Soluble Thoughts:

Late Andre Breton

City Lights Books.

“How very hard to run a movement and be oneself. Tristan Tzara somehow managed it with Dada, as long as he did, but then Dada died. As for Surrealism’s André Breton, something about his personality and everything about his style permits the singular endurance of his self and his strong selving.”

Mary Ann Caws, Dalkey Archive.

In all likelihood many folks, myself among them, readily perceive the negative energy and destructive events of war as evidence of a hugely anti-rationalist outcome resulting from a failure of reason to prevail in daily life. We suspect that it would be counter intuitive to imagine otherwise, given that war, especially modern warfare, is precisely the opposite of rationality. But for a French poet/philosopher such as Andre Breton (1896-1966), war, and many other inherent dilemmas in our survival mechanism, was the woefully obvious result of hyper-rationalist thought patterns largely originating in the so called Enlightenment era of history and persisting to this day. The inherent dichotomies of our apparently dualistic universe provoke in us, he surmised, an unhealthy and wholly unsupported faith in the zero-sum game of aggressive polarities that lead inevitably to basic conflicts without resolution such as war, since they are embedded in drastically diverse and opposed definitions for what reality even is or might be.

Man Ray’s 1924 portrait of Andre Breton (r) with fellow poet Louis Aragon

This new release from City Lights Books with the cheekily translated title Cavalier Perspective contains the final writings of a philosopher who was able to transform existential tragedy into aesthetic triumph. For him, those basic definitions of reality, or perhaps assumptions would be a better word, lead us into familiarly limited behaviors from which we seldom if ever learn any lessons whatsoever, no mater how many times the same results continue to recur. Déjà vu all over again, in other words. Which might potentially help to explain Breton’s belief in and attachment to its polar opposite: jamais vu, or the wondrous sensation of the marvelous hidden in everyday life which prompts the feeling that we are experiencing something never before experienced or even imagined. In its raw state of course, jamais vu amounts to an unwelcome neurological obstacle which renders ordinary daily life situations as an incomprehensible parade of weird and inexplicable events. In other words, unsought for, it amounts to what is customarily called mental illness.

But what if, Breton proposed, when certain reverie-prone individuals such as poets, artists, musicians, novelists, painters, photographers, filmmakers and even social activists experience this state of rapturous wonderment they enter an alternate reality, a surreality, one which liberates them, and anyone else who chooses to abandon all assumptions about conscious control, from the false constraints imposed by our long held addiction to the drug of rationality? Those simple questions, ‘but what would happen if?’ and ‘but what might it mean if?’, are at the very heart of his entire creative enterprise as the founder of the infamous art movement known as Surrealism. Breton just happened to be born during a convulsive period of historic upheaval, wedged between two immensely catastrophic World War conflagrations which provided him with an ideal pair of living laboratories with which to conduct his uniquely insightful and entertaining researches.

The circumstances of his life, seemingly random but actually manifesting a condition he would later come to call ‘objective chance’ (otherwise known by the easily understandable adage that ‘chance is the fool’s name for fate’) would thrust him into the midst of events which would provide tangible evidence of the need for an anti-rationalist approach, not only to poetry, literature and art, but to the manner in which we might conduct everyday social life itself. Of course, the best shorthand version of this sentiment might be the superb pop song by Eric Burdon called “War” (i.e.: “Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!”) And Breton came by his critical insights into the illusory separation between our interior and exterior life, the liminal borderline between conscious and unconscious living, as a result of objective chance placing him in the perfect place to study our deepest and most disturbing threshold experiences: the combat battlefield, AKA the doorway between life and death. Breton was more than merely a transmitter of fabulous reveries in his verse, novels and essays however, he was the co-founder, leader and principal theorist of Surrealism, one of the most influential art movements in modernist history, and one whose influences remain impactful even today (most notably, I would say, in the films of a film director like the recently deceased David Lynch for instance, especially in his Lost Highway.).

Breton claimed that with these glasses he could see the future. He was right.

(InLibris)

The son of a vehemently atheistic policeman father and charmingly cooperative seamstress mother in Normandy, Andre Breton, despite his lifelong early devotion to conscious dreaming, attended medical school, which peaked his fascination with what most of us quaintly call mental illness, but which struck young Andre as being a revelatory state of being. His formal education was fatefully interrupted when he was among many unsuspecting conscripts into World War I, during which he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes. There he met a hypersensitive patient named Jacques Vache, who in turn turned him on to the obscure writings of Alfred Jarry, most infamous for his incendiary play Ubu Roi in 1896 when he was 23. Both the avant-garde absurdism of Jarry and the anti-establishment disdain for traditional artistic values expressed by Vache (who committed suicide at 23), along with his encounters with shell-shocked soldiers (what today we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome) prompted Breton’s reassessment of the purpose and function of poetry and art.

Among his first aesthetic writings would be a collection of letters from Vache, War Letters, published in 1919 along with four introductory essays. At that same point in time, as if also influenced by objective chance, Breton encountered a kindred soul in Tristan Tzara, the Romanian born co-founder of the extravagantly experimental Dada art movement created in 1916 in Zurich, who was just then arriving in Paris. Tzara was an incendiary radical whose movement was birthed by a nihilistic attitude toward the conservative authorities deemed responsible for the madness of the First World War. With the equally charismatic Tzara, Breton shared a fondness for the visionary writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautremont, Jarry, and especially the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who first cointed the term ‘surrealism’ in 1917. In 1919 Tzara joined the staff of Litterture Magazine, which marked the first stage of the transition to what would eventually come to known as Surrealism, under the stewardship of co-founders Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon. The two titans of the avant-garde were however simply too titanic in leadership persona and cultural ambition to ever occupy the same conceptual roost for very long, and explosive polemics quickly emerged which led to Dada’s disintegration.

“The Instant”, by Kay Sage, 1939, one of several gifted female surrealists

Many of us (you know who you are) have been waiting for about half a century for this late collection of Breton’s musings on a multitude of subjects, including his insights into visual art aesthetics, radical poetics and socio-political issues. One of the most fascinating aspects of Cavalier Perspective, largely from its vantage point of 1952-1966, is Breton’s lofty position as a kind of lion in winter looking back across four decades on some of the most influential moments in the history of the avant-garde. This includes his own immense role for practically an entire century as the Pope of Anti-Art, upon which he is only too pleased to poetically expound, as he does so here with wit, charm, insight and occasional bile, in equal measure as necessary. Breton opined in one of the essays contained in Cavalier Perspective, “Surrealism initially aimed for the completely liberation of poetry, and through it, of life itself.

Dada, as an anti-anti-art movement, was practically assured of a brief existence (they lasted about as long as the Beatles did as a band in our era) and in 1922 at a Bauhaus Festival, Dada staged its own funeral. Fellow Dada artist and filmmaker Hans Richter recalled Tzara proclaiming his and its predicament this way: “Dada is useless, like everything else in life. Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions.” Having absorbed all of its random microbes into his lungs, and defining his new venture of Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”, Breton marked the end of Dada roughly in 1924 by issuing his now classic first Surrealist Manifesto, and actively demonstrating what fellow member Hans Richter characterized in this manner: “Surrealism devoured and digested Dada.” As Garrett Caples clarified in his Introduction to Cavalier, “Following the absolute nihilism of Parisian Dada, Surrealism sought to elaborate what Breton sometimes called a ‘new collective myth’ by harnessing experience that exceeds the limits of the rational, in order to liberate human desire.”

Breton’s experiences assisting the shattered souls he encountered during and after the war were a perpetual inspiration in his search for a way to transcend the boundaries of reason and rationality. He was even more inspired by finding himself in the ranks of radical individualists such as Tzara, Soupault, Picabia, Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, Dali, Bunel and others, who did not require shell-shock to propel them into rhapsodic and romantic reveries aimed at dismantling a reality which had proven itself to be unsatisfactory, especially once the nightmare of global conflict was repeated yet again by the Second World War. Together they would able to, they hoped, liberate themselves, and each other, from the limits imposed by what they perceived (cavalierly perhaps) as fraudulent sanity (as per R.D. Laing later on). In the first essay in this newly translated anthology, called “Link”, Breton explains himself and his disenchantment quite clearly: “When I began searching as early as 1936 for the emotional catalyst of Surrealism (then just starting to find its counterpart in the ‘surrationalism’ that overtook scientific circles), I discovered it right away in the anxiety inherent to a time when human brotherhood was collapsing more and more each day, just as the most established systems—including social systems—seemed stuck by petrification.”

Front row: Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray Back row: Paul Eluard, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Rene Crevel,

Three years later, World War II broke out, ushered in by a certified madman. The Surrealist strategy? To break away from traditional forms of expression and societal conventions altogether and instead focus on manifesting the subliminal and unconscious mind through spontaneous and dream-based creativity. Fellow surrealist poet Rene Char, once described as the custodian of the infinite faces of the living, summed it up succinctly in some lines which are particularly apt considering his friends Breton’s dealings with the alchemy of angst: “All experience is something that one comes out of transformed. Unstable, horrible, exquisite earth and the heterogeneous human condition mutually seize hold of and qualify each other.” Also ironic is Breton’s own ability to maintain a delicate balance between transgression and transcendence, between liberty and libertinage, mostly by means of a dark kind of humour (which he artfully assembled in his Anthology of Black Humour, 1940) which is also an ample tongue in cheek evidence in this posthumous Cavalier collection. “If there is one form of Surrealist activity which has persistently aroused the wrath of fools, it is indeed the activity of games, the traces of which one finds throughout most of our publications over these last thirty-five years. Although we have at times called this activity ‘experimental’ as a defense measure, we sought entertainment in it above all else.”

Yes, ever on the search for amusing diversions from reality, the Surrealists certainly knew how to have a good time at their raucous soirees. One of my favourite ‘games’ of theirs, usually involving four or five ‘players, was one they called “Exquisite Copse”, wherein a sheet of folded paper was shared between poets/artists who drew only their own section without access to the graphics of their peers. The results were often stunning real time demonstrations of the freedom of expression they were seeking and sharing with like-minded pilgrims. An excellent example was concocted one chilly Feburary night in 1938 by Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and the painter Yves Tanguy, husband of the equally brilliant painter Kay Sage. This work, somewhat reminiscent of the etching collages of their mutual friend Max Ernst, embodies a sentiment expressed by one of their favourite classical poet/mystics Georg Hardenburg, who went by the pen name Novalis (1772-1801): “An image is not an allegory, it is not the symbol of something else, it is the symbol of itself.”

“Exquisite Corpse”, 1938.

Although this latest assortment of insights from Andre Breton takes a retrospective vantage point from the late stage in his life when he was already a living legend, the pieces in it cast a wistful glance back to the time when his legend was just beginning to be lived. He lovingly takes us back the heady time when he and Soupault co-authored The Magnetic Fields in 1920, and to the dreamy time of their joint production Soluble Fish in 1924. On that occasion Breton uttered what I believe to be his salient insight and most poetic assertion ever: “Man is soluble in his own thoughts.” Breton allows us to reminisce about a favourite and most novel novel of his, Nadja, 1928, a masterpiece of ‘automatic writing’ which has recently allowed me to reinterpret auto-composition as strangely similar to self-induced A.i. But instead of a computer algorithm assembling previous content, Breton showed us how to ‘hack’ our own unconscious and devise narratives which we did not know that we knew. For Breton, his algorithm was Surrealism, just as it was for David Lynch.

The new City Lights collection also emphasizes his stubborn insistence about what he called “the superiority of impassioned people to those with common sense”. From his perspective as one besotted by passion, in this late anthology he reminds us of his origin myth: “The time I live in, this time, alas, runs by and takes me with it. There is today, it is true, little room for anyone who would haughtily trace in the grass the learned arabesques of the sun.” Mary Ann Caws’ article in the Dalkey Archive provides an additional glorious summation of his unique poetic skills. “The goal of this search for passion was a total reviewing and redoing of the way the world could be changed by surrealist optimism. That such a goal was of course impossible in no way impeded Breton’s rhetorical flow of style or his high flying ideas. It was as if the more impossible situations and desires led him to even greater heights of rhetoric.”

This penetrating insight reminds me how prescient he truly was, since he anticipated accurately what would become known as the Situationist Movement of the 1960’s, primarily championed by Guy Debord, when Breton himself was already in his twilight years. And the best conclusion possible comes, as usual, from Breton himself in his own conclusion to Communicating Vessels, 1932: “The poets to come will surmount the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between actions and dreams. From then on, the poetic operation will be conducted in broad daylight. No one will any longer pick a quarrel because of actions they pursue in order to retain eternity in the moment and fuse the general with the particular. They will already be outside in full sunlight and will cast no more intimate a look than other do at Truth itself when it comes to shake out, at their dark window, its hair streaming with light.” Yes please, I’ll have whatever he’s having.

Such was the absolute liberty of feeling that Breton sought in his multi-media excursions into the unknown via the collections of essays he regularly released over the years: The Lost Steps, 1924; Break of Day, 1934; Free Rein, 1953; and now finally available to us in English from City Lights Books, Cavalier Perspective, 1970. Forty essays are shared here, wildly ranging in subject and theme, from prefaces to books by friends, lectures presented at symposiums, ruminations on magic, communism, astrology, the language of stones, the feverish visions of Robert Desnos and Antonin Artaud and everything else in between. Anyone interested in understanding how Dada morphed into Surrealism and how Surrealism morphed into Fluxus, then into pop art, then into conceptual art, and beyond, would be well served by picking up Monsieur Breton’s fabulous guided tour to the avant-garde cultural map of the last century. Even with all its gloomy drawbacks, it was a century where we knew how to have fun and also how to smile through our sadness. I miss it.