Back to Breton

Back to Breton Julien Gracq IDO NOT BELIEVE that Breton would have truly welcomed the celebration of the centennial of his birth. Even though he may, in his own manner, have had something to do with the sacred, he had little interest in official, commemorative rites. Forever at odds with History, Surrealism, from the beginning, was never friendly with Memory, that impediment to a total receptivity of what could be, the blank page where revelation alone can be inscribed with all its power of renewal. Breton was utterly prospective, tracking what was emerging, rarely inclined to recapitulate; he was not a back-seat rider. Come to think of it, was he actually born in 1896? What he had in common with Malraux (and this was about all) was that he appeared relatively untouched by his childhood , which he more or less rejected as shabby, failed, too immature. He was really born around 1916: that is when things began to happen for him, towards the end of his adolescence, and the years immediately following. Rather than revisit a writer who today is canonical, or the soul of a movement now sufficiently dissected, I would like to reconsider Surrealism 's history of change, all the happenings of its time's history, its ups and downs, the jolts endured by a century badly batted around, all of which he refracted in his own way. For, while he may not have loved history (which gave birth to him), history sometimes (but not always) returned him the favor with severity, and acted as a strange type of counterpoint to him. Surrealism grew, without a doubt, out of the abhorrence left behind by the nightmare of World War I, an abhorrence which spread quickly backwards towards an entire literature that set the stage for it, or at very least, did not preclude it (cf. The "Barres trial"). From this literature the new movement gained its powerful initial impetus, which it owed largely to resentment, an exacerbated need to confront the world of the trenches and of the previous one that had let it prevail. Therein it found the echo faint but deep which it stirred from its beginnings. The involvement, not only in the revolutionary camp, which seemed plausible, but, more precisely , in the sector run by the Third International—which would eventually problematize its lines of demarcation—came later, though rather Vol. XXXVI, No. 4 5 L'Esprit Créateur quickly, in 1935: we know that this in part resulted from Breton's reading of Trotsky's book on Lenin. The Riff War, practically unknown today, but which was for certain Leftists at the time the equivalent of the Algerian War around 1960, also played a role. Surrealism's already bitter and noisy quarrels with communism, which were inevitable once it was put "at the Service of the Revolution," became even more complex in the Thirties, starting with the Nazis' rapid rise to power, the explosive irrationality of which appealed at first to some members of the group (Dali's expulsion is linked to this episode). Then, after 1935, and especially the Spanish Civil War, the exasperation of the conflict between the fascist and anti-fascist camps (the latter of which was firmly lead by the USSR), slowly made Breton's political position almost untenable , by presenting a direct threat of a generalized war, torn as he was between his visceral (and, for him, congenital) refusal of a new 1914-18 War, and the rejection of passivity in the face of Nazism. One might well interpret Breton's departure for Mexico in 1938 for his meeting with Trotsky as an attempt to surmount an unanswerable dilemma, through an escape into Utopian politics, to which is also linked a middle of the road position, or should we say, the position "in limbo" that for a short while he tried to assume: "I want neither your war, nor your peace!" When I first met Breton in Nantes a few days before the War, the movement he had sparked was obviously not in good shape. The tree had lost many of its leaves in the bitter political storm: Aragon was already far away, DaIi as well, the break...