Cavalier History of Surrealism, A

will massacre the priests themselves by way of an Amen The bases of a practical approach to religion were laid down in L’Action immédiate by René Magritte, E.L.T Mesens, Paul A Cavalier History of Nougé, Louis Scutenaire and André Souris: Surrealism We are convinced that what has been done to op- pose religion up to now has been virtually without effect and that new means of action must be envis- aged. Raoul Vaneigem At the present time the Surrealists are the people best fitted to undertake this task. So as not tolose any time, we must aim for the head: the outra- geous history of religions should be made known to all, the lives of young priests should be made un- bearable, and all sects and organizations of the Sal- vation Army or of the Evangelical variety should be discredited by means of every kind of mockery our imagination can devise. Think how exhilarat- ing it would be if we could persuade the better part of our youth to mount a well prepared and sys- tematic campaign of disruption of church services, baptisms, communions, funerals and so on. Mean- while roadside crosses might usefully be replaced by images promoting erotic love or poetically eu- logizing the natural surroundings, particularly if these happen to be grim. In an article published in Intervention surréaliste (1934) which went scandalously unheeded, Pierre Yoyotte set the tone for a debate that ought by rights to have sparked action of the broadest scope: The Communists have always officially evinced 1977 an extremely unintelligent suspicion with respect 44 The struggle against Christianity, for instance, by now aban- doned by Bolshevism, suffered not a little from this miscon- ceived modesty. Apart from the anodyne imagery of Clovis Trouille, and Max Ernst’s Virgin spanking the infant Jesus with her halo, Surrealist painting eschewed the theme altogether. Responding to an attempt to annex him (by means, no doubt, of one of those miracles for which the Christians are so renowned), Artaud offered the following unambiguous and definitive answer: ”I shit on the Christian virtues andon whatever it is that does duty for them among the buddhas or the lamas” (Histoire entre la groume et Dieu [History between Grousing and God]). Ever faithful to his photograph in La Révolution Surréaliste, which bore the caption ”Our Contributor Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest”, Péret did much to rescue modern poetry from its tinkliness, and reendow words with the promise of action, when he wrote such lines as these, from ”Le Cardinal Mercier est mort”: Cardinal Mercier mounted on a policeman you looked the other day like a dustbin spilling over with communion wafers Cardinal Mercier you stink of god as the stable stinks of dung and as dung stinks of Jesus Or these, from ”La loi Paul Boncour” [The Paul Boncour Law]: Men who crush senators like dog turds looking each other straight in the eye will laugh like mountains will force the priests to kill the last generals with their crosses and then using the flag 43 the drama of every day alienation as a cosmic tragedy of the mind. In 1924, though, Surrealism was nowhere near that point. Its survey of suicide also addressed the question of life. To the possibility of death were quickly attached all the possibilities Contents of freedom and all the freedoms of the possible. As Breton put it, Author’s Note ..................... 5 It is remarkable how these replies, be they subtle, 1. History and Surrealism ............... 5 literary or derisive, all seem so arid; why is it that The Crisis of Culture .............. 5 no human resonance is detectable in them? To kill Dada and Culture in Question . 12 oneself – has no one weighed the fury and experi- The Break from Dada . 14 ence, the disgust and passion, that are contained The Specificity of Surrealism . 20 in this phrase? In the Shadow of the Communist Party . 23 The Break with the So-Called Communist Party 29 Surrealism thus recognized the mark of the old world and its Post-War Years . 35 oppressive structures in the inhumanity of survival. Though it 2. Changing Life .................... 37 may have displayed a singular lack of discernment with regard The Refusal of Survival . 37 to the ramifications of commodity fetishism, it must still be Fragments of a Project of Human Emancipation 52 given credit for having so very rarely failed to measure up (as Knowledge of the Human and its Experimental Breton was wont to say) to the revolutionary ethic of freedom. Investigation . 58 The Surrealists’ denunciation of oppression was well-nigh con- Freud and Automatic Writing . 59 tinual, and the violence of their tone cannot help but arouse The Underworld of Dreams and Paresthaesias 63 our sympathy. 3. Transforming the World . 70 The fact remains that these young people, who oughtby Revolutionary Ideology . 70 rights to have turned themselves into theorists and practition- An Informal Organization . 78 ers of the revolution of everyday life, were content to be mere 4. Promoting the Image as Object . 83 artists thereof, waging a war of mere harassment against bour- Language and its Subversion . 83 geois society as though it fell to the Communist Party alone to The Savage Eye and the Civilization of the Image 98 mount the main offensive. It thus came about that targets of 5. Converting to Mysticism . 105 great moment were chosen without any deep conviction that Reconsecration . 105 they ought to be designated as spheres of oppression towards An Anti-Christian Ecumenism . 123 which the proletariat’s anger should be directed; indeed many 6. Now . 127 a flaming brand hurled by the Surrealists amounted tolittle Translator’s Acknowledgments . 129 more than pyrotechnics. 42 3 That is why the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste is re- plete with press clippings concerning suicide. In the survey conducted in that issue on the question of why people kill themselves, Artaud’s response remains exemplary: I suffer frightfully from life. There is no state Ican- not attain. And without a doubt I have been dead for a long time already – I have already commit- ted suicide. I have, as it were, been suicided. But what would you think of a suicide before the fact – a suicide that made you redirect your steps, but to somewhere beyond being, not towards death. Artaud’s path was already quite clear. Through a nihilism that Dada never attained, though it had sought it as a basis on which to reconstruct the self, life, and social organization, Artaud chose a return to the dissolution of the self in a spiritual totality. The Surrealism of the years after the Second World War would adopt a comparable stance, returning in this way to the movement’s starting point, and even transcending it, but it nevertheless avoided the lucidity and the drama lived out by Artaud. Very few Surrealists would ever apprehend their own alienation with Artaud’s courage and awareness: ”I am unhappy like a man who has lost the best part of himself.” Very few would face up so directly to their own fragmented state: ”I no longer want to be one of the deluded. Being dead, others are not separated from themselves. They continue to circle around their own corpses. As for me, I am not dead, but I am separated from myself.” For Artaud, in 1924, the hope of a classless society, the hope of a coming reign of freedom, so passionately entertained by Surrealism, had already been dashed. Later, when the unmask- ing of Stalinism cast a dark cloud over these aspirations in the hearts of Breton and his friends, Surrealism embraced Artaud’s conclusion in an intellectual way, and resolved like him to live 41 Dada spirit outlived itself as an empty verbal form; Surrealism Author’s Note surreptitiously endowed that form with another content. All the same, the melancholy of everyday life was the stirrup Commissioned in 1970 by a French publisher who planned to that enabled Surrealism to take its wild ride through the world issue a series intended for high-school pupils, this Histoire dés- of dreams. Contrary to the prognostications of not a few Stal- involte du surréalisme was written in a couple of weeks under inist thinkers, the movement was not destined to serve simply the pressure of a contractual deadline. The fact that the origi- as a trampoline for escapism and mysticism. On the contrary, nal bearer of the name chosen as a pseudonym, “Jules-François it became that focus of despair whence all new hope dérives, Dupuis”, was the janitor of the building where Lautréamont even if the road taken was the cultural one. died, and a witness to his death certificate, should be a clear Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché, two great witnesses to enough sign that this book is not one of those that are particu- mal de vivre, were soon to die. The first put out to sea one larly dear to my heart; it was merely a diversion. stormy evening on the Gulf of Mexico; the second, who had When the original publisher’s projected series was aban- written from the front that it was ”tiresome to die so young”, doned, the manuscript was returned to me. It then languished killed himself in Nantes no sooner than the War was over. Soon for some years at the house of a friend, who in 1976 showed after there would be Jacques Rigaut and Raymond Roussel and, it to a young publisher of her acquaintance. As a result it among the Surrealists, René Crevel. Like Artaud, Crevel had was published a year later (Nonville: Paul Vermont).

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