From Surrealism to Popular Art: Paul Deharme’s Radio Theory

"The surrealist doctrine and my idea of a new form of expression, proper to the wireless, are opposed. To dream is no longer at the origin of a work; it is its goal. Half-sleep is no longer used as a creative state of mind, but as a receptive one. The automatic play of associations, the author's impregnation with subconscious material made of images that are created in the preconscious is not necessarily his domain anymore, but the public's. Now the rotten apples and crystal balls belong to them!"

["La doctrine surréaliste et ma conception d'un moyen d'expression nouveau, propre à la T.S.F., s'opposent. Le rêve n'est plus l'origine de l'oeuvre, il en est le but. Le demi-sommeil n'est plus utilisé comme état créateur, mais comme état récepteur. Le jeu automatique des associations, l'imprégnation par le matériel subconscient des images créées dans le préconscient n'incombe plus obligatoirement à l'auteur, mais au public. À lui les reinettes pourries et les boules de cristal!"]¹

This temperamental statement on the priority of radio over surrealism appears in a small book, titled Pour un art radiophonique (1930) and written by the French radio pioneer Paul Deharme in an attempt to prove to himself and his readers that indeed, surrealism and radio could be distinguished from each other. In principle, radio broadcasting seemed to Deharme a surrealist medium par excellence. Similar to the surrealist automatic writing, it made its audience listen to the dictate of an unknown voice; also, it allowed for instantaneous communication between audiences all over the world that resembled the quasi telepathic communication achieved by the first members of the movement in their creative sessions. How could the surrealists not be taken in by a medium that seemed to promise liberation from analytical "written" reasoning and grant access to a mass audience that had been out of reach until then? And yet, surrealist radio broadcasting would remain an experiment, created by a team of three men, Paul Deharme, Robert Desnos, and Alejo Carpentier, who had taken their distance with André Breton and his group. Together they would, during the 1930s, put in place an experimental radio practice that aimed at being better than surrealism itself. In the following I trace the uneasy dialogue of those first radio professionals with surrealism and demonstrate what was at stake when "radiophonic" art and surrealism coalesced.

The first twenty years of radio broadcasting had been characterized by the rapid global expansion of the new medium; public as well as private radio stations experimented with formats and purposes of radio programming.² However, those who were in charge of the first radio programs rarely had professional training as writers and inversely, those who wrote about radio would not necessarily know how to make it. Even though avant-garde artists and writers all over the world became interested early on in radio as a new communication medium, few of them bothered to learn about the technology itself. The idea and potential of radio, however, fascinated many, including the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, who wrote an essay on "The Radio of the Future," and the Italian Futurists, who from 1914 on wrote about radio as a way of liberating speech.³ In Spain, the medium was promoted by Ramón Gómez de la Serna's radio chronicles and greguerías, and in Mexico the estridentista group, as Rubén Gallo tells us, became so fascinated with radio that they named their first journal Irradiador.⁴ In England, Ezra Pound wrote a set of radio operas in the 1930s for the BBC. As Sarah Wilson has shown, listening to the radio made Gertrude Stein reconsider the importance of a participatory audience in the new public sphere; however, this new preoccupation of hers was reflected in her writing, not in activities related to radio as such.⁵

The French surrealists presented a more complicated picture. If, according to Christopher Schiff, early French surrealist theater had experimented with sound, noise, and radio, André Breton...