by Various
From the armies of the demon he will drive firmly from his heart into the blue sky the nail of charity and he will sustain it ultimate black and hard.
A soi-même
Ecris maintenant pour le ciel
Ecris pour la courbe du ciel
Et que nul plomb de lettre noire
N’enveloppe ton écriture
Ecris pour l’odeur et le vent
Ecris pour la feuille d’argent
Que nulle laide face humaine
N’ait regard connaissance haleine
For Oneself
Write now for the sky Write for the curve of the sky And may no black leaden letter shroud your writing
Write for the scent and the wind Write for the silver leaf May no ugly human face have sight consciousness breath
Ecris pour le dieu et le feu
Ecris pour un amour de lieu
Et que rien de l’homme n’ait place
Au vide qu’une flamme glace.
Write for the god and the fire Write for a love of place And may nothing of man be included in the void that is chilled by a flame.
Surrealism
This international but Paris-based movement has had an immense influence on all the arts in the twentieth century; that influence is still being assessed, and arguably it is still being felt. Passing from initial nihilism via convulsively creative rather than therapeutic psychoanalysis to an uneasy alliance with Marxism, it has transformed the way in which many writers and artists approach their work. Correspondingly, Surrealism has issued a great challenge to those who receive it. Its origins were in a revolt against a society capable of engendering the horrors of the First World War, and in a perceived need for radical new processes of thought, for a break with failed ‘reason’. The movement found its precursors in the Marquis de Sade, Bertrand, Borel, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Saint-Pol Roux and Jarry, and its central figure through several decades was André Breton.
The original impulse, anarchic and provocative, was felt in Zürich in 1916, where a group of young artists led by Tristan Tzara created a phenomenon known as Dada (the name chosen at random in a dictionary according to one of their creative principles). This was a screaming, demonstrative destruction of cultural values and conventions, and of language. Poets and other artists (recognizing no distinctions or hierarchies) ‘performed’ their work at the Cabaret Voltaire and other centres, and this ‘new beginning’ spread into Germany and France. Tzara himself arrived in Paris in 1919. He quickly established links with Breton, Soupault, Aragon and other like-minded poets such as Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. While praising the modernism of the Cubist group, Tzara presented Paris with a major challenge, and out of the response developed the much more positive, substantial and durable movement that we know as Surrealism.
A clear division between Dadaists and Surrealists was visible for a time, but Dada was played out well before Tzara formally came over to the other side in 1929. Paul Eluard quickly joined the Breton-Soupault-Aragon group, then came a second wave: the poets Péret, Crevel, Vitrac (a play-wright too), Desnos, Artaud (who was to have a profound effect on the direction of modern theatre) and, later, Leiris, Prévert, Queneau and Char. Kindred spirits among visual artists were Man Ray, Ernst, Picabia (also something of a poet), Masson, Chirico, Dali and Buñuel. Subsequent history tells of many expulsions and defections, and among the poets only Breton and Péret remained consistently (or stubbornly) faithful to the movement’s principles until their death.
From 1925 a political dimension entered Surrealism, linking economic revolution with liberation of the mind, though most adherents insisted for the immediate future on the priority of mental experimentation. A problematic relationship developed with the Communist Party, with Breton trying to hold the balance between Marxism’s separation of the objective and subjective worlds on the one hand, and on the other the Rimbaud-inspired Surrealist view of poetry as a comprehensively life-changing activity. Orthodox Communism’s tendency to restrict or belittle the role of artistic production if it is individualistic was bound to create problems, and each artist and poet evolved in his own way on a scale of acceptance or rejection of political commitment. Many of them actively supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and carried their commitment into the French Resistance, though Breton chose exile in New York during the German occupation of France.
Surrealism in itself may seem to be history now, but it created a radically new poetic climate in which today’s writers to an extent still live, and the turbulent political events and idealistic youth movements of the late 1960s in France brought a strong resurgence of interest in its aims and methods, and in its capacity to liberate consciousness.
André Breton
(1896–1966)
The history and central ideas of Surrealism are inseparable from the life and work of Breton, its guiding spirit and author of two essential documents, the Surrealist Manifestos of 1924 and 1930.
As a medical student in Paris (his origins were in Normandy), he was mobilized as an auxiliary doctor, and worked as a psychiatrist in the Medical Corps. He became familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis (he was to meet Freud himself in Vienna in 1921), though Breton was more interested in the risky and revelatory exploration of the unconscious than in the restoration of equilibrium, and particularly interested in dream-notation. In 1916 he met Apollinaire, and also came under the influence of a provocative humorist called Jacques Vaché, whom Breton came to see as the prototype Surrealist in his attitude to life and art.
Breton’s post-war association with Tzara was over by 1922, and the parting was acrimonious, though this was of minor importance in the feverish activity of the newly constituted Surrealist group and the publication of the First Manifesto. This document defines Surrealist creation as: ‘Pure psychic automatism by which we propose to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other fashion, the real operation of thought. Dictation of thought, detached from all aesthetic or moral preoccupations’. Elsewhere he uses the term ‘dictée psychique’.
The Surrealist goes beyond reason and logic, beyond the normal waking state of consciousness, and approaches a superior state of awareness by the cultivation of a condition of lucid trance or delirium, often hypnotically induced, and by the notation of his dreams and perceptions in the form of ‘automatic writing’. This will be a pattern of verbal association committed spontaneously to paper, with no mediating intellectual activity and no intrusion of literary conventions (there is some disagreement about the legitimacy of subsequent revision, but as a general principle the products of ‘dictée psychique’ should need no further formal manipulation). It is an adventure within language, expanding the frontiers of language to infinity, through creative word-play (including jokes, for humour and vulgarity are essential Surrealist weapons), through free association based on sound-relationships existing prior to meaning, and above all through the discovery of original poetic analogies. Thus the Surrealist finds in language an active freedom denied to him by society, and Surrealism becomes an attitude to life, an attitude which makes all things possible.
Dynamic and surprising juxtapositions are at the heart of Surrealist images. Though Breton wishes them to surge more explosively from the unconscious, he adopts Reverdy’s approach to images, and adds these thoughts of his own: ‘The most powerful surrealist image is the one that presents the highest degree of arbitrariness, that takes longest to translate into functional language, whether because it contains an enormous quantity of apparent contradiction, or because one of its terms is curiously secret, or because after a sensational introduction it seems to resolve itself weakly (closing abruptly the angle of its compass), or because it is of a hallucinatory nature, or because it lends very naturally to the abstract the mask of the concrete, or inversely, because it involves the negation of some elementary physical property, or because it unleashes laughter.’ As with Reverdy, the more remote the relationship, the more poetic is the image and the more likely
to awaken deep resonances in the reader’s unconscious.
There is thus a strong element of surprise in Surrealism, and they are intensely interested in miraculous coincidences and premonitions in life as well as art, enjoying sophisticated variants of ‘Consequences’-type games of which the most celebrated product is: ‘Le cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau.’ For the Dadaists creation based on ‘le hasard’ is a matter of violent and gratuitous provocation and the arbitrary combination of words cut from newspapers, but the Surrealists pursue ‘le hasard objectif’. This could take the form of a long walk through Paris, for example, creating patterns of encounters and sensory impressions in a search for a unity between the mind and the external world that exists beyond the multiplicity of surface appearances; beyond the apparent contradictions between life and death (an area in which Jean Cocteau excels in particular); between the real and the dream, the past and the future. This reconciliation is a major Surrealist goal. It is rarely attained, but the adventure is the point, not the arrival.
For Breton, Aragon and Eluard, love can also be a route to this absolute experience. The women they love are revered and honoured for their capacity to generate transcendence, to bring about a world in which there are no boundaries between desire and experience, and in which ‘the marvellous’ erupts continually into reality.
As we have seen, Breton spent much time and energy in the late 1920s and early ’30s on the attempt to synthesize Surrealism and Marxism, working from 1930 to 1933 on a new periodical, Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, while continuing to publish poetry and prose. Much of it sustains the genuinely lyrical note of his early work, something often overlooked by those who see him essentially as a theoretician. In 1938 he met Trotsky in Mexico, and during the war established a Surrealist group in New York. His later life in France saw no break with a lifetime’s artistic and political convictions and active involvement in both fields.
Major poetic works: Mont de piété 1919, Les Champs magnétiques (with Philippe Soupault) 1920, Clair de terre 1923, Poisson soluble 1924, Ralentir Travaux (with Char and Eluard) 1930, L’Immaculée Conception (with Eluard) 1930, L’Union libre 1931, Le Revolver à cheveux blancs 1932, L’Air de l’eau 1934, Les Etats généraux 1947, Ode à Charles Fourier 1947, Constellations 1959.
Tournesol
à Pierre Reverdy
La voyageuse qui traversa les Halles à la tombée de l’été
Marchait sur la pointe des pieds
Le désespoir roulait au ciel ses grands arums si beaux
Et dans le sac à main il y avait mon rêve ce flacon de sels
Que seule a respirés la marraine de Dieu
Les torpeurs se déployaient comme la buée
Au Chien qui fume
Où venaient d’entrer le pour et le contre
La jeune femme ne pouvait être vue d’eux que mal et de biais
Avais-je affaire à l’ambassadrice du salpêtre
Ou de la courbe blanche sur fond noir que nous appelons pensée
Le bal des innocents battait son plein
Les lampions prenaient feu lentement dans les marronniers
Sunflower
for Pierre Reverdy
The traveller who crossed Les Halles at the fall of summer Tiptoed as she walked Despair spun in the sky its great and lovely arums And in the handbag there was my dream that phial of salts That only the godmother of God has breathed Torpors were unfurling like vapours At the Smoking Dog Where the pro and the con had just walked in The young woman could be seen by them only badly and obliquely Was I dealing with the ambassadress of saltpetre Or of the white curve on a black background which we call thought The ball of the innocents was in full swing The Chinese lanterns were slowly catching fire in the chestnut trees The lady with
La dame sans ombre s’agenouilla sur le Pont-au-Change
Rue Gît-le-Cœur les timbres n’étaient plus les mêmes
Les promesses des nuits étaient enfin tenues
Les pigeons voyageurs les baisers de secours
Se joignaient aux seins de la belle inconnue
Dardés sous le crêpe des significations parfaites
Une ferme prospérait en plein Paris
Et ses fenêtres donnaient sur la voie lactée
Mais personne ne l’habitait encore à cause des survenants
Des survenants qu’on sait plus dévoués que les revenants
Les uns comme cette femme ont l’air de nager
Et dans l’amour il entre un peu de leur substance
Elle les intériorise
Je ne suis le jouet d’aucune puissance sensorielle
Et pourtant le grillon qui chantait dans les cheveux de cendre
Un soir près de la statue d’Etienne Marcel
M’a jeté un coup d’oeil d’intelligence
André Breton a-t-il dit passe
no shadow knelt down on the Pont-au-Change In the Rue Gît-le-Coeur the bells no longer sounded the same The promises of the nights were at last being kept The homing pigeons the kisses of rescue Were united with the breasts of the lovely unknown woman Darting forward beneath the veil of perfect meanings A farm was prospering in the heart of Paris And its windows looked on to the milky way But no one lived in it still because of the unexpected guests Guests who are one knows more devoted than ghosts Some like that woman are apparently swimming And into love there enters a little of their substance She absorbs them inwardly I am the plaything of no sensory power And yet the cricket that was singing in the ashen hair One evening near the statue of Etienne Marcel Gave me a knowing look He said pass André Breton
Vigilance
A Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante
Pareille à un tournesol
Du front vient quelquefois heurter la Seine et son ombre glisse imperceptiblement parmi les remorqueurs
A ce moment sur la pointe des pieds dans mon sommeil
Je me dirige vers la chambre où je suis étendu
Et j’y mets le feu
Pour que rien ne subsiste de ce consentement qu’on m’a arraché
Les meubles font alors place à des animaux de même taille qui me regardent fraternellement
Lions dans les crinières desquels achèvent de se consumer les chaises
Squales dont le ventre blanc s’incorpore le dernier frisson des draps
A l’heure de l’amour et des paupières bleues
Je me vois brÛler à mon tour je vois cette cachette solennelle de riens
Watchfulness
In Paris the tottering Saint-Jacques tower Like a sunflower Comes sometimes and strikes the Seine with its brow and its shadow glides imperceptibly among the tugboats At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep I move towards the room where I am lying And I set it on fire So that nothing will exist of that acquiescence wrung from me The furniture then gives way to animals of the same stature who gaze at me fraternally Lions in whose manes the chairs are consumed to the last Sharks whose white belly absorbs the last flutter of the sheets At the hour of love and of blue eyelids I see myself burning in my turn I see
Qui fut mon corps
Fouillée par les becs patients des ibis du feu
Lorsque tout est fini j’entre invisible dans l’arche
Sans prendre garde aux passants de la vie qui font sonner très loin leurs pas traînants
Je vois les arêtes du soleil
A travers l’aubépine de la pluie
J’entends se déchirer le linge humain comme une grande feuille
Sous l’ongle de l’absence et de la présence qui sont de connivence
Tous les métiers se fanent il ne reste d’eux qu’une dentelle parfumée
Une coquille de dentelle qui a la forme parfaite d’un sein
Je ne touche plus que le cœur des choses je tiens le fil
that solemn hiding-place of nothings Which was my body Probed by the patient beaks of the ibises of fire When all is finished I go invisible into the ark Paying no heed to the passers-by of life who make their draggin
g footsteps resound into the distance I see the ridges of the sun Through the hawthorn of the rain I hear the human linen tearing like a great leaf Under the claw of absence and of presence which are in connivance All the looms are withering and there remains of them only a scented lace A scallop of lace which has the perfect form of a breast I touch now only the heart of things I hold the thread
L’Union libre
Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois
Aux pensées d’éclairs de chaleur
A la taille de sablier
Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre
Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d’étoiles de dernière grandeur
Aux dents d’empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche
A la langue d’ambre et de verre frottés
Ma femme à la langue d’hostie poignardée
A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux
A la langue de pierre incroyable
Ma femme aux cils de bâtons d’écriture d’enfant
Aux sourcils de bord de nid d’hirondelle
Ma femme aux tempes d’ardoise de toit de serre
Et de buée aux vitres
Ma femme aux épaules de champagne
Et de fontaine à têtes de dauphins sous la glace
Free Union
My wife with the wood-fire hair With her summer lightning thoughts With her hour-glass figure My wife with the shape of an otter caught in the tiger’s teeth My wife with her mouth a cockade and a bouquet of stars of utmost magnitude With her teeth imprints of a white mouse on the white earth With her tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with her tongue a stabbed communion wafer With her tongue a doll with opening and closing eyes With her tongue of incredible stone My wife with her eyelashes strokes in a child’s handwriting With her eyebrows the edges of a swallow’s nest My wife with her temples of slate on a greenhouse roof And steam on the panes My wife with her shoulders of champagne and a fountain with