The Development of Surrealism
Even before it had obtained its official name, Surrealism was already rapidly gathering momentum. Over the course of 1922 and 1923, the journal of the movement that was taking shape was Littérature, a collaboration between Breton, Aragon, Éluard, Picabia, Peret and Ernst, together with Robert Desnos, who wrote under the pseudonym of Rrose Sélavy which he had taken from Marcel Duchamp. New, youthful forces were constantly finding their way into the journal. Surrealism, like Dadaism before it, manifested itself most obviously in literature in the initial phase of its development. Its head, without a doubt, was the highly energetic and single-minded André Breton.
Adrienne Mounier, who ran a bookshop on the Rue d’Odeon, described André Breton as she saw him in 1916 as follows: “He was beautiful, with the beauty, not of an angel, but of an archangel (angels are graceful and archangels are serious…). His face was massive and well-outlined; he wore his hair fairly long and brushed back with an air of nobility; his gaze was always distant from the world, even from himself, and with its lack of animation, it resembled the colour of jade… Breton did not smile, but he would sometimes laugh, with a brief and sardonic laugh which would suddenly appear in the middle of his conversation without disturbing the features of his face, in the way you see with women who are careful about their looks. With Breton, it was his violence that made him like a statue. His weapon is the sword. He has the motionless quickness of perception found in mediums.”[46] He wore green spectacles purely to catch attention. The André Breton of the 1920s in which this attractive young man had been transformed, possessed qualities which made everyone who had joined the new world of Surrealism drawn to him, and led them to gather around him. His contemporaries spoke of the peculiar magnetism of his personality. He was a man who proved capable of persuading others, and of forming a circle of supporters who made up the driving force of the movement. But Breton also knew how to take command; he had the particular type of authority that comes from the exercise of power.
In 1924, the poet Ivan Goll, who had been involved in the Dada movement in Zürich during the war, published a journal entitled Surrealism. In an attempt to steal Breton’s thunder, he published his own personal Surrealist Manifesto. He accused Breton of confusing art with psychology, and of creating a false version of Surrealism through his misleading notions about the all-importance of the dream. However, the most brilliant Dadaists and the young generation of literary talent that had joined them formed a group around Breton, in spite of the wide range of individual characters and conflicts between different personalities that often proved impossible to resolve.
“It is said that every day, at the time when he went to sleep, Saint-Pol-Roux would tell someone to put a notice on the door of his manner, Camaret, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.” For Breton, the legend of the symbolist poet was almost a formula of the method of Surrealist creativity.[47] A man’s whole experience of real, everyday life enters into contradiction with his imaginative capability, with the experience of a different life, the life of his dreams. Breton therefore rejected everything in art that was connected to realism and, in the final analysis, to all the classics that the Dadaists were trying so hard to destroy. “… The realist attitude, inspired as it is by positivism, from St. Thomas to Anatole France, actually strikes me as hostile to intellectual and moral progress of any kind. I have a horror of it, because it is the product of mediocrity, hatred and dreary self-satisfaction.”[48] For genuine creative work one requires freedom, and it is essential to throw off the weight of everything that oppresses man in real life, everything upon which the structure of realism is founded. “We are still living under the reign of logic… But logical processes, in our time, can now only be applied to the resolultion of problems of secondary importance. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion only allows one to consider the facts that narrowly pertain to our experience. What we have lost, on the other hand, are logical aims. Needless to say, even experience has got to the stage of assigning itself limits. It turns around in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to get it to come out. It, too, rests on immediate utility, and it is watched over by common sense. Under the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have reached the point of banning from the mind everything which can be criticised, rightly or wrongly, as superstitious or chimerical; of forbidding any method of seeking after truth that does not conform to the standard approach.”[49] What has to take the place of rationalism, and of the source of inspiration provided by the realities of everyday life, is the imagination: “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting its rights. If the depths of our mind contain strange forces that are capable of adding to those at the surface, or of winning the fight against them, there is every interest in capturing them, in capturing them first, to tame them afterwards…”
Valentine Hugo, Toad from Maldoror, 1936.
Gouache and pencil on paper, 47 × 30.5 cm.
The Neshui Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections.
Jindrich Styrsky, Book-Object, 1937.
Private Collection.
The Surrealist poet had at one time embarked on a medical career in psychiatry, and so, when he went in search of the sources of the imagination, he turned to the experience of Freud, who was the first man to appreciate the vast place in the life of man occupied by dreams. “Man, when he is no longer asleep, is above all the toy of his memory, and in his normal state the latter gratifies itself by feebly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, depriving the dream of any real importance, and causing what he thought was the only determining factor at the time he left it a few hours earlier to disappear: whatever firm hope he cherished, or fear he felt. Afterwards he has the illusion of carrying on with something that is worthwhile.”[50] The objective of Surrealism is to make use of the dream, which will open the way to the Great Mystery of Life in the cause of his own art – which for Breton basically meant literature. “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, so contradictory in appearance, that are the dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a “surreality”, if one can put it that way. This is what I am striving to attain…”[51]
The imagination of André Breton erected a castle, at once fantastic and real, inhabited by both the former Dadaists and the Surrealists: “This castle belongs to me, I see it in a rustic site, not far from Paris… Some of my friends have come to live there: Louis Aragon is just leaving; …Philippe Soupault gets up when the stars come out, and Paul Éluard, our great Paul Éluard, is not yet back. Here are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac, who are in a park deciphering an old edict on the duel; Georges Auric, Jean Paulan; Max Morise, who rows so well, and Benjamin