Andre Breton (1896-1966) is generally credited with the founding of Surrealism in 1919. Many also consider him the founder of Dada in 1915. Just as it was for millions of his fellow citizens, the First World War entirely disrupted his life. He was a medical student at its outbreak but spent the war as an orderly in a military mental hospital. Here he met Sigmund Freud, and used his techniques on some patients. Though Breton claimed that the war did not affect the evolution of human thought towards Surrealism, it is likely that the experience affected him powerfully.  

After the war he became an art dealer and in 1924, after experimenting with automatic writing and dream imagery, published the famous ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ along with a short surrealist novel ‘Soluble Fish’. In the Manifesto he says that: 

‘Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. It can also be an organiser, if ever, as the result of a less intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything!’(1). 

Breton wrote a small number of surrealist poems. Most of his work was in art criticism and novels. In ‘The Immaculate Conception (1930)’ he simulates the thought patterns of mania, general paralysis and dementia praecox (schizophrenia). His best known novel is Nadja (1928). 

Here is his poem ‘Less Time’: 

Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything,
there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and some
others; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I've
kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for
if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the
re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don't keep a
reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no
one passes (underline passes). You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same. May I introduce Madam
Madam? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't
know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the towns have been
replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A, return to B,
change at X? Yes, of course I'll change at X. Provided I don't miss the connection with boredom!
There we are: boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful the parallels are under God's
perpendicular.

 

Breton declared that ‘nothing but the marvellous is beautiful’; and thought war an ‘incredible stupidity’ that resulted from the exploitative capitalist system. He was a Communist and a Stalinist, and founded the ‘Federation de’l’Art Revolutionnaire Independent’ with Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938. Surrealist philosophy could not associate itself for long with these political systems. Breton lived through two world wars and much of the cold war, and died believing man had perhaps regressed in his time, despite the best efforts of the Surrealist project for the mental liberation of humankind. 

Breton said of his early works that ‘Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity.’ 

Consider: had any strange dreams lately? You might like to write a few down, and use them to compose your own surrealist poem!

 

Gertrude Stein 

Stein (1874-1946) was a wealthy American doctor and art dealer whose house on the side of Venice’s Grand Canal is today a famous museum and gallery. She had some poetry of a surrealist nature herself, but I get the impression it was tolerated because of her wealth rather than any particular skill. Indeed, the critic Wiliam Rose Benet wrote that Stein 'majored in literary ventriloquism' (4):

A Mounted Umbrella 

What was the use of not leaving it there where it would hang what was the use if there was no chance of ever seeing it come there and show that it was handsome and right in the way it showed it. The lesson is to learn that it does show it, that it shows it and that nothing, that there is nothing, that there is no more to do about it and just so much more is there plenty of reason for making an exchange. 

 

One American visitor from this period, Joseph Stella, has left this sardonic account of Saturday night at the Rue de Fleurus: 

Somehow in a little side street in Montparnasse there was a family that had acquired some early work of Matisse and Picasso. The lady of the house was an immense woman carcass, austerely dressed in black. Enthroned on the sofa in the middle of the room where the pictures were hanging, with the forceful solemnity of a Sibylla, she was examining pitiless all newcomers, assuming a high and distant pose(2).

 

One of America's most prominent literary critics, Marjorie Perloff, has written extensively about Gertrude Stein, whom she sees as a pivotal language poet for her work dissecting the vagaries of language and communication,  that predates the surrrealist movement (5,6). The Nobel lauraete Samuel Beckett was also a fan.

Perloff writes (6, p76) 'For her, verbal configurations are set up precisely to manifest the arbitrariness of discourse, the impossibility of arriving at 'the meaning' even as countless possible meanings present themselves to our attention.  Again, on p77 she acknowledges that 'Skeptical readers will object...arguing that [her] texts [like Susie Abado] are unnecessarily obscure, unreadable, and boring, and that Stein fails to communicate a coherent meaning to the reader. The line between sense and nonsense is, of course, a  narrow one. Remove all vestiges of reference and the text collapses into a series of empty sounds.'

 

Consider: comparing the work of Breton and Stein. Who was the most revolutionary writer? How does the dissection of language relate to WW1? To medicine?

 

Psychoanalysis and Surrealism 

These excerpts are from Kevin Brophy's work (3), and concern Breton's Nadja

‘For Surrealism in 1928, when Nadja was published, psychoanalysis had re-shaped discourse on the individual as well as notions of creativity. The unconscious now convulsively intrudes into actions, words, illnesses, and art. After psychoanalysis the ‘I’ is always (at least) doubled- the self one knows stands beside the self one can only witness and marvel at- or interpret. These two selves are the same but not the same. Between them there is a strange transfiguration. Each is like a dream of the other.’

‘For Surrealism psychoanalysis must be a disabling and threatening discourse because its therapeutic aim is to bring the unconscious back under the control of an ego; psychoanalysis characterises artistic activity as neurotic and socially conservative; it is aimed at replacing art, or making art redundant. It is at the same time the ally of Surrealism in exposing and undermining art that seeks ultimate sanity and moral closure.’ 

W A Osborne 

It is recorded that ‘In November 1915, Professor W. A. Osborne of the University of Melbourne lectured on the new concept of the vitamins’. He was professor of clinical pathology, and wrote a modest book of poems entitled ‘The Laboratory and Other Poems’, published in 1907. The last word on the many art movements active during his life belongs to him: 

The Symbolist 

I sometimes think the rose is red,

I sometimes think it’s green;

I sometimes think the cauliflower

Is the finest thing I’ve seen.

 

I sometimes think the world is round,

I sometimes think it’s flat;

I sometimes think the symbolist

Is talking through his hat. (7)

 

If you look through some paintings by Rene Magritte, you might find an extra dimension to this poem...not to say that Osborne intended it!

 

References and further reading 

(1) Breton A (1924) The First Manifesto of Surrealism 

(2) Carpenter H (1987) Geniuses Together: American writers in Paris in the 1920’s  Unwin    p31-2 

(3) Brophy K (1998) Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing  MUP   Ch 4 

(4) Benet WR (1941) The Dust Which Is God  Knopff p451

(5) Perloff M (1996) Wittgenstein's ladder: Poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary. Princeton. 

(6) Perloff M (1981 ) The poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage Ch3 Princeton

(7) Osborne W A (1907) The Laboratory and Other Poems