Soluble Thoughts: Late André Breton

André Breton claimed with these glasses he could see the future. He was right. (Photo: InLibris.)

“How very hard to run a movement and be oneself. Tristan Tzara somehow managed it with Dada, as long as he did, but then Dada died. As for Surrealism’s André Breton, something about his personality and everything about his style permits the singular endurance of his self and his strong selving.”

--Mary Ann Caws, Dalkey Archive

In all likelihood many folks, myself among them, readily perceive the negative energy and destructive events of war as evidence of a hugely anti-rationalist outcome resulting from a failure of reason to prevail in daily life. We suspect that it would be counter intuitive to imagine otherwise, given that war, especially modern warfare, is precisely the opposite of rationality. But for a French poet/philosopher such as André Breton (1896-1966), war, like many other inherent dilemmas in our survival mechanism, was the woefully obvious result of hyper-rationalist thought patterns largely originating in the so-called Enlightenment era of history and persisting to this day. The inherent dichotomies of our apparently dualistic universe provoke in us, he surmised, an unhealthy and wholly unsupported faith in the zero-sum game of aggressive polarities that lead inevitably to basic conflicts without resolution such as war, since they are embedded in drastically diverse and opposed definitions for what reality even is or might be.

(City Lights Books.)

This new release from City Lights Books with the cheekily translated title Cavalier Perspective contains the final writings of a philosopher who was able to transform existential tragedy into aesthetic triumph. For him, those basic definitions of reality, or perhaps assumptions would be a better word, lead us into familiarly limited behaviors from which we seldom if ever learn any lessons whatsoever, no matter how many times the same results continue to recur. Déjà vu all over again, in other words. Which might potentially help to explain Breton’s belief in and attachment to its polar opposite: jamais vu, or the wondrous sensation of the marvelous hidden in everyday life which prompts the feeling that we are experiencing something never before experienced or even imagined. In its raw state, jamais vu amounts to an unwelcome neurological obstacle which renders ordinary daily-life situations as an incomprehensible parade of weird and inexplicable events. In other words, unsought for, it amounts to what is customarily called mental illness.

But what if, Breton proposed, when certain reverie-prone individuals such as poets, artists, musicians, novelists, painters, photographers, filmmakers and even social activists experience this state of rapturous wonderment they enter an alternate reality, a surreality, which liberates them, and anyone else who chooses to abandon all assumptions about conscious control, from the false constraints imposed by our long-held addiction to the drug of rationality? Those simple questions, “But what would happen if?’ and “But what might it mean if?,” are at the very heart of his entire creative enterprise as the founder of the infamous art movement known as surrealism. Breton just happened to be born during a convulsive period of historic upheaval, wedged between two immensely catastrophic world conflagrations which provided him with an ideal pair of living laboratories with which to conduct his uniquely insightful and entertaining researches.

The circumstances of his life, seemingly random but actually manifesting a condition he would later come to call “objective chance” (otherwise known by the easily understandable adage, “Chance is the fool’s name for fate”) would thrust him into the midst of events which would provide tangible evidence for the need for an anti-rationalist approach, not only to poetry, fiction and art, but to the manner in which we might conduct everyday social life itself. And Breton came by his critical insights into the illusory separation between our interior and exterior life, the liminal borderline between conscious and unconscious living, as a result of objective chance’s placing him in the perfect place to study our deepest and most disturbing threshold experiences: the combat battlefield, a.k.a. the doorway between life and death. Breton was more than merely a transmitter of fabulous reveries in his verse, novels and essays, however; he was the co-founder, leader and principal theorist of surrealism, one of the most influential art movements in modernist history, the influences of which remain impactful even today (most notably, I would say, in the films of a director like the recently deceased David Lynch, especially in his Lost Highway).

Man Ray's portrait of Breton (right) with fellow poet Louis Aragon.

The son of a vehemently atheistic policeman father and charmingly cooperative seamstress mother in Normandy, Breton, despite his lifelong early devotion to conscious dreaming, attended medical school, which peaked his fascination with what most of us quaintly call mental illness, but which struck young André as a revelatory state of being. His formal education was fatefully interrupted when he was found himself among many unsuspecting conscripts into World War I, during which he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes. There he met a hypersensitive patient named Jacques Vache, who turned him on to the obscure writings of Alfred Jarry, most infamous for his incendiary play Ubu Roi, written in 1896 when he was 23. Both the avant-garde absurdism of Jarry and the anti-establishment disdain for traditional artistic values expressed by Vache (who committed suicide at 23), along with his encounters with shell-shocked soldiers (suffering from what today we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome) prompted Breton’s reassessment of the purpose and function of poetry and art.

Among his first aesthetic writings would be a collection from Vache, War Letters, published in 1919 along with four introductory essays. At that same point in time, as if also influenced by objective chance, Breton encountered a kindred soul in Tristan Tzara, the Romanian-born co-founder of the extravagantly experimental dada art movement created in 1916 in Zurich, who was just then arriving in Paris. Tzara was an incendiary radical whose movement was birthed by a nihilistic attitude toward the conservative authorities deemed responsible for the madness of the First World War. With the equally charismatic Tzara, Breton shared a fondness for the visionary writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautremont, Jarry, and especially the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who first coined the term “surrealism” in 1917. In 1919 Tzara joined the staff of Littérature Magazine, which marked the first stage of the transition to what would eventually come to known as surrealism, under the stewardship of co-founders Philippe Soupault and Aragon. The two titans of the avant-garde were, however, simply too titanic in leadership persona and cultural ambition to occupy the same conceptual roost for very long, and explosive polemics quickly emerged which led to dada’s disintegration.

Many of us have been waiting for about half a century for this late collection of Breton’s musings on a multitude of subjects, including his insights into visual art aesthetics, radical poetics and socio-political issues. One of the most fascinating aspects of Cavalier Perspective, largely from its vantage point of 1952-1966, is Breton’s lofty position as a kind of lion in winter looking back across four decades on some of the most influential moments in the history of the avant-garde. He played an immense role for practically an entire century as the Pope of Anti-Art, upon which he is only too pleased to poetically expound, as he does here, with wit, charm, insight and occasional bile. Breton opines in one of the essays contained in Cavalier Perspective, “Surrealism initially aimed for the completely liberation of poetry, and through it, of life itself.”

Dada, as an anti-anti-art movement, was practically assured of a brief existence (it lasted about as long as The Beatles did) and in 1922 at a Bauhaus Festival, it staged its own funeral. Fellow dada artist and filmmaker Hans Richter recalled Tzara proclaiming his and its predicament this way: “Dada is useless, like everything else in life. Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions.” Having absorbed all of its random microbes into his lungs, and defining his new venture of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” Breton marked the end of dada roughly in 1924 by issuing his now classic first Surrealist Manifesto, and actively demonstrating what Richter characterized in this manner: “Surrealism devoured and digested Dada.” As the American poet Garrett Caples clarifies in his introduction to Cavalier, after the total nihilism of Parisian dada, surrealism wanted an alternative and more hopeful vibe. Breton’s unapologetically romantic movement desired to bring about a shared dream state.

Breton’s experiences assisting the shattered souls he encountered during and after the war were a perpetual inspiration in his search for a way to transcend the boundaries of reason and rationality. He was even more inspired by finding himself in the ranks of radical individualists such as Tzara, Soupault, Picabia, Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, Dali and Buñuel, among others, who did not require shell shock to propel them into rhapsodic and romantic reveries aimed at dismantling a reality which had proven itself to be unsatisfactory, especially once the nightmare of global conflict was repeated yet again in the Second World War. Together they would able to, they hoped, liberate themselves, and each other, from the limits imposed by what they perceived (cavalierly perhaps) as fraudulent sanity (as per R.D. Laing later on). In the first essay in this newly translated anthology, “Link,” Breton explains himself and his disenchantment quite clearly: “When I began searching as early as 1936 for the emotional catalyst of Surrealism (then just starting to find its counterpart in the ‘surrationalism’ that overtook scientific circles), I discovered it right away in the anxiety inherent to a time when human brotherhood was collapsing more and more each day, just as the most established systems—including social systems—seemed stuck by petrification.”

Front row: Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray.
Back row: Paul Éluard, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, René Crevel.

Three years later, World War II broke out, ushered in by a certified madman. The surrealist strategy? To break away from traditional forms of expression and societal conventions altogether and instead focus on manifesting the subliminal and unconscious mind through spontaneous and dream-based creativity. Surrealist poet René Char, once described as the custodian of the infinite faces of the living, summed it up ironically by expressing his belief that one comes out of all lived experience, whether good or bad, utterly transformed. Also ironic is Breton’s own ability to maintain a delicate balance between transgression and transcendence, between liberty and libertinage, mostly by means of a dark kind of humour (which he artfully assembled in his Anthology of Black Humour, 1940) which is also in ample tongue-in-cheek evidence in this posthumous Cavalier collection. One form of surrealist activity which persistently mystified many onlookers was their involvement in the activity of party games, and Breton was quick to explain that they though had at times called this activity experimental as a defense measure, what they really sought was amusing entertainments above all else. That and a clever relief from the ennui of everyday living.

Yes, ever on the search for amusing diversions from reality, the surrealists certainly knew how to have a good time at their raucous soirées. One of my favourite “games” of theirs, usually involving four or five players, was one they called “Exquisite Corpse,” wherein a sheet of folded paper was shared among poets/artists who drew only their own section without access to the graphics of their peers. The results were often stunning real-time demonstrations of the freedom of expression they were seeking and sharing with like-minded pilgrims. An excellent example was concocted one chilly February night in 1938 by Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and the painter Yves Tanguy, husband of the equally brilliant painter Kay Sage. This work, somewhat reminiscent of the etching collages of their mutual friend Max Ernst, embodies a sentiment expressed by one of their favourite classical poet/mystics, Georg Hardenburg, who went by the pen name Novalis (1772-1801), who claimed that an image is not an allegory, not the symbol of something else at all, but only the symbol of itself.

Exquisite Corpse, 1938.

Although this latest assortment of insights from André Breton takes a retrospective vantage point from a later stage in his life when he was already a living legend, the pieces in it cast a wistful glance back to the time when his legend was just beginning to be lived. He lovingly takes us back the heady time when he and Soupault co-authored The Magnetic Fields in 1920, and to the dreamy time of their joint production Soluble Fish in 1924. On that occasion Breton uttered what I believe to be his salient insight and most poetic assertion: “Man is soluble in his own thoughts.” Breton also allows us to reminisce about a favourite and most novel novel of his, Nadja, 1928, a masterpiece of “automatic writing” which has recently allowed me to reinterpret auto-composition as strangely similar to self-induced AI. But instead of a computer algorithm assembling previous content, Breton showed us how to “hack” our own unconscious and devise narratives which we did not know that we knew. Breton’s algorithm was surrealism, just as it was David Lynch’s.

The new City Lights collection also emphasizes his stubborn insistence about what he calls “the superiority of impassioned people to those with common sense.” From his perspective as one besotted by passion, in this late anthology he reminds us of his origin myth: “The time I live in, this time, alas, runs by and takes me with it. There is today, it is true, little room for anyone who would haughtily trace in the grass the learned arabesques of the sun.” The goal of his search for limitless passion was a total reviewing and redoing of the way the world around and inside of him might be altered at will by the potent drugs of love and poetry. He sincerely believed that life could be forever changed by surrealist optimism, not unlike the situationist optimism that returned in a different form during the swinging sixties. Such was the absolute liberty of feeling that Breton sought in his multi-media excursions into the unknown via the collections of essays he regularly released over the years: The Lost Steps (1924), Break of Day (1934), Free Rein (1953), and – now finally available to us in English from City Lights Books – Cavalier Perspective (1970).

Forty of Breton’s essays are shared here, widely ranging in subject and theme, from prefaces to books by friends, lectures presented at symposia, ruminations on magic, communism, astrology, the language of stones, the feverish visions of Robert Desnos and Antonin Artaud and everything else in between. Anyone interested in understanding how dada morphed into surrealism and how surrealism morphed into fluxus, then into pop art, then into conceptual art and beyond, would be well served by picking up M. Breton’s fabulous guided tour to the avant-garde cultural map of the last century. Even with all its gloomy drawbacks, it was a century during which we knew how to have fun and also how to smile hopefully, even through our sadness. I miss it.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.