ing between the stated desire to explode the traditional bound aries of consciousness and a style that imprisons thought in a tightly disciplined rhetorical art reminiscent of Chateaubri and.

As I have suggested, the vi sion of revolutionary transfor mations of consciousness is per haps a fantasy of escape from history rather than a viable in spiration for programs of his torical change. In Breton's case, that fantasy expressed, in part, an admirably generous view of human possibilities. But —and the example is an in structive one for us—the lan guage of intransigence also helped to protect his somewhat self‐limiting freedom, his re luctance to take the psycho logical and moral risks of a possibly more authentic rebel lion. ■