THE SURREALIST NOVEL: ITS PRINCIPLES AND STRUCTURES
IN ANDRE BRETON'S NADJA, L'AMOUR FOU AND ARCANE 17
by
Carol Elizabeth Lang
"La liberte n fest pas, comme la
liberation, la lutte contre la
maladie, elle est la sante."
Andre Breton
Arcane 17
"Freedom is not like liberation, the fight against disease, it is health."
ABSTRACT
Surrealist principles and structures in Nadja, L TAmour fou and Arcane 17 reveal the continuing preoccupation of Andre Breton with the liberation of the unconscious and its communication to the reader. The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the evolution of such structures and to demonstrate the contribution of Breton’s early medical background to these works including the influence of J. Babinski.
In the Introduction the lack of interest in these works on the part of key critics is considered. Passages from Clair de terre, LesPas perdus and the Manifeste du Surrealisme are seen, on the other hand, to suggest the early concern of Breton with the potential of the Surrealist novel.
Each of the three works is then treated in depth. The explicit intentions of Breton are cited (except in the case of Arcane 17). N e x t , the physical structures of each work are examined. These are considered to be spatial indications of Breton’s thought. Primary and secondary divisions, paragraphing, sentence length and illustrated matter are discussed.
Special attention is given to Breton’s continuing attempt to provide the work as a ’’glass house” to the reader. Physical structures are seen to be original, varied, uneven, open and groping in Nadja.
They are more even but more eclectic in L ’Amour fou. In Arcane 17 they
are structures capable of communicating Breton’s most mature, intense
expression.
Thematic structures are explored in detail. In Nadja these are many. Self-expression via the unconscious, surrealist space, attraction and repulsion, the four elements, the promenade, the encounter and liberty and creation receive attention. Particular study is made of the
principal themes of the unconscious, the promenade, the encounter and liberty. In L^Amour fou, Breton is seen to have gathered these loose thematic structures into a tighter framework. From the earlier themes of Nadja four principal notions are shown to have developed: objective chance, the encounter, mad love, and woman and child.
The thematic intensity of Arcane 1 7 , finally, is seen to depend on the integration of
three structures, that of disintegration and reintegration, woman and the child and liberty and creation. Use of generative images to document and communicate these notions to the reader is noted.
In addition, lexical elements and syntactical structures are examined since they play a unique role in the Surrealist documentation of the unconscious in these works. Interplay of proper nouns, juxtaposition of psychological, scientific, poetic, casual and Biblical terms,
as well as an often utilized "springboard" technique are explored.
These elements, as well as the creative use of open-ended sentences,
italics and suspension points permit simultaneous documentation of objective and subjective realities.
In the Conclusion these principles and structures are found to provide for the liberation of the unconscious and the consequent evolution of the dream. At the same time they involve closely superimposed objective and subjective documentation of this process. Both aspects
must be considered characteristic of the Surrealist novel as envisioned by Breton.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ANDRE BRETON. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query ANDRE BRETON. Sort by date Show all posts
Friday, February 14, 2020
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Myth, History, and Repetition: Andre Breton and Vodou
South Central Review, 2015
South Central Review, 2015
Issue: 1
Volume: 32
Publication Date: 2015
Publication Name: South Central Review
IN 1948, ANDRÉ BRETON WROTE AN ESSAY that discussed his first encounter a few years prior with the paintings of Hector Hyppolite at the Centred’ Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Breton, noting Hyppolite’s role as a Vodou priest, described his strong impression that the artist had, “an important message to communicate, that he was the guardian of a secret.”Breton’swords express a certain contradictory sense about Hyppolite and his painting, in which the urgent, important message is simultaneously a mystery that must be safeguarded or even withheld. As this essay will examine, the same contradiction lies at the heart of Breton’s broader efforts to relate Haiti and its traditions to surrealism’s evolving politics,and it widely relates to ongoing ideological debates within the movement as it evolved in post-World War II Europe. The history and culture of Haiti and Vodou held a central position within Breton’s turn to myth and esotericism in the mid-1940s, and informed his creative projects on secret initiation and utopia as political tools of freedom and the imagination. Yet Breton generally demonstrated a reluctance to write or speak directly about Haiti and Vodou.
Friday, February 14, 2020
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. ■
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. ■
Thursday, February 13, 2020
MANIFESTOS OF SURREALISM ANDRE BRETON
Andre Breton - Monoskop THE MANIFESTOS OF SURREALISM 1929 -1940
https://monoskop.org › images › Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism
Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. Mallarme is Surreal ist when he is confiding. Jarry is Surrealist in ...
[PDF] Manifesto of Surrealism - The exquisite corpse 1924 FIRST MANIFESTO
by A BRETON - Cited by 717 - Related articles
MANIFESTO. OF. SURREALISM ... SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being ... Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is ..
NEW TRANSLATION 2010
[PDF]
First Manifesto of Surrealism - 1924 - Kristine Door
by A Breton -
Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art. - Written surrealist composition, or first and last draft. - How not to be bored ... Baudelaire is surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is ...
The occultation of Surrealism: a study of the relationship between Bretonian Surrealism and western esotericism
https://monoskop.org › images › Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism
Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. Mallarme is Surreal ist when he is confiding. Jarry is Surrealist in ...
[PDF] Manifesto of Surrealism - The exquisite corpse 1924 FIRST MANIFESTO
by A BRETON - Cited by 717 - Related articles
MANIFESTO. OF. SURREALISM ... SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being ... Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is ..
NEW TRANSLATION 2010
[PDF]
First Manifesto of Surrealism - 1924 - Kristine Door
by A Breton -
Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art. - Written surrealist composition, or first and last draft. - How not to be bored ... Baudelaire is surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is ...
The occultation of Surrealism: a study of the relationship between Bretonian Surrealism and western esotericism
Bauduin, T.M.
Rad America V4 I1.pdf - Libcom
SPECIAL ISSUE ON SURREALISM
André BRETON: Preface to the International Surrealist Exhibition ... 27 Vincent BOUNOURE: Surrealism and the Savage Heart ... herited from Baudelaire:.
Rad America V4 I1.pdf - Libcom
SPECIAL ISSUE ON SURREALISM
André BRETON: Preface to the International Surrealist Exhibition ... 27 Vincent BOUNOURE: Surrealism and the Savage Heart ... herited from Baudelaire:.
A burst of laughter
of sapphire in the island of Ceylon
The most beautiful straws
HAVE A FADED COLOR
UNDER THE LOCKS
on an isolated farm
FROM DAY TO DAY
the pleasant
grows worse
coffee
preaches for its saint
THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY
MADAM,
a pair
of silk stockings
is not
A leap into space
A STAG
Love above all
Everything could be worked out so well
PARIS IS A BIG VILLAGE
Watch out for
the fire that covers
THE PRAYER
of fair weather
Know that
The ultraviolet rays
have finished their task
short and sweet
THE FIRST WHITE PAPER
OF CHANCE
Red will be
The wandering singer
WHERE IS HE?
in memory
in his house
AT THE SUITORS’ BALL
I do
as I dance
What people did, what they’re going to do
What is Surrealism?
Lecture delivered in Brussels by André Breton on the 1st June 1934
Comrades:
The activity of our surrealist comrades in Belgium is closely allied with our own activity, and I am happy to be in their company this evening. Magritte, Mesens, Nougé, Scutenaire and Souris are among those whose revolutionary will—outside of all consideration of their agreement or disagreement with us on particular points—has been for us in Paris a constant reason for thinking that the surrealist project, beyond the limitations of space and time, can contribute to the efficacious reunification of all those who do not despair of the transformation of the world and who wish this transformation to be as radical as possible.
The activity of our surrealist comrades in Belgium is closely allied with our own activity, and I am happy to be in their company this evening. Magritte, Mesens, Nougé, Scutenaire and Souris are among those whose revolutionary will—outside of all consideration of their agreement or disagreement with us on particular points—has been for us in Paris a constant reason for thinking that the surrealist project, beyond the limitations of space and time, can contribute to the efficacious reunification of all those who do not despair of the transformation of the world and who wish this transformation to be as radical as possible.
At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months later, aged twenty-four), the author of the Chants de Maldoror and of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known by the name of Comte de Lautréamont, whose thought has been of the very greatest help and encouragement to myself and my friends throughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded in carrying a common activity, made the following remark, among many others which were to electrify us fifty years later: "At the hour in which I write, new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them."
1868-75: it is impossible, looking back upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches from the separate publication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to the insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbaud's last poem, Rêve, which has not so far been included in his Complete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to their correct historical background: the coming and the immediate results of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last in date caught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaud found themselves thrown into the preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its consequence—and this is the new and important
fact—the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.
1868-75: it is impossible, looking back upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches from the separate publication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to the insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbaud's last poem, Rêve, which has not so far been included in his Complete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to their correct historical background: the coming and the immediate results of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last in date caught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaud found themselves thrown into the preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its consequence—and this is the new and important
fact—the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.
I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as we then were—we who, on one hand, came for the most part from the petite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were all by vocation possessed with the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane—the days of October, which only the passing of the years and the subsequent appearance of a large number of works within the reach of all were fully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn so decisive a page in history. We were, I repeat, ill-prepared and ill-informed.
Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions under which, in such an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed—and having been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed—against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him. Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than anything else formed the causes of our horror and our destructive impulse; morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work (did not Rimbaud say: "Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de feu!" and also: "La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main!" [Never will I work, O torrents of flame! The hand that writes is worth the hand that ploughs! What a century of hands! I will never lift my hand!]).
Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions under which, in such an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed—and having been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed—against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him. Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than anything else formed the causes of our horror and our destructive impulse; morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work (did not Rimbaud say: "Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de feu!" and also: "La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main!" [Never will I work, O torrents of flame! The hand that writes is worth the hand that ploughs! What a century of hands! I will never lift my hand!]).
The more I think about it, the more certain I become that nothing was to our minds worth saving, unless it was... unless it was, at last "l'amour la poésie," to take the bright and trembling title of one of Paul Eluard's books, "l'amour la poésie," considered as inseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between the negation of this good, a negation brought to its climax by the war, and its full and total affirmation ("Poetry should be made by all, not one"), the field was not, to our minds, open to anything but a Revolution truly extended into all domains, improbably radical, to the highest degree impractical and tragically destroying within itself the whole time the feeling that it brought with it both of desirability and of absurdity.
Many of you, no doubt, would put this down to a certain youthful exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; I must, however, insist on this attitude, common to particular men and manifesting itself at periods nearly half a century distant from one another. I should affirm that in ignorance of this attitude one can form no idea of what surrealism really stands for. This attitude alone can account, and very sufficiently at that, for all the excesses that may be attributed to us but which cannot be deplored unless one gratuitously supposes that we could have started from any other point. The ill-sounding remarks, that are imputed to us, the so-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the quarrels, the scandals—all things that we are so much reproached with—turned up on the same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, the surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime defeatism.
I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be more relevant than ever. "New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them." They are, in fact, always running through the intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are concerned, remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old and mortal shivers are trying to substitute themselves for those which are the very shivers of knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful disease, a disease followed by the deprivation of all rights; it is only a matter of having the courage to face them also. This disease is called fascism.
Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable and more worthy form of existence. The other day I noticed on the front page of a Paris newspaper a photograph of the surroundings of the Lambrechies mine on the day after the catastrophe. This photograph illustrated an article titled, in quotation marks, 'Only Our Chagrin Remains'. On the same page was another photograph—this one of the unemployed of your country standing in front of a hovel in the Parisian 'poor zone'—with the caption Poverty is not a crime. "How delightful!" I said to myself, glancing from one picture to the other. Thus the bourgeois public in France is able to console itself with the knowledge that the miners of your country were not necessarily criminals just because they got themselves killed for 35 francs a day. And doubtless the miners, our comrades, will be happy to learn that the committee of the Belgian Coal Association intends to postpone till the day after tomorrow the application of the wage cut set for 20 May. In capitalist society, hypocrisy and cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to humanitarianism, which always involves impossible reconciliations and truces to the advantage of the stronger, I should say that in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exterior world without an immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascism shows that it is precisely the confirmation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its furthest point by the lasting resignation that it seeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to re-establish for the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it worthy of all our hatred; we continue to consider this feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can possibly be inflicted upon beings of our kind, and those who would inflict it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there, lurking at our doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure byzantinism to dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several aspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us.
During the course of taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am capable, to the organization in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual circles of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore in this struggle. Some of them have even begun to make excuses for the loss of the battle already. Such dispositions seem to me to be so dismaying that I should not care to be speaking here without first having made clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a whole series of remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more than ever before, the liberation of the mind, demands as primary condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the express aim of surrealism, the liberation of man, which implies that we must struggle with our fetters with all the energy of despair; that today more than ever before the surrealists entirely rely for the bringing about of the liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.
I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is to attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain immediate ambiguity contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude, while, on the contrary it expresses—and always has expressed for us—a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day, which I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years past—or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25)—at the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see the very cause of man's unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow the preeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are (and I believe that those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion); of acting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and the same thing.
Tessel M. Bauduin
t.bauduin@let.ru.nl
2015
Abstract
In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism surrealist leader André Breton (1896-1966) defined Surrealism
as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state,’ positioning ‘psychic automatism’ as both a concept and a
technique. This definition followed upon an intense period of experimentation with various forms of
automatism among the proto-surrealist group; predominantly automatic writing, but also induced
dream states. This article explores how surrealist ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism
for communication, or the expression of thought as directly as possible through the unconscious, in
the first two decades of Surrealism. It touches upon automatic writing, hysteria as an automatic bodily
performance of the unconscious, dreaming and the experimentation with induced dream states, and
automatic drawing and other visual arts-techniques that could be executed more or less automatically
as well. For all that the surrealists reinvented automatism for their own poetic, artistic and
revolutionary aims, the automatic techniques were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism,
psychical research and experimentation with mediums, and the article teases out the connections to
mediumistic automatism. It is demonstrated how the surrealists effectively and successfully divested
automatism of all things spiritual. It furthermore becomes clear that despite various mishaps,
automatism in many forms was a very successful creative technique within Surrealism.
Exquisite Corpses: Representations olectivf Violence in the Cole Surrealiist Unconscous
Megan C. McShane is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Emory University.
This paper will address the collective method for producing drawings and collages employed by the Surrealists, known as the cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse. In 1925 the Surrealists began playing the exquisite corpse game using words to produce fantastic sentences. The game was quickly adapted to produce strange and unexpected figural images. Playing the game entailed passing a sheet of paper among participants while folding the paper in order to conceal the previous person's response. Each person would contribute a part of the sentence or,if drawing, a partial image of a body. In the linguistic method, the players followed the approximate syntactical sequence of subject, verb, and predicate. In the visual method, the image of a body was substituted for the sentence. Andre Breton cites the elemental segments to be supplied by each person: "subject,verb, or predicate adjective—head, belly, or legs" {hkmifestos1 79). The first sentence produced provided the unusual name for the game: "The exquisite / corpse / will drink / the young / wine" [Le-cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau]
Megan C. McShane is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Emory University.
This paper will address the collective method for producing drawings and collages employed by the Surrealists, known as the cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse. In 1925 the Surrealists began playing the exquisite corpse game using words to produce fantastic sentences. The game was quickly adapted to produce strange and unexpected figural images. Playing the game entailed passing a sheet of paper among participants while folding the paper in order to conceal the previous person's response. Each person would contribute a part of the sentence or,if drawing, a partial image of a body. In the linguistic method, the players followed the approximate syntactical sequence of subject, verb, and predicate. In the visual method, the image of a body was substituted for the sentence. Andre Breton cites the elemental segments to be supplied by each person: "subject,verb, or predicate adjective—head, belly, or legs" {hkmifestos1 79). The first sentence produced provided the unusual name for the game: "The exquisite / corpse / will drink / the young / wine" [Le-cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau]
Friday, February 14, 2020
PERSIAN SURREALISM
A Study on Surrealism in the Short Story Oldooz and the Crows Written by Iranian Writer Samad Behrangi
Aazam Jahangiri
English Literature, Shoushtar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shoushtar, Iran.
ABSTRACT
This study attempts to analyze Surrealism in Oldooz and the Crows, a short story written by the Iranian author Samad Behrangi. Surrealism is a cultural movement founded in 1920s by the French poet and critic Andre Breton. The surrealists favored in the function of the world of unconscious mind in integrating fancies and dreams to the phenomenal world in order to elaborate a higher reality. They also were interested in Freud's theories about unconscious mind and the power of free imagination especially in Children. Moreover, they insisted on the automatic writing avoiding regular artistic conventions and restrictive rule. In this regard, the researcher tries to discuss the imaginative freedom and childhood dreams propounded in Behrangi's short story Oldooz and the Crows to consider whether this literary work can be considered as a surrealist work or not.
A Study on Surrealism in the Short Story Oldooz and the Crows Written by Iranian Writer Samad Behrangi
Aazam Jahangiri
English Literature, Shoushtar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shoushtar, Iran.
ABSTRACT
This study attempts to analyze Surrealism in Oldooz and the Crows, a short story written by the Iranian author Samad Behrangi. Surrealism is a cultural movement founded in 1920s by the French poet and critic Andre Breton. The surrealists favored in the function of the world of unconscious mind in integrating fancies and dreams to the phenomenal world in order to elaborate a higher reality. They also were interested in Freud's theories about unconscious mind and the power of free imagination especially in Children. Moreover, they insisted on the automatic writing avoiding regular artistic conventions and restrictive rule. In this regard, the researcher tries to discuss the imaginative freedom and childhood dreams propounded in Behrangi's short story Oldooz and the Crows to consider whether this literary work can be considered as a surrealist work or not.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Auction of contested African artifacts going ahead in Paris
PARIS (AP) — A Nigerian commission has called for the cancellation of Monday’s auction in Paris of sacred Nigerian statues that it alleges were stolen.
Christie’s auction house has defended the sale, saying the artworks were legitimately acquired and the sale will go ahead.
In recent years, French courts have consistently ruled in favor of auction houses whose sales of sacred objects, such as Hopi tribal masks, were contested by rights groups and representatives of the tribes.
A Princeton scholar, professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, alongside Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, raised alarm earlier this month that the objects were looted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s.
Christie’s wrote earlier this month to the Nigerian commission, saying the sale would go ahead.
Okeke-Agulu, who is a member of the Igbo tribe, said the objects were taken through “an act of violence” from his home state of Anambra and that they should not be sold. An online petition with over 2,000 signatures is demanding that the auction be halted.
The petition said “as the world awakens to the reality of systemic racial injustice and inequality, thanks to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we must not forget that it is not just the Black body, but also Black culture, identity and especially art that is being misappropriated.”
It claims that between 1967 and 1970, as Nigeria’s Biafran civil war raged and while more than 3 million civilians were dying, a renowned European treasure hunter was in Biafra “on a hunting spree for our cultural heritage.”
In a statement to AP Monday, Christie’s said “these objects are being lawfully sold having been publicly exhibited and previously sold over the last decades prior to Christie’s involvement.”
While the auction house said it recognized the “nuanced and complex debates around cultural property,” it said that public sales should go ahead of objects like these to stop the black market flourishing.
Paris has a long history of collecting and selling tribal artifacts, tied to its colonial past in Africa, and to Paris-based groups in the 1960s, such as the “Indianist” movement that celebrated indigenous tribal cultures.
Interest in tribal art in Paris was revived in the early 2000s following two high-profile — and highly lucrative — sales in Paris of tribal art owned by late collectors Andre Breton(FOUNDER OF SURREALISM) and Robert Lebel.
Controversy over sales can be a double-edged sword for an auction house. In the past, such contested sales have served to raise the ultimate selling price of the objects going under the hammer because of media interest, but there has also been instances where buyers have been deterred from purchasing artifacts over fears of a backlash.
PARIS (AP) — A Nigerian commission has called for the cancellation of Monday’s auction in Paris of sacred Nigerian statues that it alleges were stolen.
Christie’s auction house has defended the sale, saying the artworks were legitimately acquired and the sale will go ahead.
In recent years, French courts have consistently ruled in favor of auction houses whose sales of sacred objects, such as Hopi tribal masks, were contested by rights groups and representatives of the tribes.
A Princeton scholar, professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, alongside Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, raised alarm earlier this month that the objects were looted during the Biafran war in the late 1960s.
Christie’s wrote earlier this month to the Nigerian commission, saying the sale would go ahead.
Okeke-Agulu, who is a member of the Igbo tribe, said the objects were taken through “an act of violence” from his home state of Anambra and that they should not be sold. An online petition with over 2,000 signatures is demanding that the auction be halted.
The petition said “as the world awakens to the reality of systemic racial injustice and inequality, thanks to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we must not forget that it is not just the Black body, but also Black culture, identity and especially art that is being misappropriated.”
It claims that between 1967 and 1970, as Nigeria’s Biafran civil war raged and while more than 3 million civilians were dying, a renowned European treasure hunter was in Biafra “on a hunting spree for our cultural heritage.”
In a statement to AP Monday, Christie’s said “these objects are being lawfully sold having been publicly exhibited and previously sold over the last decades prior to Christie’s involvement.”
While the auction house said it recognized the “nuanced and complex debates around cultural property,” it said that public sales should go ahead of objects like these to stop the black market flourishing.
Paris has a long history of collecting and selling tribal artifacts, tied to its colonial past in Africa, and to Paris-based groups in the 1960s, such as the “Indianist” movement that celebrated indigenous tribal cultures.
Interest in tribal art in Paris was revived in the early 2000s following two high-profile — and highly lucrative — sales in Paris of tribal art owned by late collectors Andre Breton(FOUNDER OF SURREALISM) and Robert Lebel.
Controversy over sales can be a double-edged sword for an auction house. In the past, such contested sales have served to raise the ultimate selling price of the objects going under the hammer because of media interest, but there has also been instances where buyers have been deterred from purchasing artifacts over fears of a backlash.
Monday, October 14, 2019
Friday, July 23, 2021
Slagging Surrealism
Money for arts
"Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with [Leon] Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s. ...
"But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miro did backdrop designs for a production of 'Romeo and Juliet,' by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. ...
Most of the surrealists, including [Andre] Breton, made their living by dealing, 'art advising,' involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all.
"[Salvador] Dali, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretense about this, unlike [Pablo] Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. 'Picasso is a genius!' Dali would later exclaim. 'Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!' "
— Robert Hughes, writing on "L'Amour Fou," in the Guardian
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
The Four Types of Play of Roger Caillois
From Competition to Chance, From Mimicry to Vertigo
Orientation
What is play? What are its types and its psychological impacts?
In what way is play different from other human activities? In what ways is play different across the life cycle, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood? Do people ever stop playing? How many kinds of play are there? What is the difference in the psychological states between playing in a baseball game, playing with crossword puzzles, entering the lottery, watching a puppet show, or rolling down a hill? A child riding on a carousel in not in the same state as one who is in a state of suspenseful anticipation after betting, then watching the roulette wheel. We will find out what these differences are.
What is the relationship between society and play?
Authors such as Johan Huizinga go so far as to say that all social organization – from economics to politics to law and technology – are derived from play. Others say that the forms of play are driven by changes in human societies. For example, games of chance are primary in hunting and gathering societies because the hunt itself is a very unpredictable activity. As the food supply becomes more stable, games where the outcome is more controlled will grow greater as humans feel more stable in their economic life. So the question is – what is primary and what is secondary? The basic themes of sociology of play are that social institutions such as economics, politics and family institutions as derivable from play, just as play can be explained by economics, politics and family structures. Evolutionary biologists don’t buy the value of play. They claim that play is a useless activity in terms of Darwinian natural selection.
Why write about a book that is 90 years old?
Over 20 years ago, I became interested in environmental psychology and discovered there was a whole field in sociology called “leisure studies”. One of the main topics covered was theories of play. Besides the famous book by Johan Huizinga, I came across the work of Roger Caillois and his extremely original theory of play. I was riveted! I found his book Man, Play and Games and devoured it in about a week. However, I had no immediate use for the book either in books I was writing or classes I was teaching. I wrote a five-page summary of the book and left it at that. But I never forgot the book. I remembered it for its interdisciplinary intellectual orientation and its range in writing about every type of play. Caillois’ book was written over 90 years ago, so you are not going to find anything here about the positive and negative impact of Dungeons and Dragons on people’s psychology. Neither will you find the impact of video games on people’s level of happiness. However, despite its age, I believe it still has an enormous amount to teach us. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Roger Caillois’ book is broader and deeper than Huizinga’s famous book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture.
Roger Caillois was an interdisciplinary French sociologist whose range of interests besides play include sacred studies(Man and the Sacred), cults, literature, mythology, poetry, and psychoanalysis. He hovered on the edge of the surrealist movement according to the book The Edge of Surrealism, edited by Claudine Frank, and he corresponded with Andre Breton, considered by some as the father of surrealism.
Theories of Play: Huizinga vs Caillois
Roger Caillois begins his insightful and imaginative book Man, Play and Games by challenging John Huizinga’s theory of play. Huizinga’s theory of play contains six components. Play is:
- Free – that is not serious
- It is absorbing
- It is non-material—that is not for profit
- It is separated from everyday life (done in its own place and time)
- According to fixed rules and an orderly procedure
- Done in secret
Caillois takes exception to some of these points. For example, he pointed out that some games are part of everyday life and are not done in secret as in sports or games of chance. Huizinga is not sensitive to the wide range in the spectrum of play. George Herbert Mead makes a distinction between structured forms of play, which he calls “the game”, and what Mead calls “pretend play”. Huizinga’s claim that play occurs according to fixed rules ignores pretend play which is far more imaginative. If rules exist in pretend play they are made up along the way as in “Calvinball” from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Lastly, modern games are played for profit as in sports stadiums and gambling houses. In short, Caillois claims Huizinga ignores or minimized the diverse form of play. Caillois’ book sets out to correct this.
Why do People Play?
Caillois claims that play has a natural propensity for good or evil. In both cases the same qualities can be identified:
- The need to prove one’s superiority
- The desire to challenge, make a record or merely overcome an obstacle
- The hope and the pursuit of finding out one’s destiny
- The pleasure in secrecy, make-believe or disguise
- Creating fear or inspiring fear
- The search for repetition and symmetry
- The joy of improvising, inventing or infinitely varying solutions
- Solving a mystery or riddle
- The satisfaction deriving from the arts involving contrivance
- The desire to test one’s strength, skill speed, endurance, equilibrium or ingenuity
- The temptation to circumvent rules, laws or conventions
- Intoxication, longing for ecstasy and a desire for voluptuous panic
Examples of How Play Evolved in History
Here are some examples of what play evolved from:
- The cup-and-ball and top were once magical devices
- Roundelays and counting-out rhymes were once ancient incantations
- Stagecraft, liturgy, military tactics and debate also became rules of play
- The greasy pole is related to the myths of heavenly conquest
- Football emerged from to the conflict over the solar globe of two opposing phratries
- String games had once been used to inaugurate the changing seasons
- The kite, before becoming a toy toward the end of the 18th century, in the Far East symbolized the soul of its owner
- In Korea, the kite served as a scapegoat to liberate a sinful community from evil
- Hopscotch once symbolized labyrinth through which the magical initiate must first wander
- The game of tag was once recognized as a terrifying choice of a propitiatory victim
- Games of chance were once associated with divination
- Villages, parishes and cities once had gigantic tops that special confraternities caused to spin during certain festivals
- Slingshots and peashooters have survived as toys where they were once the more lethal weapons
Naming the Four Types of Play and Their Two Fundamental Structures
Caillois divides play into four categories:
- Agon, which involves competition
- Alea which involve games of chance
- Mimicry which involves simulation
- Ilinx which involves the experience of vertigo
These four kinds of play can be grouped into two categories:
- Paidia play is active, tumultuous, exuberant and spontaneous. This corresponds to mimicry and Ilinx and goes with Mead’s pretend play.
- Ludus play is more restrained. It involves calculating, contrivances and requires patience and subordination to rules. Ludus play is translatable to Mead’s category of “games” and includes agon and alea.
Caillois’ hypothesis is that the basic themes of society should be traceable from the proportionate use of these four types of play. Read Table A with the four types of play together with Caillois’ and Mead’s structures of play.
Table A
| Types of play | Agon Competition | Alea Chance | Mimicry Stimulation | Ilinx Vertigo |
| Caillois’ structures of play
| Ludus | Ludus | Paidia | Paidia |
| Mead’s Structure of play | Game | Game | Pretend play | Pretend play |
Details of the Four Kinds of Play
Let us look in more detail into examples of each of the types of play along with the psychological states induced. Agon amusement involves competition. Agon play involves skills such as speed, endurance, physical strength, ingenuity and improvisation. The paidia example of play under agon would be wrestling or racing. This kind of play is unique to humans. The more organized type of agon, ludus play at the individual level would be doing cross-word puzzles, playing solitaire or flying a kite. Social expressions of more organized play would include sports such as boxing, football, chess, billiards, duels and tournaments. Competition involves skill. In chance games skills are minimized. In sports competition is based primarily on skill, if the outcome of a game was determined by chance, spectators would complain that the victor’s success was cheap.
The alea kind of play is the opposite of agon. It abolishes natural or acquired differences between people and leaves as much as possible to chance. Paidia forms of chance are counting out rhymes or playing heads or tails. Ludus types of chance games include playing the lottery or gambling at casinos. These activities are uniquely human and not found in the rest of the animal kingdom.
The third type of play, mimicry, involves simulation. In this a person forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds their personality into order to play a role. At the paidia level of mimicry we have masks, costumes, impersonation and games of illusion taking place. The ludus type of mimicry includes puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals and movies. Masks spill over into non-playful situations as in the use of uniforms and in ceremonial etiquette or sympathetic magic. This type of play is also uniquely human.
The fourth type of play is called Ilinx. This type of play is primarily physiological. It destroys the stability of perception and imposes a kind of playful panic on the person. At the paidia level of Ilinx is where we find children whirling, swinging on monkey bars, sleigh riding and later on, horseback riding. These states often create a feeling of ecstasy. In the more ilinx forms of play are skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking and going on the rides at amusement parks or fair grounds. Mammals will also engage in experiencing vertigo, as anyone who has watched monkeys swing on ropes at the zoo can attest. Table B at the end of this article summarizes the manifestation of play and their psychological effects.
However, are people constrained to keep these four types of play separate? Perhaps you might feel it is too simplistic to group the types of play into four separate categories. Maybe you think of play as involving more than one category. If so, which ones might work together and which combinations don’t work? We shall see.
Fundamental Types of Relationships Between Types of Play
Agon and ilinx
While a baseball game involves competition, the exuberance over a great catch to end a game or a homerun to win the game involves vertigo or Ilinx on the part of both players and fans. In fact, Caillois argues that certain forms of play constitute fundamental relationships with similar underlying principles. For example, games of chance and games of competition both presuppose absolute equality from the start. The pleasure derived from these games comes from one having done as well as possible in a situation not of their creation. There is satisfaction in overcoming voluntarily accepted obstacles. In this case, it is quite easy to see that playing this game prepares a person for real life.
Mimicry and ilinx
Another kind of fundamental relationship is between mimicry and vertigo or ilinx. Here there is equality but with less roles. There is constant improvisation and trusting in a guiding fantasy. A conjunction of a mask or an illusion is that perception is distorted and leading into a trance. The magic in tribal societies results from a combination of mimicry and ilinx to real social life.
Contingent Relationships Between Types of Play
Alea and vertigo
The second set of relationships as called contingent. Games producing vertigo and chance are contingent as games of chance have a special kind of vertigo which seizes both the lucky and unlikely. However, this does not allow the suspension of the rules of the game.
Mimicry and agon
Mimicry and agon are also contingent in that every competition also involves playing a role, not only among the players but also by the audience. An audience in a competition act must make believe they are no longer in real life. They are in a theater suspending the rules of everyday life in order to enjoy the competition. Their make-believe is also an act of mimicry.
Forbidden Relationships Between Types of Play
Ilinx and agon
The last set of relationships are forbidden. I think Caillois overstates what this relationship means when it is called “forbidden”. All this means is that the types of play work at cross-purposes and undermine each other. I would say they “clash”. The first set is between ilinx and agon. The regulated rivalry of competition would be undermined if players abandoned themselves to vertigo in the middle of the competition. It would negate the controlled effort and undermine skill, power, calculation and respect for rules. So too, the thrill of vertigo would be ruined if the revelers were expected to come back from their revelry and focus on playing a specific role with specific rules of a game.
Mimicry and alea
The second set of forbidden relationships is between mimicry and chance. In order for a game of chance to maintain its coherence, there must be no ruses. To engage in this is to cease to be playing and to be engaging in sympathetic magic, the object of which is to compel the future. On the other hand, magic would be undermined by admitting that the results of mimicry were subject to chance. Magic is based on the notion that if you do the ritual right, nature will be compelled to respond to the ritual.
To summarize:
Fundamental relationships:
- Mimicry and ilinx
- Alea and agon
Contingent relationships:
- Ilinx and alea
- Mimicry and agon
Forbidden relationships:
- Ilinx and agon
- Mimicry and alea
Play and the Sacred
According to Caillois, many games have their roots in sacred traditions. For example,
masks were once sacred objects that were used in initiation ceremonies. Later they became accessories to ceremonies – as in dance and theater. Now they are playthings at parties for children and erotic balls for adults. With Christianity the design became elongated and simplified reproducing the layout of a basilica. In sacred situations, ilinx type of play is induced by fasting, vision quests, hypnosis, and monotonous or strident music. Games of chance were once associated with divination, as in the case of tarot cards.
In tribal societies, ilinx and mimicry were primary in both games and in sacred traditions inducing magical states of consciousness. With the rise of state civilizations, ilinx and mimicry become forbidden for the lower classes to practice. To the extent it was still used, it was the domain of the priestesses and priests. It was in forms of play that ilinx and mimicry continued for the lower classes.
Corruptions of Play
There is a distortion of play which Caillois calls corruption. All play is based upon the ability of the participants to separate play from reality and be clear where one ends and the other begins. Where play is corrupted, it blurs the relationship between play and reality. This is the realm where the habits of play become obsessions and compulsions. Each of the four types of play has its own form of corruption.
Corruption of agon and alea
Distortions of agon (competition) are wars and unbridled economic competition which becomes lethal or detrimental to most members of society. A corruption of the game of chance is the stock market, where life savings can be wiped out instantaneously with no one able to predict anything. In the spiritual dimension, card playing games of chance can be twisted into actually foretelling the future with the use of tarot cards.
Corruption of mimicry and ilinx
A distortion of mimicry and simulation are through psychological disorders such as multiple personality disorder. In multiple personality disorder, the roles of a game are not dissolved at the end of the game, but become permanent without a central personality to reign them in. In the case of schizophrenia, the masks of people are believed to be real and not temporary. Lastly, the corruptions of Ilinx are alcoholism and drug abuse such as speed which substitutes chemical power for physical effects as a way of life rather than a temporary state.
Reification
I’ve added a category that I think fits but is not part of Caillois book. Play gets out of control not only through the corruption of fusing play with reality but when play becomes reified and takes on a life if its own. From an evolutionary point of view the purpose of play is to test the waters of a new situation under safe circumstances. Play is subordinated to reality. Reification occurs when the process of testing becomes a thing which takes on a life of its own. An example of the reification of agon is when fans get so caught up in rooting for the home team that they get into fights with opposing fans or when they lose sleep or become depressed over a team’s losses. The reification of alea is when games of chance cause the working class to lose most of their paychecks at the lottery. The reification of mimicry or simulation is the extent to which an actor or an actress becomes so caught up in the role that the role becomes their entire identity and they can’t function outside the role. Lastly, the reification of ilinx is when a person repeatedly puts themselves in dangerous situations through seeking sensations like race-car driving, skydiving or mountain climbing. You might review Table B again for an overview with examples from the entire article.
Table B
Play Classifications, Their Psychological Affects
Corruption, Reification
| Types of Play | Agon Competition Hinges on skill—speed endurance, strength, memory, ingenuity | Alea Chance Abolishes natural or acquired differences | Mimicry/ Simulation Forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds personality in order to trick another | Ilinx Vertigo, thrills Destroys the stability of perception and inflicts a kind of playful panic
|
| Range of species application | Uniquely human | Uniquely human | Uniquely human | Human and animal
|
| Examples of Play
| Wrestling/racing (not regulated) | Counting out rhymes; heads or tails | Masks, costumes, impersonation, games of illusion | Children whirling, horseback riding, swinging, racing downhill, sleigh riding ecstasy
|
| Examples of Play- individual | Crossword puzzles, solitaire, kite flying
| |||
| Examples of play- social | Sports Boxing, football chess, billiards, duels tournaments | Lotteries, casinos | Puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals, movies | Skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking, amusement rides, amusement parks fairgrounds |
| Structures of play | Ludus Mead’s game | Ludus Mead’s game | Paidia Mead’s pretend play | Paidia Mead’s pretend play
|
| Corruption (Clash) Blurring the boundaries between play and reality Habits become obsessions or compulsions Applies the rules of play to real life | Wars, unbridled economic competition | Playing the stock market
Cardplaying turned into Tarot | Multiple personality disorder Schizophrenia: believes the mask is real | Alcoholism, drug abuse (speed) Substituting chemical power for physical effects as a way of life |
| Reification | Sports fans who get carried away with team losses by fighting or depression | Losing a great deal of money at the lottery
being obsessed with “lucky” numbers | An actor or actress whose roles seems more real than their identity in everyday life | Putting oneself in needless danger with constant race-car driving, skydiving, mountain climbing |
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