Breton and Dalí—The Utopian Eros in Exile

Breton and DalÃ-—The Utopian Eros in Exile Haim Finkelstein I INTEND TO TRACE two diverging trajectories of love in Surrealist thought—Breton's and Dali's—culminating, at least within the limits I have set up for myself in this essay, in the years of exile in the New World. My paper focuses not so much on the "erotique du Surréalisme" or the Surrealist Eros in general, but more on the Utopian Eros; in other words, the expression of Utopian craving, and indeed, the Utopian rhetoric adopted by both Breton and Dali in their endeavor to evoke the role of Eros within the general movement for the emancipation of man. The crux of the problems underlying the political and philosophical course of Surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s lay in the role of the individual creative artist within that general movement for the emancipation of man, especially with regard to its more material or practical aspects. The Surrealists, after all, were artists and writers, and the means adopted by them to bring about the liberation of man were quite naturally directed toward the sphere of "interpretation" and of artistic or poetic expression. Breton was well aware of the difficulties posed by these conflicting aims. The dilemma of innovative writers and artists, as he defined it in 1935 in Position politique du surréalisme, was that "either they must give up interpreting and expressing the world whose secrets each finds within himself and himself alone ... or they must give up collaborating on the practical plan of action for changing this world."1 Breton suggested a dialectical conciliation of these contraries, predicting that the "poet to come will surmount the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between action and dream."2 The visionary passage in Les Vases communicants—published in 1932—in which this statement is found, however Utopian in tone, also points to the practical program proposed by Breton for conciliating action and dream, art and revolution . This program combined an "objective consciousness of realities, " together with an "unconscious, immediate action of the internal on the external" (147). This implies, to begin with, exposing art and poetry to the realities underlying moral and revolutionary thought, and, conversely , introducing art and poetry into life as privileged expressions of revolt against the rules of bourgeois morality and as the links uniting the world of everyday reality with that of what the Surrealists referred to as the 76 Winter 1996 Finkelstein "merveilleux." In this endeavor, the notion of Eros played a primary role. "We shall reduce art to its simplest expression, which is love," asserted Breton in 1924 in Poisson soluble (Manifestoes 63). More than ten years later, in L'Amour fou, he described love similarly as the ' 'bearer of the greatest hopes that have been translated into art for Centuries ."3 This connection between love and art is of paramount importance to Surrealist aesthetics, since Breton and his fellow Surrealists placed love-desire ("désir") at the core of their Utopian vision. Man must be able to place his faith and his hope, not only in the Revolution, but also in love, Breton argued in the Second Manifesto (Manifestoes 180). Love is the "supreme edification of man," and the "site of ideal occultation of all thought" (181). In answering an inquiry concerning this hope, Breton also noted that the idea of love is the only one capable of reconciling man with the idea of life—indeed, with the world (180). And, thus, it is the liberation of desire that offers hope of changing life and transforming the world. These ideas formed a common thread in Breton's writings in the course of the 1920s, gaining momentum toward the mid19308 . In L'Amour fou, Breton had come to view love as the "greatest supplier of solutions" and as the locus of the fusion of these solutions (42), and—further—as the generator of the supreme synthesis of the objective and the subjective—that is, of objective phenomena and subjective concerns of the individual—a synthesis underlying the Surrealist concept of art and life alike. A synthesis, I should add, which underlies the central Surrealist concept of "Le hasard objectif" or objective chance...