The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  20Picabia, who had visited New York in 1913 to attend the Armory Show and had been given a solo exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, named his journal after Gallery 291.

  21“She has a hot ass.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Rapture of the Deep

  On June 22, 1922, the Almanach des Lettres Françaises et Étrangères announced that Littérature, whose collaborators would thenceforth “devote themselves to Surrealism in poetry and life,” had had its day. Two weeks later, Breton declared that Symbolism, Dadaism, and Cubism were also spent enthusiasms. He envisaged art as life-changing. Salvation lay in the unconscious, from which Surrealists proposed to “take dictation,” like evangelical scribes at the mouth of an inner oracle.

  Two years later, shortly before the publication of the movement’s new journal, La Révolution Surréaliste, Breton issued a long manifesto in which Surrealism was defined as “psychic automatism in its pure state,” or a method of freeing thought from the shackles of reason and letting it play innocently, without regard for morality and aesthetics. Its foundation, he wrote, is a belief in “the omnipotence of dream,” which, in turn, sustains a belief in “the superior reality of certain forms of hitherto neglected associations.”

  Although Descartes was the last philosopher with whom Breton wished to be associated, his creed echoes the motto illustrated in Jan Weenix’s famous portrait of the philosopher, Mundus est fabula: the world is a fable. In Breton’s manifesto, the world is not so much a fable as it is our narration of it. Having declared in the manifesto that “man was given language to make Surrealist use of it,” he took that thought one step further in Point du Jour by contending that “the mediocrity of our world” derives essentially from the way we use our power of speech. “What prevents me,” he asked, “from muddling the order of words and thus dealing a blow to the wholly apparent existence of things?”

  It was almost axiomatic among young poets of the postwar generation that Victor Hugo, who had made good his promise to put a red bonnet on the French dictionary, and Mallarmé, who proposed to give a “purer sense” to “the language of the tribe,” needed radical heirs. Language had become the instrument and warden of the ruling social order. “This hubbub of cars and lorries, these districts housing merchandise or files rather than people, … these governments of shopkeepers and money-grubbing politicians, I want out; but no, we are forced to play the game,” wrote Francis Ponge, a young poet who later signed Breton’s “Second Manifesto.” “Alas, this sordid regime speaks from within ourselves, for we have at our disposal no other words … than those prostituted from time immemorial by daily use in this squalid world.”

  The cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1924.

  How to conjure a new world in speaking it? was the question. Their revolt against the commonly understood significance of words, or against the word as sign, led Breton and his confrères to insist on the word’s materiality, to view words as debris erupting from the unconscious and signifying nothing for being self-referential. Louis Aragon proclaimed that he sought the human equivalent of external things.

  The paradox of hermetic transcendence was a collective quest. The new evangelists subscribed to Breton’s fantasy that the mind in some altered state would no longer be aware of words but, rather, would press them out of itself, like a thing extruding things. When words themselves became objects impervious to logic, the rift between subject and object would vanish. In Une Vague de Rêves, one of the first essays about Surrealism and its experiments, Aragon recounts a magical moment when the group discovered that a written image could affect their senses, “shed its verbal aspect” and call into being phenomena they did not think it possible to create. The concrete is the ultimate moment of thought, and the state of concrete thought is poetry, he concluded. Ponge said something of the same thing more engagingly in his celebration of the snail, whose utterance, as he describes it, takes the form of dribble clotting, drying, and leaving a silvery wake: “It does not have many friends. Nor does it need any to assure its happiness. It cleaves so well to nature, revels so perfectly in its clasp; it is a friend of the ground, and kisses it with its whole body.”1 In the organism absolutely adequate to the earth, “awareness of” or “consciousness of” is otiose.

  Ultimately, Surrealism’s initiates might have chosen the snail as their emblem for its shell as well as its dribble—for its exquisite self-involvement as well as its organic trail. Breton wrote this about Picasso:

  The plastic instinct, raised here by an individual to the apogee of its development, draws upon the refusal, the negation of everything that may distract it from a sense of itself. With Picasso it is the sum of all these needs, these essays in disintegration, rendered with implacable lucidity.… It [the plastic instinct] is, to suppose the impossible, the spider devoting its attention to the design and substance of its web’s polygon more than to the fly; it is the migrating bird peering over its wing in full flight to look at what it has left behind, or the bird seeking to recover itself in the labyrinth of its own song.

  Surrealists, with Breton in the center and his wife, Simone, at the typewriter, taking dictation from Robert Desnos’s unconscious. Desnos was reputed to have a special talent for entering self-induced trances. In the upper right-hand corner, craning his neck, is Giorgio de Chirico.

  The Surrealist poem was to answer the same ideal of a locked, reflexive universe in which language exists on its own terms (“words make love to one another,” wrote Breton), conveying no feeling, no experience, no image felt, experienced, or imagined outside itself. It no longer derived from an intention or preconceived idea but, rather, sprang from pure chance. As the product of unconscious mayhem, it was purely necessary in a way that only things can presume to be. Hence Breton’s doctrine of “objective chance”: the ellipses, the absence of rhetorical connectives, the dislocated clichés, the unforeseen meeting of rationally unjuxtaposable words, or sometimes the loneliness of a single word drumming through the poem, pivoting on itself in puns or disintegrating into its syllables, form a material cryptogram of one’s “mental matter”—not a transparent sign dissolving into significance but an irreducible thing. Surrealist gospel envisioned an objective order of concrete metaphors bearing an imprint of the poet’s “true life” on their inner face, like a fossilized secret. It remained for him to find his secret within the order he created by chance.

  Aragon—Drieu’s close friend and Breton’s most eloquent apostle—once told an audience of students in Madrid: “I am stranded at your ear.” Stranded they all were, insofar as their ideal of creation had the poet looking out and seeing himself look in, or hearing his voice through his ears, like a listener. One is put in mind of André Malraux’s comment in The Voices of Silence on his novel La Condition Humaine. “We know the yearning every man has for omnipotence and immortality,” he wrote. “We know that his mind does not grasp itself the way it grasps the world, that each of us is, in his own eyes, a welter of monstrous dreams. I once told the story of a man who fails to recognize his own voice, freshly taped, because he is, for the first time, hearing it through his ears, no longer through his throat. And because our inner voice is conveyed to us through our throat alone, I called this book The Human Condition.” What the Surrealists abhorred in the end was less the subversive influence of the bourgeoisie than their own human condition. Or perhaps both inseparably. Emerging from the bloody havoc wreaked by men who honored “le clair esprit français,” in a country blooming with monuments to the dead, they could not settle for less than the absolutes of omnipotence and immortality. The Great War fostered literary terror.

  Equating mind and word in a substantive sense, Breton wished to short-circuit the world. Nowhere is his intention more explicitly stated than in the “Second Manifesto”:

  Everything leads one to believe that there exists a certain vantage point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the inco
mmunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as opposites. One searches in vain for any other motive to Surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point.… It is clear … that Surrealism is not seriously interested in whatever is being produced next door under the pretext of art, or of anti-art, of philosophy, or of anti-philosophy, in a word, in anything whose end is not the annihilation of being in a flash, interior and blind.… What could those people who harbor some concern about the place they will occupy in the world expect to gain from the Surrealist experiment?

  As in the text on Picasso, Breton draws an image of the self, divided in the phenomenal world but recoiling upon itself, thereby gaining the kind of absolute oneness inherent in matter, on the one hand, and divine vessels, on the other. At times the Surrealist would characterize words as matter materializing the self, like dreams of stone, at other times as a solvent dissolving the self (Breton’s image of “soluble fish”). Like Baudelaire’s private journal My Heart Laid Bare, which opens with the pronouncement “The evaporation and the condensation of the SELF: there you have it, in a nutshell,” the “Surrealist Manifesto” could have been published with two illustrations on facing pages: Magritte’s tableau of a petrified man seated at a petrified table within petrified walls, and a blank canvas on a blank page. Surrealist writings everywhere refer to an original unity of which man has been dispossessed but that he can regain in some new Creation, conceived alternately as a plenum and a void: the dreamer’s mind being occluded by the hallucinatory object or being absolved of everything that furnishes a personal history. In one of Aragon’s early works, a certain Baptiste Ajamais (who, according to the writer’s key, is Breton) says, “Above all there is that joy of finding nothing within myself once I’ve closed my eyes. Nothing. I am empty. Outside nothing fixes onto my sight any longer.”

  Although Drieu spent much time with Louis Aragon—at music halls, in brothels, on long walks though the beautiful crescent of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, high above Paris, and, during summer holidays, at the Cyrano café near Breton’s flat in Montmartre—his name mingled with the Surrealists’ publicly only once, in a pamphlet they published, largely at his expense, after the death of Anatole France on October 12, 1924. It was entitled Un Cadavre.

  Not since December 1923, when Maurice Barrès’s hearse, drawn by ten black horses and followed by an immense cortège, crossed Paris en route to Notre Dame Cathedral (halting at the Place des Pyramides to bid Jeanne d’Arc a posthumous farewell) had there been a state funeral of such proportions for a revered literary figure. Anatole France’s coffin, draped in black and silver, lay beneath a statue of Voltaire overlooking the square of the Institut de France on the Quai Malaquais. Crosses were banished. Musicians played the Andante from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the March from Gluck’s Alceste. Red flags honoring Anatole France’s conversion to Socialism outnumbered the tricolor, and a row of them followed his horse-drawn hearse past the Tuileries and the Arc de Triomphe to a small cemetery in Neuilly. Again, from windows and balconies many thousands witnessed the cortège, which reached Neuilly after dark. France was buried by torchlight.2

  The funeral procession began so late because so many dignitaries delivered prolix eulogies: the president of the Republic, the premier, cabinet ministers, the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Notable was the fact that no one quoted the famous line from France’s own eulogy of Émile Zola at the Montmartre cemetery in 1902. Zola was, he had said, “un moment de la conscience humaine”—a moment in the history of human conscience. To do so would have revived memories of the Dreyfus Affair at the very portal of the Académie Française, to which France had belonged and whose meetings he had boycotted between 1902 and 1916 as a protest against his colleagues’ unanimous anti-Dreyfusism. There were oblique references to this, but what the speakers trumpeted were the author’s unobjectionable virtues—his taste, his style, his exemplification of “French genius.” Gabriel Hanotaux, who represented the Académie Française, annointed him “the great writer par excellence, the most French in his language, his ingenuity, his wisdom.” Having received “the admirable dialect of Paris” as a birthright, France defended it all his life, said Hanotaux, and thus “contributed to our conquests abroad.” His works were “pregnant with humanity,” declared Paul Painlevé, the minister of education. He was “the very model of the perfect writer,” according to Georges Lecomte, president of the Société des Gens de Lettres, “the writer whose language most exactly translated and fit his thought.” In Le Figaro, another member of the Académie Française claimed that Pierre Loti, France, and Barrès, all of whom died within fourteen months of one another, formed “a chain of peaks.”

  André Breton in the 1950s in his Montmartre apartment, after World War II.

  A few years later, Breton would be flirting with the French Communist Party, Aragon and other Surrealists would be seeking their salvation in Marxism-Leninism rather than in the id, and Drieu would be waffling between ideological extremes; but in 1924, none was yet sufficiently political to balance Anatole France’s civic heroism against the literary ideals they scorned.

  Un Cadavre satisfied enemies who wanted only one more piece of evidence to convict its authors of being mad dogs. “Anatole France hasn’t died, he will never die,” wrote Soupault. “In a few years, a few worthy writers will have invented a new Anatole. There are people who can’t do without this comic character, ‘the greatest man of the century,’ or ‘a master.’ His every last word is anthologized, his most trivial sentences are studied under a magnifying glass. And then one obligatorily bellows: ‘How beautiful it is! How magnificent! How splendid!’ The eternal master.” Breton’s smear appeared under the title “Burial Refused.”

  Let us commemorate the year that silenced three sinister men, Loti, Barrès, France: the idiot, the traitor, the cop. Gone with France’s departure is a bit of human servility. Let there be rejoicing on the day that ruse, traditionalism, patriotism, opportunism, skepticism, realism, and lack of heart are buried! Let us remember that the basest villains of this age had Anatole France as an accomplice and let us never pardon him for having colored his smiling inertia with the red, white, and blue of the Revolution. Let his corpse be put in a box, all those old books “that he loved so dearly” packed on top of it, and the whole kit and kaboodle thrown into the Seine. Once he’s dead, this man must no longer be able to make dust.

  Drieu, who, three years earlier, had argued Maurice Barrès’s case at the mock trial, was characteristically ambivalent, chiding Anatole France for his ignorance of everything new in art while lauding his conservative virtues. One could not draw a “principle of life” from his works, but neither could the language have done without him. From the moribund body of France the nation, wrote Drieu, war had brought forth a new nation as alien to the old as the Wild West to Europe or Ottoman Constantinople to Byzantium. In an uncouth country swarming with Negroes and “disturbing” foreigners and automobiles and airplanes, Anatole France rescued the “old family” of words. “He exercised the vigilance and the prudence that enables words to live together like a strong, united nation: it is called syntax, which can be like love among citizens.” Readers might have mistaken this for a gross parody of eulogies in the provincial press or the Bulletin de l’Instruction Publique. It wasn’t intended to be.

  Still, Drieu’s contrary argument did not prevent him from rushing to the defense of Louis Aragon when Aragon’s diatribe in Un Cadavre cost him the stipend he received from Jacques Doucet, a famous fashion designer who collected modern literary manuscripts. Unbeknownst to Aragon, Drieu pleaded with Doucet to restore his allowance. “You and I, sir, are of the century, while Louis Aragon is not,” he wrote. “He has taken vows that exclude him from it. I don’t know if they are permanent but for the moment they put him before us in a situation that demands our solicitude.” Aragon, he went on to say, was a seeker of the absolute among timeservers. He kept the torch lit for others improvising existence, and deserved to be tre
ated accordingly. “Wise kings,” he concluded, “have always sheltered mad monks.”

  A year later Drieu and Aragon were no longer on speaking terms. Friends surmised that Aragon’s love affair with a woman who had previously been Drieu’s mistress accounted for the break. It may well have played a part in it. But the professed cause was an open letter to the Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel, France’s ambassador to Japan, in which the Surrealists denounced him for carrying the cross to Asia. Their hope was that revolutions, wars, and colonial insurrections would exterminate Western civilization. “We seize this opportunity to dissociate ourselves publicly from everything French, in words and actions,” they wrote, adding that salvation for them lay nowhere. “We understand Rimbaud to have been a man who despaired of his salvation, whose work and life are pure testimonies of perdition.”

  Despair was Drieu’s homeland. He could travel with his Surrealist friends to its far reaches, but not beyond. With the letter to Claudel seeming to imply that they saw a bright star in the east over Moscow and meant to follow it after abandoning their quest for that “absolute vantage point of the mind,” he took offense. And he did so flagrantly, in an open letter to Aragon. “I always believed that your movements, Aragon, had the virtue of expressing a despair that flows in my blood and in that of many around us,” he wrote. “After more than ten years in Paris—fitful discussions, anxious pacings, long flights toward love.… But suddenly I see you relaxing [your sense of the absolute] and at the first crossroad taking a shortcut to the beaten path before the crowd arrives en masse.… Suddenly one point on the horizon is more cardinal than another.… What are these superstitions? How can one prefer the east to the west?” He dismissed the image of “light coming from the east” as unpardonably trite and their apparent conversion to “neo-Orientalism” as an outright self-betrayal. “While some consider themselves obliged to murmur ‘Long live the King’ from time to time, or ‘Long live Millerand,’ which is more prudent, you fall into the trap and shout: ‘Long live Lenin!’ ”3