Surrealism, movement in literature and art, was founded by the French poet
and critic Andre Breton.He wrote his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 and consistently
dominated the movement. Surrealism grew directly out of the movement known
as Dadaism.Surrealism emphasizes the role of the unconscious in creative
activity, but it uses the psychic unconscious in a more orderly and serious
way.
Surrealist Literature
The surrealists claimed as their literary forebears a long line of writers,
outstanding among whom is the Comte de Lautréamont, author of the
lengthy and complicated work Les chants de Maldoror (1868-1870). Besides
Breton, many of the most distinguished French writers of the early 20th
century were at one time connected with the movement; these include Paul
Eluard, Louis Aragon, René Crevel, and Philippe Soupault. Younger
writers such as Raymond Queneau were also influenced by its points of view.
Pure surrealist writers used automatism as a literary form—that is, they
wrote whatever words came into their conscious mind and regarded these
words as inviolable. They did not alter what they wrote, as that would
constitute an interference with the pure act of creation. The authors felt
that this free flow of thought would establish a rapport with the subconscious
mind of their readers. A typical short example of surrealist writing is
the proverb by Paul Éluard that states "Elephants are contagious."
This purely psychic automatism was modified later by the conscious use,
especially in painting, of symbols derived from Freudian psychology. Like
their forerunners, the Dadaists, the surrealists broke accepted rules of
work and personal conduct in order to liberate their sense of inner truth.
The movement spread all over the world and flourished in America during
World War II (1939-1945), when André Breton was living in New York
City.
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 result