Surrealism, Politics and Culture

Raymond Spiteri, Donald Lacoss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351769921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. Drawing on literary, art historical and historical studies, this essay collection explores the complex encounter between culture and politics within Surrealism. The Surrealist movement was one of the first cultural movements to question explicitly the relation between culture and politics, and its attempt to fuse social and cultural revolution has been a critical factor in shaping our sense of modernity. This anthology addresses not only the contested ground between culture and politics within Surrealism itself, and within the subsequent historical accounts of the movement, but also the broader implications of this encounter on our own sense of modernity. Its goal is to delineate the role of radical politics in shaping the historical trajectory of Surrealism.

Chapter 1
The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–36^*

Robert Short

* Originally published in the Journal of Contemporary History 1:2 (September 1966), pp. 3–25. Reprinted with permission.

‘Transformer le monde’, a dit Marx;

‘Changer la vie’, a dit Rimbaud; ces deux mots

d’ordre pour nous n’en font qu’un.

André Breton

Including as it did at one time or another writers and artists of the calibre of Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, René Char, Michel Leiris, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Naville, Max Ernst, André Masson and Alberto Giacometti, to mention just a handful of the hundred or so who joined its ranks, the Surrealist group probably exercised a greater influence on the intellectual climate of the interwar period in France than any other comparable movement. As such the political history of the Surrealists, who participated collectively in many of the organizations of the revolutionary left, deserves attention.

Not that the Surrealists ever had a decisive effect on the course of political events, or made any original contribution to political theory. The interest in the movement’s political history lies in its tenacious efforts, set forth in some highly articulate polemical writing, to associate its intellectual, artistic and moral preoccupations with the aims and methods of international Communism. The issues at stake may be reduced to three: the reconciliation of a generalized spirit of revolt with revolutionary action; the reconciliation of the idea of a ‘spiritual revolution’ and its accompanying insistence on ethical ‘purity’ with the practical necessities of political effectiveness; and the reconciliation of an independent revolutionary art with the demands for propaganda and didacticism made by the Communist Party. An examination of them will show how the evolution of the theory of Surrealism, an enterprise which was initially and essentially poetic, led the movement to call for the transformation of society; and an account of Surrealism’s ventures into politics and of the repeated setbacks these met with, will suggest some of the reasons why the Surrealists failed to translate their metaphysical and spiritual ambitions into social terms, and, more specifically, why they failed to find a permanent place within the Communist movement.

While in the narrow sense, according to the definition in Breton’s Manifesto of 1924, Surrealism appeared to be no more than a new poetics, a linguistic experiment and a novel method of ‘forcing inspiration’, in the broad sense it implied an ethics, a philosophy and a politics. Bringing together Rimbaud’s ‘Lettre du Voyant’, Hegel’s dialectical method, and Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, the Surrealists began by making a drastic revaluation of the poetic image. They believed that the series of images which they brought to light by using automatic techniques represented the ‘real process of thought’. They devoted themselves to the exploitation of the untapped resources of the unconscious, hitherto ignored or suppressed by a culture obsessed by technological progress and material comforts. For the Surrealists, poetry was not a cultivated form of escapism; it was an instrument of discovery. Insofar as the source of poetic inspiration was the unconscious mind, a faculty which, like Descartes’s reason, was common to all men, they believed that poetry could be ‘made by all’ and not just by the technically accomplished litterateur. It had ceased to be a ‘means of expression’ and had become ‘an activity of mind’.

From the moment poetry was conceived as a spiritual activity accessible to all men, it ceased to be a purely aesthetic matter and became an ethical one. In Paul Éluard’s words: ‘Toute veritable morale est poétique, la poésie tendant au règne de l’homme, de tous les hommes, au règne de notre justice’. Surrealism thus affirmed the ethical basis of all expression and the ‘Communism’ of poetry. At the same time, poetry’s roots in the unconscious meant that it was the expression not only of primal mental activity but of man’s deepest desires as well, for the unconscious was also the seat of the instincts and the libido. As such, poetry could not remain at the abstract level of ‘fine art’. As the expression of desire, it involved choices and demands which sought satisfaction in the real world. Far from being a compensation for an inadequate and unworthy reality, poetry represented that towards which reality should progress. The Surrealists were confident that once the mind had a vision of what was possible, the will would struggle to achieve it, and that the ‘interpretation’ of man and of the world would inevitably be accompanied by their transformation. The poet would lead the struggle to raise man’s spiritual and social state up to the level of his dreams. In so far as the disparity between that which existed and that which was desired was the result of alterable social conditions rather than of an immutable human condition, the Surrealists came to demand a radical social upheaval: a revolution.

This, very schematically, was the chain of reasoning that linked the Surrealist conception of art to an attitude of revolt against society and towards political commitment. This sequence of ideas was reflected in the intellectual evolution of the group in the seven years following World War I.

* * *

The word ‘revolution’ punctuated the writings of the Surrealists with great regularity between 1922 and 1925 but it had not yet acquired political connotations. As a document from April 1925 stated:

The immediate sense and purpose of the Surrealist revolution is not so much to change anything in the physical and manifest order of things as to create an agitation in men’s minds.¹

1 Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, vol. 2, Documents Surréalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1948), p. 44.

At this stage, they believed in a ‘revolution’ in experience to be brought about by the mind and the imagination once the fetters of rationalism and habit had been struck off. Aragon challenged his audience in Madrid: ‘Do you believe, yes or no, in the infinite powers of thought? We will prevail against all odds’. Ignoring social and political forces, the Surrealists claimed to be able to set off their revolution unaided, since it was not something rendered inevitable by the laws of social evolution so much as something ardently desired which, if willed with sufficient passion, was bound to occur. Their first task was to rejuvenate language, the instrument and substance of thought and hence the key to their ‘subjective idealist’ revolution. Putting to advantage their earlier apprenticeship among the Dadaists in the art of provocation and scandal, the Surrealists turned on the regime whose conventions had crippled and stunted language. They denounced the wretchedness of everyday life, the cults of family and fatherland, the necessity to work, masochistic Christianity, and the whole system of values which had permitted the war in which they themselves had unwillingly sacrificed their youth. As André Breton put it: ‘We were possessed by a will to total subversion’. They extolled all forms of anti-social behaviour - crime, drug-addiction, suicide, insanity - as so many expressions of human freedom and revolt. They preferred the criminal to the political militant since crime seemed to be a self-sufficient act implying no fresh determinations. As an indispensable preliminary to the reconquest of liberty, they called for a crime on an international scale: a second ‘Terror’ or a new wave of barbarian invasions from the East. But these remained poetic symbols of menace. The Surrealists refused as yet to serve any real revolutionary cause because they conceived liberty as an absolute and commitment would have imposed intolerable limitations on their disponibilité. ‘Je meurs si je m’attache’, said Breton.

The distance that separated the Surrealists from young Communist intellectuals was revealed in a controversy between Aragon and the editors of Clarté, Marcel Fourrier and Jean Bernier, over Un Cadavre, a tract published by the Surrealists on the death of Anatole France. The Clartéists had approved the general spirit of this lampoon but objected to Aragon’s use of the phrase ‘Moscou la gäteuse’ (doddering Moscow) in his comment on a telegram of condolence sent by the Kremlin to the French nation on its loss. Aragon replied to the Clartéists:

If you find me antagonistic to the political spirit […] it is because, as you cannot fail to see, I have always valued and continue to value the spirit of revolt far more highly than any politics […]. As for the Russian Revolution, you’ll forgive me for shrugging my shoulders. Measured by the yardstick of ideas, it is nothing more than a trivial ministerial crisis.²

2 Clarté, 1 December 1924.

Other Surrealists shared Aragon’s contempt for communism. Éluard called it ‘a mediocre regime which, just like capitalism, depends on the crude and repulsive order of physical labour’. The group did not yet see revolutionary politics as the means of satisfying their grievances against the world; Breton told Jacques Baron: ‘We just don’t bother ourselves with politics’.

It was not until the summer of 1925 that the Surrealists began to reassess their resources and what they meant by ‘revolution’. The public had remained cheerfully immune to threats of the Terror and an Oriental scourge however vividly these horrors were evoked in the columns of La Revolution surréaliste. Breton realized that the social order was not going to yield before mere invective whose extravagant violence rendered it ridiculous. If their revolution was not to deteriorate into an impotent nonconformism it had to be given some tangible content, if necessary social content, and join forces with other revolutionary intellectuals. Critics like Marcel Arland had been quick to pigeonhole the Surrealists’ revolt as a symptom of a ‘nouveau mal de siècle’ or to identify the group as a latterday generation of ‘poètes maudits’. To avoid this forcible assimilation into a literary avant-garde which they despised, no better means was to hand than affiliations with proletarian politics. The press furore aroused by the Surrealists’ behaviour at the banquet in honour of the poet Saint-Pol-Roux, where they had shouted overtly political slogans for the first time, proved that this was the way to make the public take notice of their protest.

* * *

The outbreak of hostilities between the French army under Pétain and the Riffs in Morocco precipitated the Surrealists into politics. It was ie grand choc’ which suddenly clarified a highly ambiguous intellectual position. Their admiration for ‘Oriental’ and particularly for primitive peoples, their hatred of militarism and of the ‘professional patriots’, the academic intellectuals who celebrated France’s civilizing role abroad - all directed their sympathies towards Abd-el-Krim. Nineteen of the group put their signatures to Henri Barbusse’s protest: ‘Appel aux Travailleurs Intellectuels. Oui ou non condamnez-vous la guerre?’, which appeared in L’Humanité on 2 July 1925.

For Breton, the first step towards conversion to Communism was reading Trotsky’s biography of Lenin. He set about convincing his friends, anticipating their objections that the Russian Revolution hardly satisfied the exigencies of Surrealism by insisting that it was not yet over or complete and that on the moral plane there was no incompatibility between the ideas of Lenin and their own. It was necessary, he said, to abandon the myths of revolution for the reality. Communism might represent a minimum programme, but it was the only force in existence capable of bringing about the social revolution which in turn was the necessary condition of ‘une revolution dans les esprits’. The autumn of 1925 saw the political conversion of the group en masse. Michel Leiris admitted that the individual by himself, however passionate and profound his sense of revolt, was impotent when it came to social action. Aragon was soon writing with the conviction and facility of a lifelong Marxist. In articles such as ‘Le Proletariat de l’esprit’, he showed how capital could turn ideas themselves into commodities.³ The Surrealists seem to have undergone a kind of intoxication with Communism; the hyperbole and naive enthusiasm of their early political writings, their panegyrics on the Cheka and the Ogpu, cast doubt on the permanence and seriousness of their conversion. Breton appeared one morning at the Cafe Cyrano with a workman’s cap over his long curls to demonstrate his solidarity with the proletariat. André Masson, recalling the atmosphere of the group’s meetings, admits: ‘When I was present at these things I kept saying to myself: “But I’m dreaming. I must be dreaming”’.⁴

3 Clarté, 30 November 1925.

4 Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec André Masson (Paris: René Julliard, 1958), p. 108.

The passage towards politics was eased by the instruction and encouragement the Surrealists received from the young editors of Clarté. But the national movement that Barbusse had founded in 1919 was now only a shadow of its former self. Clarté had long been suffering from shortage of funds, loss of readers, and repeated changes of policy as its successive editors struggled to determine the role that a Communist cultural review independent of the Communist Party could usefully play in a period of prolonged anticipation of the revolution. Despite some misgivings, the Clartéists decided to collaborate with Breton’s group, many of whom were brilliant and already notable writers, in the hope of saving their review. Clarté was to adopt an editorial policy very close to that already undertaken in part, though for less consciously political motives, in La Révolution surréaliste: ‘the systematic denunciation of bourgeois thought’. On their side, the Surrealists saw in Clarté a useful half-way house on their road towards commitment and one which, unlike membership of the PCF, did not deprive them of their independence.

The Clarté ‘alliance’, made up of the Surrealists, the Clarté writers, and the ‘Philosophers’ (Georges Politzer, Pierre Morhange, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Guterman and Georges Friedman) formed a distinct new generation of Communist adherents. They differed greatly from the original postwar intellectual sympathizers with the October Revolution, such as Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Marcel Martinet and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. They were emphatically not humanitarians, pacifists, or ‘men of good will’. Both the Surrealists and the ‘Philosophers’ came to communism in the course of an independent spiritual quest. The ‘Philosophers’, who were pioneer existentialists, rebelled against the idea of an irreducible dualism between the human and the absolute which had been taught them by their Sorbonne professors. They retorted: ‘Our thought is earthbound and concrete. It is no longer Thought with a capital T’.⁵ One way of making their thought concrete seemed to be to make it political. As for the Surrealists, Communism served to give some positive justification to an idealistic revolt which had been turnin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Revolution by Night: Surrealism, Politics and Culture
• 1 The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–36
• 2 Towards a New Construction: Breton’s Break with Dada and the Formation of Surrealism
• 3 Surrealism and the Political Physiognomy of the Marvellous
• 4 Advertising Surrealist Masculinities: André Kertész in Paris
• 5 Surrealism Noir
• 6 Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of ‘Reason’: Whiteness, Primitivism and Négritude
• 7 Painting and Politics: Miró’s Still Life with Old Shoe and the Spanish Republic
• 8 Of Politics, Postcards and Pornography: Salvador Dalí’s Le My the tragique de l’Angélus de Millet
• 9 Surrealism in 1938: The Exhibition at War
• 10 For an Independent Revolutionary Art: Breton, Trotsky and Cárdenas’s Mexico
• 11 Aimé Césaire’s Insurrectionary Poetics
• 12 Hans Bellmer’s Libidinal Politics
• 13 Attacks of the Fantastic
• 14 Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism
• Appendix I: Notes in the Hand of Léon Pierre-Quint Being the Record of a Conversation
• Index