Surrealism in Latin American Literature

Searching for Breton's Ghost

M. Nicholson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317612
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Charting surrealism in Latin American literature from its initial appearance in Argentina in 1928 to the surrealist-inspired work of several writers in the 1970s, Melanie Nicholson argues that surrealism has exercised a significant and positive influence over twentieth-century Latin American literature, particularly poetry.

Part I

Contexts and Contours

Chapter 1

Surrealism Is Dead, ¡Viva el Surrealismo!

Le surréalisme—qui fait long feu—en tant que doctrine autonome, en tant que méthode spécifique, n’existe pas. Mais, fait historique, ce feu illumine encore le paysage intellectuel jusqu’à l’horizon.

—Paul Nougé, Histoire de ne pas rire

Introduction

What is surrealism? Surrealism is a tangled web of contradictions. This is, paradoxically, both its raison d’être and the limitation that it strives perpetually to overcome. It is also, I would argue, the condition that has granted it a long afterlife beyond the borders of World War II—era France. André Breton claims in one of his most famous pronouncements, “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point” (Manifestoes 123—24). The surrealists sought through a dialectical process to resolve the antinomies they saw as alienating modern man from himself, from what they imagined to be authentic existence.1 There is no stasis in this process. The point sublime could only be reached momentarily and provisionally, before it in turn became the starting point of a new dialectic. It comes as no surprise, given the dialectical structure of surrealist thought, that surrealism when viewed historically should present itself as a series of contradictory elements or stances, a thesis and antithesis at times momentarily resolved. First and foremost in this series, of course, is the opposition of reality to the dream, or of rational to irrational thought. By cultivating the irrational, surrealists sought the absolute but insisted that it was reachable only through the here-and-now. The aim was not to reach a spiritual beyond but to access a heightened form of existence in this world, what Ferdinand Alquié calls “everyday life transfigured” (13). This means that in terms of creative production, the values of imagination and antirationalism were offset by an almost scientific attention to the details of the material world.

Further contradictions appear as we try to make sense of the original French surrealist movement and the ideas that energized it. Surrealism is simultaneously traditional and ultramodern, pessimistic and optimistic, destructive and constructive.2 These contradictions lead the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato to characterize surrealism (with tongue in cheek) as “that odd admixture of dialectical materialism and Lautréamont, of fourth dimension and clairvoyance, of madhouse and proletariat” (79). The key point I wish to make here is that the dichotomous and unresolved nature of surrealist thought was precisely what allowed it to survive over time and to reinvent itself in cultural contexts vastly different from that of its origins. The “outright contradiction” at the heart of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, says Michael Benedikt, was “as productive to the growth of Surrealism beyond its early years as any deliberate allowance for variation” (xvii). Roger Shattuck emphasizes the important role of these unresolved antinomies when he suggests that “the excitement of the surrealist object or work is its attempt, not to obliterate or climb higher than the big contradictions, but to stand firmly upon them as the surest ground” (“Introduction” 22). This excitement—embracing both devoted enthusiasm and bitter vituperation—established surrealism’s place as the latecomer but also the late-stayer among avant-garde movements.

Defining Features of Surrealist Thought

By the late twentieth century, the adjective “surreal” had settled itself in English parlance as a general name for the odd, the unexpected, or the absurd. Surrealism’s founders, however, had in mind something much more specific, and any study of the movement and its sequelae must address itself to these original intentions. The following pages present the key tenets of surrealist thought as it developed in France in the 1920s and 1930s, which will serve as a foundation for a more extended look at Latin American surrealist literature.

Surrealism was originally conceived not as a literary or artistic school, much less a set of techniques or a mere style. It was rather a mode of thought that was meant to subvert all conventional modes of thought and even to change the nature of thought itself. The most sustained effort at explaining surrealism conceptually is Ferdinand Alquié’s The Philosophy of Surrealism, first published in French in 1955. Alquié observes that surrealism “involves an authentic theory of love, of life, of the imagination, of the relations between man and the world” (2). For him, “all this supposes a philosophy,” an assumption that allows Alquié to reconcile his admiration for Breton—the movement’s “intellectual and reflective consciousness”—with his admiration for Plato, Descartes, and Kant (2, 4). The Philosophy of Surrealism provides coherent analyses of the surrealist concepts of love, liberty, poetry, revolt, beauty, and the interplay of the imaginary and the real, among others; it also analyzes surrealism’s relationship to literature, to the Western metaphysical tradition (particularly to Descartes, Hegel, and Kant), and to Marxist thought. Interwoven into these concerns are certain consistent notions that make it possible to examine surrealism on a conceptual level. These notions allow us to see in surrealist thought a set of meaningful contradictions or productive tensions.

Alquié openly acknowledges the problem at the heart of his own project (and of any attempt to understand surrealism), which is the very desire to conceptualize surrealism in rational and coherent terms. He presents the problem as a series of questions that set the “surrealist state” against any attempt to explain it: “Will one who has participated in the surrealist state be able to find a different expression for what he has already been given? How will he escape, in order to talk about it, this interpenetration of dream, waking, poetry, madness, whose fusing announces, promises, troubles, but does not allow knowing? Will every step toward clarity not be abstraction and betrayal?” (109; emphasis added). On a certain level, Alquié is pointing here to the problem facing any attempt to make sense of a work of literature or art, to express its “meaning” in terms other than those of the work itself. There is in surrealism—which is a set of principles but also a praxis—an immediacy of experience that resists codification, something that does not “allow knowing.” And yet, as Alquié insists, there is also in surrealism an aspiration to reason, which is, significantly, “a new reason in which man as a whole may find his image again” (110). This very aspiration to reason justifies an examination of surrealism as a philosophy, provided that we keep in mind its character as both a mode of thought and a practice of life.

In the first surrealist manifesto, Breton formulates a dictionary definition that reads, “SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Manifestoes 26). Surrealism’s ideal of revealing the inner workings of the psyche characterizes it as a state of mind, an attitude toward existence: this is why Walter Benjamin speaks of the early surrealists as “a closely knit circle of people pushing the ‘poetic life’ to the utmost limits of possibility” (178). Historically, the emphasis on seeking a poetic existence—as opposed to simply writing poetry—was no doubt rooted in the crisis in European thought represented by the First World War, a crisis that led to a radical expansion of the role of the writer or artist in interpreting and transforming the world. In fact, surrealism conceived as an attitude toward life or actitud vital would become one of the strongest features of its creative appropriation by Latin American writers.

In response to the debacle of the Great War, the surrealists proposed a total revolt against reason and rational discourse, which they saw as largely responsible for the bankrupt state of the Western world. Speaking at Yale University in 1942, with Europe sunk deeply into the Second World War, Breton asks, “What is the narrow ‘reason’ that is being taught if this reason must, from life to life, give way to the unreason of wars?” (Free Rein 55). In a similar vein, logic is characterized disdainfully by the surrealist writer Pierre Mabille as “that obliging servant [who] proposes false certainties and false solutions” (6). Especially in its later developments, this deliberate unfastening from reason led in some cases to what Balakian calls “a high dose of mysticism” (48), a feature that differentiates surrealist thought from psychoanalysis and that draws it closer to certain other modes of the irrational such as occultism or spiritism still in vogue in the early twentieth century.

Liberated mental activity and the revolt against the strictures of rational thought put the attentive mind in touch with le merveilleux. “The marvelous,” a crucial concept that is defined only obliquely by Breton, refers to dream imagery, to various forms of revelation, or to unusual ways of perceiving quotidian reality. (In the latter sense, it is related to James Joyce’s notion of epiphany.) The ongoing discovery of the marvelous was the only aesthetic principal to which the surrealists unfailingly adhered. Mabille stresses the notion that the marvelous is accessible to all with the pithy phrase “the marvelous is everywhere” (14), and Breton defines the surrealist aesthetic by asserting that “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful” (Manifestoes 14). If the smooth surface of normally perceived reality can be broken by the eruption of the marvelous, the surrealist’s task is either to instigate that rupture or simply to witness and perhaps record it. In keeping with this task, Breton frames the descriptions of his travels in the West Indies and Mexico in terms of le merveilleux. It is important to note here that the surrealist perception of the marvelous as an inherent quality of Latin American reality will inform and complicate the relationship of local writers to their own geographies and cultures.

Beyond the dream poetics that draws the unexpected out of the unconscious mind, the marvelous is intimately related to le hasard objectif or “objective chance”: the notion that the objective world can produce unexpected revelations as it interacts with the human psyche. Projected desire, in other words, can “create” an object in the material world. This line of thinking produced both the characteristic surrealist image in poetry and the surrealist object in painting, photography, and sculpture. The surrealists walked the streets of Paris prepared for random encounters, or they carried out daily routines in a receptive state of mind, always poised to identify that moment in which an exterior event corresponded exactly to an interior illumination. This expectation is the basis of Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) and of Breton’s most famous work, Nadja. Both texts are semiautobiographical narratives that explore the psychic ramifications of events that in themselves may appear unremarkable. Almost from the moment it appeared in 1928, Nadja became required reading for several generations of Latin Americans.

Breton’s brand of surrealism gradually shifted away from the “scientific” pursuit of psychic knowledge toward more esoteric strains of thought that identified the marvelous with the magical or the sacred. Studies of comparative religion such as those carried out by Mircea Eliade contributed to a revaluation of non-Western approaches to spirituality. The sacred, in this context, was conceptualized not in orthodox religious terms (most of the original surrealists were agnostics or atheists), but in terms of the numinous, a notion popularized by Rudolf Otto’s seminal work The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (1917). Like le merveilleux, the concept of the sacred is intimately tied to the principal of objective chance: the transcendent reveals itself to the alert mind at unexpected moments, always from within the here-and-now. The surrealists insisted on this grounding of the numinous in the ordinary, banal, or even morbid details of everyday existence.

The association of the marvelous with the sacred was further bolstered by the broad dissemination of works by early twentieth-century anthropologists such as James Frazer, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, as well as by Karl Jung’s studies of myth and the collective unconscious. Breton is clearly speaking in Jungian terms when he claims that with surrealism, art becomes a question of “the creation of a collective myth” (Manifestoes 232). From the studies of the early anthropologists, the surrealists and other avant-garde practitioners drew the conclusion that other cultures, particularly those deemed “primitive,” provided an access to the marvelous that was more direct and somehow more authentic than that available within their own European cultures. The “renegade surrealist” Georges Bataille makes the remarkable claim that “the quest for primitive culture represents the principal, most decisive and vital, aspect of the meaning of surrealism, if not its precise definition” (71). For their inspiration on this front, the surrealists researched (often firsthand) the contemporary societies of Oceania, Africa, and the Pacific Northwest. The pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and South America—and to a lesser degree, the contemporary cultures of this region—also provided them with valuable material.3

From a historical perspective, the avant-garde’s fascination with the primitive has proved to be one of its most problematic features, as it often reflects an attitude of disparagement toward the very peoples whose thought it emulated. In Surrealism and the Exotic, Louise Tythacott sums up the situation: “In their radical critique of the dominant world-view of their time, then, the Surrealists deliberately extolled the virtues of peoples whom Western culture had traditionally debased. Yet this uncritical mingling of the primitive, the mad, and the child had dangerous implications, for it was precisely the idea that non-Western peoples resembled children or the insane, and were thereby incapable of self-determination, that had ideologically justified colonialism” (55). As we will see at various points in this study, the discourse of the primitive, the marvelous, the magical, and the mythical will frame to a great degree the approach of the European surrealists to Latin America, and it will in turn prove to be one of the most complicated features of Latin American writers’ appropriation of surrealist thought and practice.

The Surrealist Text and the Primacy of the Image

The principal surrealist technique for delving into the unconscious in order to access the reign of the marvelous was automatic writing, which involved recording with pen or typewriter the uninterrupted flow of what Breton calls “undirected thought” (Free Rein 59). In these exercises there was to be no preconceived subject, and the writer was to proceed as quickly as possible, without the intervention of any critical consciousness. Octavio Paz makes an important distinction when he states that automatic writing was not a recipe for writing poems but “a psychic exercise, a convocation and an invocation meant to open the floodgates of the verbal stream” (“André Breton” 49). In the early stages of the surrealist movement, much of this activity was carried out in groups: one member would record the “spoken dream” of another, or two members would carry on a dialogue in which one would pose a question and the other would answer in a logically unconnected or absurd way. The cadavre exquis or “exquisite cadaver” was another favorite activity, in which participants drew segments of a body (or wrote lines of a poem) on a sheet folded over so that the previous participant could not know what was there: the result was a collective drawing or poem in which unlikely juxtapositions created sparks of humor or new ways of seeing. In short, any method that loosened the rational structures of thought was explored; thus word games, puns, anagrams, aphorisms with double meanings, and other forms of linguistic play were appreciated not for their mere entertainment value—as critics often charged—but as a means of opening doors onto other realms of consciousness. The emphasis on group activity provocatively called into question “the nature of the work of art as it has developed since the Renaissance—the individual creation of unique works” (Bürger 56).

In keeping with the surrealist ideal of reaching and reproducing “pure thought,” in which genre distinctions have no relevance, the surrealist literary text can take the form of poetry, prose, or some combination of the two. Genre boundaries are further blurred in collaborative compositions such as artists’ books or in paintings or collages that include the written word.4 Almost without exception, surrealist texts are brief, acting as documentation of momentary psychic illuminations. This is why, for orthodox surrealism at least, narrative fiction is problematic. Breton wrote disparagingly (and humorously) of the realist novel in his first manifesto: “The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of [the novelists’] notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page” (Manifestoes 7). Although pure psychic automatism can certainly follow a narrative line (as it often does in dreams), the extended linear structure of the traditional novel does not lend itself well to surrealist techniques. The structural demands of realist fiction, furthermore, tend to detract from the full exercise of the imagination that was the goal of surrealist practices.

Unlike some other manifestations of the literary avant-garde, surrealism did not promote experimentation with the shape of the text on the page or with metrical form, sonorous effects, or grammatical structures. The recording of thought itself was the surrealists’ primary purpose, as opposed to experimentation per se. For this reason, says Breton, “very few neologisms show up, and…this continual flow brought about neither syntactic dismemberment nor disintegration of vocabulary” (Manifestoes 299). The surprising effects produced by many automatic texts arise not from broken syntax but from free association, in which words or phrases are strung together without obvious logical connection. Alternatively, segments of otherwise intelligible description or narrative are interrupted by images or phrases that seem out of place, disrupting the reader’s expectation of meaning. In the words of Michael Riffaterre, “Automatism opens wide the associative lock: whereas controlled writing aims for the one appropriate word, subordinates inappropriate words to a context in which they can be assimilated, and favors semantic and stylistic harmony and a unity of tone going from word to word, automatic writing by contrast replaces a word with its satellites and tonal unity with continuous transcoding” (232).

Eschewing morphological or syntactical experiments, the su...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Contexts and Contours
• Part II: The Emergence of Surrealism in Latin American Literature, 1928—1950
• Part III: A Surrealism of One’s Own, 1950—1980
• Conclusion: “Like a River”
• Notes
• Works Cited