Constituting Surrealism (original) (raw)

Constituting Surrealism

Oisin Wall

Presented at the London Conference in Critical Thought, Birkbeck College
(June 29, 2012)

When we think of surrealism most of our minds will immediately produce a handful of stock images, and yet surrealism was far more than bright colours and melting clocks. This paper will engage with one aspect of the vast critical project that Surrealism set for itself. That is The Trial. Throughout the 1920’s and 30’s the idea of the trial recurs almost constantly in the works of the Surrealists. In this paper I will begin at the constituent moment of Surrealism, the trial of Maurice Barres. I will then show how this trial establishes the crime which would be the basis of all their later conceptual trials.

Although Andre Breton did not announce the birth of Surrealism until 1924, when he published The Surrealist manifesto, the movement had been in the making since the first world war. In Vienna in 1916 at a club called the Cabaret Voltaire a group of artists, led by Tristan Tzara, conceived of Dada. A movement who’s avowed purpose was absolute negation. In its early days it mainly opposed the ongoing European war but it rapidly branched out and sought to negate all aspects of culture. After demobilisation, at the end of the first world war, Breton and the other soon to be Surrealists returned to Paris. Here he began his correspondence with Tzara, the leader of the Dada movement, and soon he established a Paris Dada group. Between 1918 and 1922 the Paris Dada group preformed various actions from poetry readings and exhibitions to, what we might now call, happenings.

One of these Dada happenings is extremely important to this paper, and indeed to our entire understanding of surrealism as a movement. In 1922 the Paris dada group staged a trial of Maurice Barres. Now, Barres was a novelist that many of the surrealists had admired in their youth. Late 1880’s and early 1890’s Barres had published a trilogy of novels known as The Cult of the Self. At this point Barres was a hero of the avant-garde, politically his sympathies lay with the anarcho-syndicalists and he radically rejected conventional morality. However by 1918 he was, in the eyes of the Surrealists, or Dadaists as they were at the time, an apostate. During the war he became a hard-line nationalist and a chauvinist. He toured the country giving lectures to soldiers about duty and the beauty of dying in battle.

So in 1922 the tried him, in absentia, for ‘crimes against the security of the spirit’. The charge itself hints at the coming ideas of surrealism. Two years later Breton would write again about the ‘security of the spirit’ in the first Manifesto of surrealism. In the manifesto he argued that error was not the opposite of security of the spirit. Instead he tells us it is the enslavement of the imagination, in persuit of individual happiness which endangers this security.

This Dada trial took on the affectations of the bourgeois court. Breton wore robes and sat in judgement. In the absence of Barres a dummy sat in the dock. A prosecution, a defence and a jury were appointed. Perhaps most importantly of all witnesses were called, including Benjamin Peret in a German uniform playing the unknown soldier.

The most important of these witnesses, from the point of view of this paper, was the arch-dadaist Tristan Tzara. In his testimony he declared: ‘I have no confidence in justice, even if this justice is made by Dada." And went on to compare the court and people lake Barres saying that they are both "a bunch of bastards… greater or lesser bastards is of no importance’.

In contrast at the end of the proceedings Breton delivered his judgment saying that: ‘Dada, judging that the time has come to endow its negative spirit with executive powers, and determined above all to exercise these powers against those who threaten its dictatorship, is beginning, as of this date, to take appropriate measures’.

We can see an obvious superficial split here. Tzara declaring that he has no confidence in justice, in a situation where Breton stands as judge was a challenge to Breton’s domination of French Dada. Moreover his calling the court a bunch of Bastards was more than mere profanity. In essence he, as the father of Dada, was disinheriting the Paris Dada group.

However this was more than a superficial spat, deep-rooted ideological differences were at stake. In that exchange between Breton and Tzara we can see the constituent moment of surrealism. Through its constructive action, the trial is the negation of the absolute negation espoused by the Dada movement. Thus the Paris group, although they continued to call themselves Dada for a while afterwards, fundamentally differentiated themselves from the rest of the Dada movement, they marked themselves out as different by seeing that they needed to engage in critical and constructive action if they were going to affect the world. The group that would soon become known as the

surrealists constituted itself by rejecting and being rejected by Dada. So this is how surrealism came into the world in the midst of a trial.

It always amazes me that the idea of the trial is not discussed more often in relation to surrealism. It recurs almost constantly in their writings. Often as fictional events in their novels and stories; at other times it they discus real trials, as in the case of The Red Front affair when Louis Aragon, one of the leading surrealists, was tried for sedition after he published a poem called Red Front which contained the line ‘Kill the cops’; and in 1934 the Surrealists tried Dali for crimes against Surrealism and for being a Hitlerite.

This paper will look at one recurring idea of a trial, that is the trial of reality. Surrealism was founded on the idea that the enlightenment conception of reality as governed by rational laws forced people to deny or repress a vital part of their mode of experience. The surrealists rejected the idea that cause and effect was the only important form of relationship between objects. Instead sought to explore the vast sprawling nexus of psychic connections that we perceive in every object. As an example, if we take the classic surrealist image of the Persistence of Memory. The image began when Dali encountered a slice of Camembert melting in the sun and yet, apart from the manifest content of the painting - which is a barren landscape with a sea and mountains in the background and a cuboid, a bare tree, a distorted face and some melting clocks in the foreground - in this painting people have seen death, the malleability of time, the monstrousness of the self and comments on female sexuality. The surrealists project was an attempt to fully explore these inter-connective nexes, in other words to discover how one gets from Camembert to death, in order to establish an integrated and authentic mode of experience. They argued that our insistence on understanding reality according to rationalist principles greatly limited our experience of the world and our actions towards it. Later, in the 1930’s they would go on to argue that, in fact, capitalist oppression was perpetuated through these limitations of experience. Thus they argued that to be a revolutionary one must be willing to completely overturn ones mode of experience.

One of the methods that they proposed to do this was through the trial of reality. This was a vast critical project which sought to draw into question the nature of our collective and individual experience and ultimately to overturn certain aspects of it. Their method was to cross-examine reality through their exploration of different modes of experience. To this end they researched, and constructed, exotic cultures; they visited

mystics and experimented with fortune telling; they wrote automatic texts as a method of mining their subconscious for uncanny connections or ideas; they simulated madness; they cultivated paranoia and, most famously, they recorded their dreams. In this section I will look at three of these methods - fortune telling, dream recording and simulated madness - and I will explain how they used each method to cross-examine reality.

In the Letter to Seers, written in 1925, Breton explains the significance of fortune telling. In this letter he praises fortune tellers not for predicting the future but for breaking apart the rational predictability of the future. In the letter he wrote that

Abstract

Everything that is revealed to me about the future falls in a marvellous field which is nothing other than that of absolute possibility, and develops there at all costs. Whether or not reality takes it upon itself to subsequently verify the assertions I receive from you, I shall not consider this arithmetical proof to be of prime importance, as should all those who had not tried the same operation themselves… I have faith in everything you have told me. I would not try to resist the temptation that you have aroused in me, let’s say to wait for myself in China, for anything in the world. For thanks to you I am already there.

In other words, for Breton predictions of the future are not useful insofar as they show what will happen, they are useful because they provide us with a host of contradictory possibilities and temptations not driven by a rational consideration of available facts but by a mystical and arbitrary revelation. In fact Breton ascribed no importance to the future simply by virtue of its existence. The future is only of importance at all, he tells us, because it fractures the certainty of the present. For the surrealists this sense of uncertainty is a basic condition of existence and as fundamental to the formation of genius, which we have deprived ourselves of through our insistence on rational predictions.

Perhaps the best known of the surrealist attempts to cross-examine reality is their work with dreams. In this they followed Freud’s theory of dream psychology quite closely. They used dreams in two ways. The first use, much like the use they made of automatic writing, was to explore their subconscious and mine it for disruptive images or strange connections that they might make. This is probably where they are closest to Freud. As in his exploration of the dream-work they took dreams to be cryptic manifestations of unconscious or repressed thoughts and so they began to explore their dreams as such. This exploration took two interesting directions the first was that it provided an interesting set of images. This is perhaps best visible in the works of Dali,

who claims to have faithfully painted many of his dreamscapes and Miro who repeatedly used symbols and shapes that emerged in his dreams. The second direction that this exploration took was that they used dreams to uncover unconscious and repressed thoughts which they then sought to act upon. So we can see that in this sense they used dreams both as a method of exploring their own conception of reality, even those aspects hidden to them by themselves. Moreover they used the images and information that they found in their dreams to create artworks that sought to from uncanny feelings in the viewer and through this encourage them to undertake a similar examination of their self and their reality.

The second use they found for dreams was as an exploration of an alternate or anti rationality which provided an entirely new way to understand reality. According to Freud, dreams operate according to a different rationality. Rather than showing that an object or event caused a particular reaction the dream not only substitutes dream objects for the objects or events in question but it also substitutes different forms of relation, as in proximity in space or time for instance, for the causal relationship. Thus the surrealists held up the logic or dreams as another way of experiencing reality, every bit as valid as societies prevailing rationality.

The final mode that the surrealists used to cross-examine reality which I will discuss today is their deployment of the idea of madness. They did this in order to disrupt their own conception of reality and that of those around them. In their writings they identified a dialectical relation between individual madness and society. They Describe how madness breaks through the conceptual boundaries that we impose on the world. For the surrealists madness makes man like god. He is free to transcend the physical. The madman can wear the sky as armour, rivers as scarves and he can form entire worlds in his hands. Madness liberates man from sexual repression, and indeed all social repression. This disruption of the normal flow of the person’s consciousness forces them to interrogate and revaluate all of the things they once took for granted about the world.

Once psychically liberated from these constraints the madman begins to act on his newly liberated desires and inevitably, because they are no longer limited by internalized mental restrictions, these acts are socially transgressive. The mad people in surrealist literature abandon their loveless marriages, they steal, they take drugs and they travel to distant countries where people reject European morality. This disrupts normal social life, not just for the madman himself, but also for those around him. In fact the surrealists

argue, and in many ways they prefigure a lot of the work of Foucault and the post-war anti-psychiatrists, they argue that this mad behavior is so disruptive that society produced disciplinary psychiatry in order to negate the disruption and to allow society proceed uninterrupted. In a host of different books they discuss the psychiatric double-bind which simultaneously invalidates the madman’s questioning of reality and insists that he is guilty of his social transgressions.

It is, perhaps, worth noting that, while people like Louis Aragon and Rene Crevel embraced the surrealist experimentation with mad modes of thought, Breton, who had been a psychiatrist himself and so was far more aware of the dangers posed by both madness and disciplinary psychiatry, limited most of his experiments to exploring mad modes of expression. For instance in The Immaculate Conception he and Paul Eluard wrote many of the chapters in the voice of different types of madness, such as acute mania and dementia praecox- but they stressed that they were only experimenting with the voice and language of madness, and not with the mental state. So we can see that some of the surrealists they are more interested in disrupting others and trying to force them to examine their reality.

Finally, at the beginning of the paper I mentioned that the Dada trial of Maurice Barres established the crime which would be at the heart of all the surrealist trial, including the trial of reality. So to conclude this paper I would like to draw your attention to this crime which is, in my view the most important, parallel between the two trials. That is that both crimes which both Barres and reality are accused of is that of faithlessness to their own possibilities. In the case of Barres they called it security of the spirit, which Breton later implied meant that he had enslaved his imagination for petty gains, and in the same text he went on to say that the imagination is important because it provides possibilities and potential - It provides an unpredictable future and the ecstasy of genius - and by enslaving it he condemns himself to mediocrity. While the trial of reality revolved around the Surrealist belief that reality had been limited by rationality and by cross examining it in the ways I have just described they hoped to free reality from its prison of logic, or else to abolish it in favour of surreality. In both trials we see that the surrealists believed that Barres’ imagination and reality, respectively, were possessed of almost infinite potential which they had betrayed by allowing themselves be tamed and bound by convention.

Thus the contention of this paper is that in all of the trials that the surrealists conducted, against people, against groups, ideas and even against reality itself, the

Constituting Surrealism

greatest crime, indeed the only crime, that they could conceive of was infidelity to immeasurable possibility.