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ANDRÉ BRETON,
from Manifesto of Surrealism 1924
So strong is the belief in life,
in what is most fragile in life—real life, I mean—that in the end this
belief is lost . . .
The mere word "freedom" is the
only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining
the old human fanaticism . . . Imagination alone offers me some intimation
of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the
terrible injunction . . .
There remains madness, "the
madness that one locks up", as it has been aptly described. That madness
or another . . . We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration
to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for
these acts their freedom . . . would not be threatened . . . indeed, hallucinations,
illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled
sensuality partakes of it . . . I could spend my whole life prying loose
the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their
naiveté has no peer but my own . . .
It is not the fear of madness
which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled . . .
We still live under the reign
of logic . . . But the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the
resolution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism
which is still the fashion does not permit consideration of any facts but
those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends, on the other hand,
escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had limits assigned
to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and more difficult
to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common
sense is its keeper. Under colour of civilization, under pretext of progress,
all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or superstition
has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching after truth
has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that there
has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life—to my belief
by far the most important—with which it was supposed that we no longer
had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to Freud. Based
on these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable the
explorer of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as
he will be in taking into account more than mere summary realities. The
imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights. If the depths
of our minds harbour strange forces capable of increasing those on the
surface, or of successfully contending with them, then it is all in our
interest to canalize them, to canalize them first in order to submit them
later, if necessary, to the control of the reason. The analysts themselves
have nothing to lose by such a proceeding. But it should be observed that
there are no means designed a priori for the bringing about of such an
enterprise, that until the coming of the new order it might just as well
be considered the affair of poets and scientists, and that its success
will not depend on the more or less capricious means that will be employed
. . .
. . .I have always been amazed
at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches
so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams
. . . the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night
. . .
. . .I believe in the future
resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly
so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one
may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain
not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight
degree the joys of its possession . . .
. . .I am resolved to deal severely
with that hatred of the marvellous which is so rampant among certain people,
that ridicule to which they are so eager to expose it. Let us speak plainly:
The marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful; indeed,
nothing but the marvellous is beautiful . . .
The marvellous is not the same
in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of
general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are
the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of
affecting the human sensibility for a period of time. In these areas which
make us smile, there is still portrayed the incurable human restlessness,
and this is why I take them into consideration and why I judge them inseparable
from certain productions of genius . . .
It was in 1919, in complete
solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by
sentences more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without
my being able to discover (even by very meticulous analysis) any possible
previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to
fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly to a point
excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all quality of
vocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which came to me bearing—in sober
truth—not a trace of any relation whatever to any incidents I may at that
time have been involved in; an insistent sentence, it seemed to me, a sentence
I might say, that knocked at the window.
I was prepared to pay no further
attention to it when the organic character of the sentence detained me.
I was really bewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the exact
sentence at this distance, but it ran approximately like this: "A man is
cut in half by the window." What made it plainer was the fact that it was
accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of
walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the
axis of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space,
of a man leaning out of a window. But the window following the man's locomotion,
I understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly
the idea came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had
no sooner invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession
of all but intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but
in a state, I would say, of extreme detachment.
Preoccupied as I still was at
that time with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which
I had practised occasionally upon the sick during the War, I resolved to
obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue
poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject's critical faculty
has no control—the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds—and
which as much as possible represents spoken thought. It seemed and still
seems to me that the speed of thought is no greater than that of words,
and hence does not exceed the flow of either tongue or pen.
It was in such circumstances
that, together with Philippe Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas
on the subject, I began to cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling
a praiseworthy contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease
of achievement brought about the rest. By the end of the first day of the
experiment we were able to read to one another about fifty pages obtained
in this manner and to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness
was on the whole striking. There were similar faults of construction, the
same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary
verve, much emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such
as we should never have been able to obtain in the normal way of writing,
a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there, a few pieces
of out and out buffoonery.
The only differences which our
two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective
temperaments, Soupault's being less static than mine, and, if he will allow
me to make this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the
top of certain pages—doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification—various words
under the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for
having always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that
did not seem to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly
right.
It is of course difficult in
these cases to appreciate at their just value the various elements in the
result obtained; one may even say that it is entirely impossible to appreciate
them at a first reading. To you who may be writing them, these elements
are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you are yourself
naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distinguished
chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar quality
of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to whatever
is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given
number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than
the others . . .
Those who might dispute our
right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand
it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word
had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once
and for all:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic
automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or
by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the
absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic
or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism
rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association
neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested
play of thought. It tends definitely to do away with all other psychic
mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal
problems of life. Have professed absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron,
Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard,
Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault,
Vitrac.
These till now appear to be
the only ones . . .. Were one to consider their output only superficially,
a goodly number of poets might well have passed for surrealists, beginning
with Dante and Shakespeare at his best. In the course of many attempts
I have made towards an analysis of what, under false pretences, is called
genius, I have found nothing that could in the end be attributed to any
other process than this.
Young's Night Thoughts are surrealist
from cover to cover. Unfortunately, it is a priest who speaks; a bad priest,
to be sure, yet a priest.
Heraclitus is surrealist in
dialectic.
Lully is surrealist in definition.
Flamel is surrealist in the
night of gold.
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism.
Carrier is surrealist in drowning.
Monk Lewis is surrealist in
the beauty of evil.
Achim von Arnim is surrealist
absolutely, in space and time
Rabbe is surrealist in death.
Baudelaire is surrealist in
morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life
and elsewhere.
Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist
in the directed dream.
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.
Seurat is surrealist in design.
Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
Vaché is surrealist
in me.
Roussel is surrealist in anecdote.
Etc.
They were not always surrealists—on
this I insist—in the sense that one can disentangle in each of them a number
of preconceived notions to which—very naively!—they clung. And they clung
to them so because they had not heard the surrealist voice, the voice that
exhorts on the eve of death and in the roaring storm, and because they
were unwilling to dedicate themselves to the task of no more than orchestrating
the score replete with marvellous things. They were proud instruments;
hence the sounds they produced were not always harmonious sounds.
We, on the contrary, who have
not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of
our work have been content to be the silent receptacles of so many echoes,
modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that
they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet much nobler cause. So we honestly
give back the talent lent to us. You may talk of the "talent" of this yard
of platinum, of this mirror, of this door and of this sky, if you wish.
We have no talent . . .
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