Manifesto of Surrealism

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fra­gile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that invet­er­ate dreamer, daily more dis­con­tent with his des­tiny, has trouble assess­ing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his non­chal­ance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely mod­est: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unim­pressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a new­born babe and, as for the approval of his con­science, I con­fess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a cer­tain lucid­ity, all he can do is turn back toward his child­hood which, how­ever his guides and ment­ors may have botched it, still strikes him as some­how charm­ing. There, the absence of any known restric­tions allows him the per­spect­ive of sev­eral lives lived at once; this illu­sion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only inter­ested in the fleet­ing, the extreme facil­ity of everything. Chil­dren set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst mater­ial con­di­tions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

But it is true that we would not dare ven­ture so far, it is not merely a ques­tion of dis­tance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, aban­dons a por­tion of the ter­rain to be conquered. This ima­gin­a­tion which knows no bounds is hence­forth allowed to be exer­cised only in strict accord­ance with the laws of an arbit­rary util­ity; it is incap­able of assum­ing this inferior role for very long and, in the vicin­ity of the twen­ti­eth year, gen­er­ally prefers to aban­don man to his luster­less fate.

Though he may later try to pull him­self together on occa­sion, hav­ing felt that he is los­ing by slow degrees all reason for liv­ing, incap­able as he has become of being able to rise to some excep­tional situ­ation such as love, he will hardly suc­ceed. This is because he hence­forth belongs body and soul to an imper­at­ive prac­tical neces­sity which demands his con­stant atten­tion. None of his ges­tures will be expans­ive, none of his ideas gen­er­ous or far-​reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or ima­gined will be seen only as they relate to a wel­ter of sim­ilar events, events in which he has not par­ti­cip­ated, abort­ive events. What am I say­ing: he will judge them in rela­tion­ship to one of these events whose con­sequences are more reas­sur­ing than the oth­ers. On no account will he view them as his salvation.

Beloved ima­gin­a­tion, what I most like in you is your unspar­ing quality.

There remains mad­ness, “the mad­ness that one locks up,” as it has aptly been described. That mad­ness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incar­cer­a­tion to a tiny num­ber of leg­ally rep­re­hens­ible acts and that, were it not for these acts their free­dom (or what we see as their free­dom) would not be threatened. I am will­ing to admit that they are, to some degree, vic­tims of their ima­gin­a­tion, in that it induces them not to pay atten­tion to cer­tain rules – out­side of which the spe­cies feels threatened – which we are all sup­posed to know and respect. But their pro­found indif­fer­ence to the way in which we judge them, and even to the vari­ous pun­ish­ments meted out to them, allows us to sup­pose that they derive a great deal of com­fort and con­sol­a­tion from their ima­gin­a­tion, that they enjoy their mad­ness suf­fi­ciently to endure the thought that its valid­ity does not extend bey­ond them­selves. And, indeed, hal­lu­cin­a­tions, illu­sions, etc., are not a source of tri­fling pleas­ure. The best con­trolled sen­su­al­ity par­takes of it, and I know that there are many even­ings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, dur­ing the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curi­ous mis­deeds. I could spend my whole life pry­ing loose the secrets of the insane. These people are hon­est to a fault, and their naiv­eté has no peer but my own. Chris­topher Colum­bus should have set out to dis­cover Amer­ica with a boat­load of mad­men. And note how this mad­ness has taken shape, and endured.

It is not the fear of mad­ness which will oblige us to leave the flag of ima­gin­a­tion furled.

The case against the real­istic atti­tude demands to be examined, fol­low­ing the case against the mater­i­al­istic atti­tude. The lat­ter, more poetic in fact than the former, admit­tedly implies on the part of man a kind of mon­strous pride which, admit­tedly, is mon­strous, but not a new and more com­plete decay. It should above all be viewed as a wel­come reac­tion against cer­tain ridicu­lous tend­en­cies of spir­itu­al­ism. Finally, it is not incom­pat­ible with a cer­tain nobil­ity of thought.

By con­trast, the real­istic atti­tude, inspired by pos­it­iv­ism, from Saint Thomas Aqui­nas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hos­tile to any intel­lec­tual or moral advance­ment. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull con­ceit. It is this atti­tude which today gives birth to these ridicu­lous books, these insult­ing plays. It con­stantly feeds on and derives strength from the news­pa­pers and stul­ti­fies both sci­ence and art by assidu­ously flat­ter­ing the low­est of tastes; clar­ity bor­der­ing on stu­pid­ity, a dog’s life. The activ­ity of the best minds feels the effects of it; the law of the low­est com­mon denom­in­ator finally pre­vails upon them as it does upon the oth­ers. An amus­ing res­ult of this state of affairs, in lit­er­at­ure for example, is the gen­er­ous sup­ply of nov­els. Each per­son adds his per­sonal little “obser­va­tion” to the whole. As a cleans­ing anti­dote to all this, M. Paul Valéry recently sug­ges­ted that an antho­logy be com­piled in which the largest pos­sible num­ber of open­ing pas­sages from nov­els be offered; the res­ult­ing insan­ity, he pre­dicted, would be a source of con­sid­er­able edi­fic­a­tion. The most fam­ous authors would be included. Such a though reflects great credit on Paul Valéry who, some time ago, speak­ing of nov­els, assured me that, so far as he was con­cerned, he would con­tinue to refrain from writ­ing: “The Mar­quise went out at five.” But has he kept his word?

If the purely inform­at­ive style, of which the sen­tence just quoted is a prime example, is vir­tu­ally the rule rather than the excep­tion in the novel form, it is because, in all fair­ness, the author’s ambi­tion is severely cir­cum­scribed. The cir­cum­stan­tial, need­lessly spe­cific nature of each of their nota­tions leads me to believe that they are per­pet­rat­ing a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slight­est vacil­la­tions: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him dur­ing the sum­mer? So many ques­tions resolved once and for all, as chance dir­ects; the only dis­cre­tion­ary power left me is to close the book, which I am care­ful to do some­where in the vicin­ity of the first page. And the descrip­tions! There is noth­ing to which their vacu­ity can be com­pared; they are noth­ing but so many super­im­posed images taken from some stock cata­logue, which the author util­izes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the oppor­tun­ity to slip me his post­cards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yel­low wall­pa­per: there were gerani­ums in the win­dows, which were covered with muslin cur­tains; the set­ting sun cast a harsh light over the entire set­ting…. There was noth­ing spe­cial about the room. The fur­niture, of yel­low wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table oppos­ite the sofa, a dress­ing table and a mir­ror set against the pier­glass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etch­ings of no value por­tray­ing some Ger­man girls with birds in their hands – such were the fur­nish­ings. (Dosto­evski, Crime and Punishment)

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is inter­ested in occupy­ing itself with such mat­ters, even fleet­ingly. It may be argued that this school-​boy descrip­tion has its place, and that at this junc­ture of the book the author has his reas­ons for bur­den­ing me. Nev­er­the­less he is wast­ing his time, for I refuse to go into his room. Oth­ers’ lazi­ness or fatigue does not interest me. I have too unstable a notion of the con­tinu­ity of life to equate or com­pare my moments of depres­sion or weak­ness with my best moments. When one ceases to feel, I am of the opin­ion one should keep quiet. And I would like it under­stood that I am not accus­ing or con­demning lack of ori­gin­al­ity as such. I am only say­ing that I do not take par­tic­u­lar note of the empty moments of my life, that it may be unworthy for any man to crys­tal­lize those which seem to him to be so. I shall, with your per­mis­sion, ignore the descrip­tion of that room, and many more like it.

Not so fast, there; I’m get­ting into the area of psy­cho­logy, a sub­ject about which I shall be care­ful not to joke.

The author attacks a char­ac­ter and, this being settled upon, parades his hero to and fro across the world. No mat­ter what hap­pens, this hero, whose actions and reac­tions are admir­ably pre­dict­able, is com­pelled not to thwart or upset — even though he looks as though he is — the cal­cu­la­tions of which he is the object. The cur­rents of life can appear to lift him up, roll him over, cast him down, he will still belong to this readymade human type. A simple game of chess which doesn’t interest me in the least — man, who­ever he may be, being for me a mediocre oppon­ent. What I can­not bear are those wretched dis­cus­sions rel­at­ive to such and such a move, since win­ning or los­ing is not in ques­tion. And if the game is not worth the candle, if object­ive reason does a fright­ful job — as indeed it does — of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fit­ting and proper to avoid all con­tact with these cat­egor­ies? “Diversity is so vast that every dif­fer­ent tone of voice, every step, cough, every wipe of the nose, every sneeze.…”* (Pas­cal.) If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the oth­ers, why do you want me to make a pal­at­able grape? Our brains are dulled by the incur­able mania of want­ing to make the unknown known, clas­si­fi­able. The desire for ana­lysis wins out over the sen­ti­ments.** (Bar­rès, Proust.) The res­ult is state­ments of undue length whose per­suas­ive power is attrib­ut­able solely to their strange­ness and which impress the reader only by the abstract qual­ity of their vocab­u­lary, which moreover is ill-​defined. If the gen­eral ideas that philo­sophy has thus far come up with as top­ics of dis­cus­sion revealed by their very nature their defin­it­ive incur­sion into a broader or more gen­eral area. I would be the first to greet the news with joy. But up till now it has been noth­ing but idle repartee; the flashes of wit and other niceties vie in con­ceal­ing from us the true thought in search of itself, instead of con­cen­trat­ing on obtain­ing suc­cesses. It seems to me that every act is its own jus­ti­fic­a­tion, at least for the per­son who has been cap­able of com­mit­ting it, that it is endowed with a radi­ant power which the slight­est gloss is cer­tain to dimin­ish. Because of this gloss, it even in a sense ceases to hap­pen. It gains noth­ing to be thus dis­tin­guished. Stendhal’s her­oes are sub­ject to the com­ments and apprais­als — apprais­als which are more or less suc­cess­ful — made by that author, which add not one whit to their glory. Where we really find them again is at the point at which Stendahl has lost them.

We are still liv­ing under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driv­ing at. But in this day and age logical meth­ods are applic­able only to solv­ing prob­lems of sec­ond­ary interest. The abso­lute ration­al­ism that is still in vogue allows us to con­sider only facts relat­ing dir­ectly to our exper­i­ence. Logical ends, on the con­trary, escape us. It is point­less to add that exper­i­ence itself has found itself increas­ingly cir­cum­scribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more dif­fi­cult to make it emerge. It too leans for sup­port on what is most imme­di­ately expedi­ent, and it is pro­tec­ted by the sen­tinels of com­mon sense. Under the pre­tense of civil­iz­a­tion and pro­gress, we have man­aged to ban­ish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed super­sti­tion, or fancy; for­bid­den is any kind of search for truth which is not in con­form­ance with accep­ted prac­tices. It was, appar­ently, by pure chance that a part of our men­tal world which we pre­ten­ded not to be con­cerned with any longer — and, in my opin­ion by far the most import­ant part — has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the dis­cov­er­ies of Sig­mund Freud. On the basis of these dis­cov­er­ies a cur­rent of opin­ion is finally form­ing by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his invest­ig­a­tion much fur­ther, author­ized as he will hence­forth be not to con­fine him­self solely to the most sum­mary real­it­ies. The ima­gin­a­tion is per­haps on the point of reas­sert­ing itself, of reclaim­ing its rights. If the depths of our mind con­tain within it strange forces cap­able of aug­ment­ing those on the sur­face, or of waging a vic­tori­ous battle against them, there is every reason to seize them — first to seize them, then, if need be, to sub­mit them to the con­trol of our reason. The ana­lysts them­selves have everything to gain by it. But it is worth not­ing that no means has been des­ig­nated a pri­ori for car­ry­ing out this under­tak­ing, that until fur­ther notice it can be con­strued to be the province of poets as well as schol­ars, and that its suc­cess is not depend­ent upon the more or less capri­cious paths that will be followed.

Freud very rightly brought his crit­ical fac­ulties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inad­miss­ible that this con­sid­er­able por­tion of psychic activ­ity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solu­tion of con­tinu­ity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion only the time of pure dream­ing, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of real­ity, or, to be more pre­cisely lim­it­ing, the moments of wak­ing) has still today been so grossly neg­lected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordin­ary observer lends so much more cre­dence and attaches so much more import­ance to wak­ing events than to those occur­ring in dreams. It is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory, and in its nor­mal state memory takes pleas­ure in weakly retra­cing for him the cir­cum­stances of the dream, in strip­ping it of any real import­ance, and in dis­miss­ing the only determ­in­ant from the point where he thinks he has left it a few hours before: this firm hope, this con­cern. He is under the impres­sion of con­tinu­ing some­thing that is worth­while. Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere par­en­thesis, as is the night. And, like the night, dreams gen­er­ally con­trib­ute little to fur­ther­ing our under­stand­ing. This curi­ous state of affairs seems to me to call for cer­tain reflections:

1) Within the lim­its where they oper­ate (or are thought to oper­ate) dreams give every evid­ence of being con­tinu­ous and show signs of organ­iz­a­tion. Memory alone arrog­ates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the trans­itions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself. By the same token, at any given moment we have only a dis­tinct notion of real­it­ies, the coordin­a­tion of which is a ques­tion of will.* (Account must be taken of the depth of the dream. For the most part I retain only what I can glean from its most super­fi­cial lay­ers. What I most enjoy con­tem­plat­ing about a dream is everything that sinks back below the sur­face in a wak­ing state, everything I have for­got­ten about my activ­it­ies in the course of the pre­ced­ing day, dark foliage, stu­pid branches. In “real­ity,” like­wise, I prefer to fall.) What is worth not­ing is that noth­ing allows us to pre­sup­pose a greater dis­sip­a­tion of the ele­ments of which the dream is con­sti­tuted. I am sorry to have to speak about it accord­ing to a for­mula which in prin­ciple excludes the dream. When will we have sleep­ing logi­cians, sleep­ing philo­soph­ers? I would like to sleep, in order to sur­render myself to the dream­ers, the way I sur­render myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop impos­ing, in this realm, the con­scious rhythm of my thought. Per­haps my dream last night fol­lows that of the night before, and will be con­tin­ued the next night, with an exem­plary strict­ness. It’s quite pos­sible, as the say­ing goes. And since it has not been proved in the slight­est that, in doing so, the “real­ity” with which I am kept busy con­tin­ues to exist in the state of dream, that it does not sink back down into the imme­morial, why should I not grant to dreams what I occa­sion­ally refuse real­ity, that is, this value of cer­tainty in itself which, in its own time, is not open to my repu­di­ation? Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of con­scious­ness which is daily more acute? Can’t the dream also be used in solv­ing the fun­da­mental ques­tions of life? Are these ques­tions the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do these ques­tions already exist? Is the dream any less restrict­ive or pun­it­ive than the rest? I am grow­ing old and, more than that real­ity to which I believe I sub­ject myself, it is per­haps the dream, the dif­fer­ence with which I treat the dream, which makes me grow old.

2) Let me come back again to the wak­ing state. I have no choice but to con­sider it a phe­nomenon of inter­fer­ence. Not only does the mind dis­play, in this state, a strange tend­ency to lose its bear­ings (as evid­enced by the slips and mis­takes the secrets of which are just begin­ning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is func­tion­ing nor­mally, it really responds to any­thing but the sug­ges­tions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I com­mend it. How­ever con­di­tioned it may be, its bal­ance is rel­at­ive. It scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it con­fines itself to veri­fy­ing that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made an impres­sion on it. What impres­sion it would be hard pressed to say, by which it reveals the degree of its sub­jectiv­ity, and noth­ing more. This idea, this woman, dis­turb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isol­ate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beau­ti­ful pre­cip­it­ate it can be, that it is. When all else fails, it then calls upon chance, a divin­ity even more obscure than the oth­ers to whom it ascribes all its aber­ra­tions. Who can say to me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes in the eye of that woman is not pre­cisely what links it to its dream, binds it to those fun­da­mental facts which, through its own fault, it has lost? And if things were dif­fer­ent, what might it be cap­able of? I would like to provide it with the key to this corridor.

3) The mind of the man who dreams is fully sat­is­fied by what hap­pens to him. The agon­iz­ing ques­tion of pos­sib­il­ity is no longer per­tin­ent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart’s con­tent. And if you should die, are you not cer­tain of reawak­ing among the dead? Let your­self be car­ried along, events will not tol­er­ate your inter­fer­ence. You are name­less. The ease of everything is priceless.

What reason, I ask, a reason so much vaster than the other, makes dreams seem so nat­ural and allows me to wel­come unre­servedly a wel­ter of epis­odes so strange that they could con­found me now as I write? And yet I can believe my eyes, my ears; this great day has arrived, this beast has spoken.

If man’s awak­ing is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is because he has been led to make for him­self too impov­er­ished a notion of atonement.

4) From the moment when it is sub­jec­ted to a meth­od­ical exam­in­a­tion, when, by means yet to be determ­ined, we suc­ceed in record­ing the con­tents of dreams in their entirety (and that pre­sup­poses a dis­cip­line of memory span­ning gen­er­a­tions; but let us non­ethe­less begin by not­ing the most sali­ent facts), when its graph will expand with unpar­alleled volume and reg­u­lar­ity, we may hope that the mys­ter­ies which really are not will give way to the great Mys­tery. I believe in the future res­ol­u­tion of these two states, dream and real­ity, which are seem­ingly so con­tra­dict­ory, into a kind of abso­lute real­ity, a sur­real­ity, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this sur­real­ity that I am going, cer­tain not to find it but too unmind­ful of my death not to cal­cu­late to some slight degree the joys of its possession.

A story is told accord­ing to which Saint-​Pol-​Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice pos­ted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every even­ing before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.

A great deal more could be said, but in passing I merely wanted to touch upon a sub­ject which in itself would require a very long and much more detailed dis­cus­sion; I shall come back to it. At this junc­ture, my inten­tion was merely to mark a point by not­ing the hate of the mar­velous which rages in cer­tain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the mar­velous is always beau­ti­ful, any­thing mar­velous is beau­ti­ful, in fact only the mar­velous is beautiful.

In the realm of lit­er­at­ure, only the mar­velous is cap­able of fec­und­at­ing works which belong to an inferior cat­egory such as the novel, and gen­er­ally speak­ing, any­thing that involves storytelling. Lewis’ The Monk is an admir­able proof of this. It is infused through­out with the pres­ence of the mar­velous. Long before the author has freed his main char­ac­ters from all tem­poral con­straints, one feels them ready to act with an unpre­ced­en­ted pride. This pas­sion for etern­ity with which they are con­stantly stirred lends an unfor­get­table intens­ity to their tor­ments, and to mine. I mean that this book, from begin­ning to end, and in the purest way ima­gin­able, exer­cises an exalt­ing effect only upon that part of the mind which aspires to leave the earth and that, stripped of an insig­ni­fic­ant part of its plot, which belongs to the period in which it was writ­ten, it con­sti­tutes a par­agon of pre­ci­sion and inno­cent grandeur.* (What is admir­able about the fant­astic is that there is no longer any­thing fant­astic: there is only the real.) It seems to me none bet­ter has been done, and that the char­ac­ter of Math­ilda in par­tic­u­lar is the most mov­ing cre­ation that one can credit to this fig­ur­at­ive fash­ion in lit­er­at­ure. She is less a char­ac­ter than a con­tinual tempta­tion. And if a char­ac­ter is not a tempta­tion, what is he? An extreme tempta­tion, she. In The Monk the “noth­ing is impossible for him who dares try” gives it its full, con­vin­cing meas­ure. Ghosts play a logical role in the book, since the crit­ical mind does not seize them in order to dis­pute them. Ambrosio’s pun­ish­ment is like­wise treated in a legit­im­ate man­ner, since it is finally accep­ted by the crit­ical fac­ulty as a nat­ural dénouement.

It may seem arbit­rary on my part, when dis­cuss­ing the mar­velous, to choose this model, from which both the Nor­dic lit­er­at­ures and Ori­ental lit­er­at­ures have bor­rowed time and time again, not to men­tion the reli­gious lit­er­at­ures of every coun­try. This is because most of the examples which these lit­er­at­ures could have fur­nished me with are tain­ted by puer­il­ity, for the simple reason that they are addressed to chil­dren. At an early age chil­dren are weaned on the mar­velous, and later on they fail to retain a suf­fi­cient vir­gin­ity of mind to thor­oughly enjoy fairy tales. No mat­ter how charm­ing they may be, a grown man would think he were revert­ing to child­hood by nour­ish­ing him­self on fairy tales, and I am the first to admit that all such tales are not suit­able for him. The fab­ric of ador­able improb­ab­il­it­ies must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the age of wait­ing for this kind of spider.… But the fac­ulties do not change rad­ic­ally. Fear, the attrac­tion of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extra­vag­ant are all devices which we can always call upon without fear of decep­tion. There are fairy tales to be writ­ten for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.

The mar­velous is not the same in every period of his­tory: it par­takes in some obscure way of a sort of gen­eral rev­el­a­tion only the frag­ments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the mod­ern man­nequin, or any other sym­bol cap­able of affect­ing the human sens­ib­il­ity for a period of time. In these areas which make us smile, there is still por­trayed the incur­able human rest­less­ness, and this is why I take them into con­sid­er­a­tion and why I judge them insep­ar­able from cer­tain pro­duc­tions of genius which are, more than the oth­ers, pain­fully afflic­ted by them. They are Villon’s gib­bets, Racine’s Greeks, Baudelaire’s couches. They coin­cide with an eclipse of the taste I am made to endure, I whose notion of taste is the image of a big spot. Amid the bad taste of my time I strive to go fur­ther than any­one else. It would have been I, had I lived in 1820, I “the bleed­ing nun,” I who would not have spared this cun­ning and banal “let us con­ceal” whereof the par­od­ical Cuisin speaks, it would have been I, I who would have reveled in the enorm­ous meta­phors, as he says, all phases of the “sil­ver disk.” For today I think of a castle, half of which is not neces­sar­ily in ruins; this castle belongs to me, I pic­ture it in a rus­tic set­ting, not far from Paris. The out­build­ings are too numer­ous to men­tion, and, as for the interior, it has been fright­fully restored, in such man­ner as to leave noth­ing to be desired from the view­point of com­fort. Auto­mo­biles are parked before the door, con­cealed by the shade of trees. A few of my friends are liv­ing here as per­man­ent guests: there is Louis Aragon leav­ing; he only has time enough to say hello; Phil­ippe Sou­pault gets up with the stars, and Paul Elu­ard, our great Elu­ard, has not yet come home. There are Robert Des­nos and Roger Vit­rac out on the grounds por­ing over an ancient edict on duelling; Georges Auric, Jean Paul­han; Max Mor­ise, who rows so well, and Ben­jamin Péret, busy with his equa­tions with birds; and Joseph Delteil; and Jean Car­rive; and Georges Lim­bour, and Georges Lim­bours (there is a whole hedge of Georges Lim­bours); and Mar­cel Noll; there is T. Fraen­kel wav­ing to us from his cap­tive bal­loon, Georges Malk­ine, Ant­onin Artaud, Fran­cis Gérard, Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boif­fard, and after them Jacques Baron and his brother, hand­some and cor­dial, and so many oth­ers besides, and gor­geous women, I might add. Noth­ing is too good for these young men, their wishes are, as to wealth, so many com­mands. Fran­cis Pic­a­bia comes to pay us a call, and last week, in the hall of mir­rors, we received a cer­tain Mar­cel Duch­amp whom we had not hitherto known. Picasso goes hunt­ing in the neigh­bor­hood. The spirit of demor­al­iz­a­tion has elec­ted dom­i­cile in the castle, and it is with it we have to deal every time it is a ques­tion of con­tact with our fel­low­men, but the doors are always open, and one does not begin by “thank­ing” every­one, you know. Moreover, the solitude is vast, we don’t often run into one another. And any­way, isn’t what mat­ters that we be the mas­ters of ourselves, the mas­ters of women, and of love too?

I shall be proved guilty of poetic dis­hon­esty: every­one will go parad­ing about say­ing that I live on the rue Fon­taine and that he will have none of the water that flows there­from. To be sure! But is he cer­tain that this castle into which I cor­di­ally invite him is an image? What if this castle really exis­ted! My guests are there to prove it does; their whim is the lumin­ous road that leads to it. We really live by our fantas­ies when we give free reign to them. And how could what one might do bother the other, there, safely sheltered from the sen­ti­mental pur­suit and at the tryst­ing place of opportunities?

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 organ­izer, 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! May you only take the trouble to prac­tice poetry. Is it not incum­bent upon us, who are already liv­ing off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for fur­ther inquiry?

It mat­ters not whether there is a cer­tain dis­pro­por­tion between this defense and the illus­tra­tion that will fol­low it. It was a ques­tion of going back to the sources of poetic ima­gin­a­tion and, what is more, of remain­ing there. Not that I pre­tend to have done so. It requires a great deal of forti­tude to try to set up one’s abode in these dis­tant regions where everything seems at first to be so awk­ward and dif­fi­cult, all the more so if one wants to try to take someone there. Besides, one is never sure of really being there. If one is going to all that trouble, one might as well stop off some­where else. Be that as it may, the fact is that the way to these regions is clearly marked, and that to attain the true goal is now merely a mat­ter of the trav­el­ers’ abil­ity to endure.

We are all more or less aware of the road traveled. I was care­ful to relate, in the course of a study of the case of Robert Des­nos entitled ENTRÉE DES MÉDIUMS,* (See Les Pas per­dus, pub­lished by N.R.F.) that I had been led to” con­cen­trate my atten­tion on the more or less par­tial sen­tences which, when one is quite alone and on the verge of fall­ing asleep, become per­cept­ible for the mind without its being pos­sible to dis­cover what pro­voked them.” I had then just attemp­ted the poetic adven­ture with the min­imum of risks, that is, my aspir­a­tions were the same as they are today but I trus­ted in the slow­ness of for­mu­la­tion to keep me from use­less con­tacts, con­tacts of which I com­pletely dis­ap­proved. This atti­tude involved a mod­esty of thought cer­tain vestiges of which I still retain. At the end of my life, I shall doubt­less man­age to speak with great effort the way people speak, to apo­lo­gize for my voice and my few remain­ing ges­tures. The vir­tue of the spoken word (and the writ­ten word all the more so) seemed to me to derive from the fac­ulty of fore­short­en­ing in a strik­ing man­ner the expos­i­tion (since there was expos­i­tion) of a small num­ber of facts, poetic or other, of which I made myself the sub­stance. I had come to the con­clu­sion that Rim­baud had not pro­ceeded any dif­fer­ently. I was com­pos­ing, with a con­cern for vari­ety that deserved bet­ter, the final poems of Mont de piété, that is, I man­aged to extract from the blank lines of this book an incred­ible advant­age. These lines were the closed eye to the oper­a­tions of thought that I believed I was obliged to keep hid­den from the reader. It was not deceit on my part, but my love of shock­ing the reader. I had the illu­sion of a pos­sible com­pli­city, which I had more and more dif­fi­culty giv­ing up. I had begun to cher­ish words excess­ively for the space they allow around them, for their tan­gen­cies with count­less other words which I did not utter. The poem BLACK FOREST derives pre­cisely from this state of mind. It took me six months to write it, and you may take my word for it that I did not rest a single day. But this stemmed from the opin­ion I had of myself in those days, which was high, please don’t judge me too harshly. I enjoy these stu­pid con­fes­sions. At that point cubist pseudo-​poetry was try­ing to get a foothold, but it had emerged defense­less from Picasso’s brain, and I was thought to be as dull as dish­wa­ter (and still am). I had a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion, moreover, that from the view­point of poetry I was off on the wrong road, but I hedged my bet as best I could, defy­ing lyr­i­cism with sal­vos of defin­i­tions and for­mu­las (the Dada phe­nom­ena were wait­ing in the wings, ready to come on stage) and pre­tend­ing to search for an applic­a­tion of poetry to advert­ising (I went so far as to claim that the world would end, not with a good book but with a beau­ti­ful advert­ise­ment for heaven or for hell).

In those days, a man at least as bor­ing as I, Pierre Reverdy, was writing:

The image is a pure cre­ation of the mind.

It can­not be born from a com­par­ison but from a jux­ta­pos­i­tion of two more or less dis­tant realities.

The more the rela­tion­ship between the two jux­ta­posed real­it­ies is dis­tant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emo­tional power and poetic real­ity…* (Nord-​Sud, March 1918)

These words, how­ever sibyl­line for the unini­ti­ated, were extremely reveal­ing, and I pondered them for a long time. But the image eluded me. Reverdy’s aes­thetic, a com­pletely a pos­teri­ori aes­thetic, led me to mis­take the effects for the causes. It was in the midst of all this that I renounced irre­voc­ably my point of view.

One even­ing, there­fore, before I fell asleep, I per­ceived, so clearly artic­u­lated that it was impossible to change a word, but non­ethe­less removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to me without any appar­ent rela­tion­ship to the events in which, my con­scious­ness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insist­ent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knock­ing at the win­dow. I took curs­ory note of it and pre­pared to move on when its organic char­ac­ter caught my atten­tion. Actu­ally, this phrase aston­ished me: unfor­tu­nately I can­not remem­ber it exactly, but it was some­thing like: “There is a man cut in two by the win­dow,” but there could be no ques­tion of ambi­gu­ity, accom­pan­ied as it was by the faint visual image* (Were I a painter, this visual depic­tion would doubt­less have become more import­ant for me than the other. It was most cer­tainly my pre­vi­ous pre­dis­pos­i­tions which decided the mat­ter. Since that day, I have had occa­sion to con­cen­trate my atten­tion vol­un­tar­ily on sim­ilar appar­i­tions, and I know they are fully as clear as aud­it­ory phe­nom­ena. With a pen­cil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could eas­ily trace their out­lines. Here again it is not a mat­ter of draw­ing, but simply of tra­cing. I could thus depict a tree, a wave, a musical instru­ment, all man­ner of things of which I am presently incap­able of provid­ing even the roughest sketch. I would plunge into it, con­vinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere. And, upon open­ing my eyes, I would get the very strong impres­sion of some­thing “never seen.” The proof of what I am say­ing has been provided many times by Robert Des­nos: to be con­vinced, one has only to leaf through the pages of issue num­ber 36 of Feuilles libres which con­tains sev­eral of his draw­ings (Romeo and Juliet, A Man Died This Morn­ing, etc.) which were taken by this magazine as the draw­ings of a mad­man and pub­lished as such.) of a man walk­ing cut half way up by a win­dow per­pen­dic­u­lar to the axis of his body. Bey­ond the slight­est shadow of a doubt, what I saw was the simple recon­struc­tion in space of a man lean­ing out a win­dow. But this win­dow hav­ing shif­ted with the man, I real­ized that I was deal­ing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incor­por­ate it into my mater­ial for poetic con­struc­tion. No sooner had I gran­ted it this capa­city than it was in fact suc­ceeded by a whole series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which sur­prised me only slightly less and left me with the impres­sion of their being so gra­tu­it­ous that the con­trol I had then exer­cised upon myself seemed to me illus­ory and all I could think of was put­ting an end to the inter­min­able quar­rel raging within me.* (Knut Ham­sum ascribes this sort of rev­el­a­tion to which I had been sub­jec­ted as deriv­ing from hun­ger, and he may not be wrong. (The fact is I did not eat every day dur­ing that period of my life). Most cer­tainly the mani­fest­a­tions that he describes in these terms are clearly the same:

“The fol­low­ing day I awoke at an early hour. It was still dark. My eyes had been open for a long time when I heard the clock in the apart­ment above strike five. I wanted to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t; I was wide awake and a thou­sand thoughts were crowding through my mind.

“Sud­denly a few good frag­ments came to mind, quite suit­able to be used in a rough draft, or seri­al­ized; all of a sud­den I found, quite by chance, beau­ti­ful phrases, phrases such as I had never writ­ten. I repeated them to myself slowly, word by word; they were excel­lent. And there were still more com­ing. I got up and picked up a pen­cil and some paper that were on a table behind my bed. It was as though some vein had burst within me, one word fol­lowed another, found its proper place, adap­ted itself to the situ­ation, scene piled upon scene, the action unfol­ded, one retort after another welled up in my mind, I was enjoy­ing myself immensely. Thoughts came to me so rap­idly and con­tin­ued to flow so abund­antly that I lost a whole host of del­ic­ate details, because my pen­cil could not keep up with them, and yet I went as fast as I could, my hand in con­stant motion, I did not lose a minute. The sen­tences con­tin­ued to well up within me, I was preg­nant with my subject.”

Apol­lin­aire asser­ted that Chirico’s first paint­ings were done under the influ­ence of cenes­thesic dis­orders (migraines, col­ics, etc.).)

Com­pletely occu­pied as I still was with Freud at that time, and famil­iar as I was with his meth­ods of exam­in­a­tion which I had some slight occa­sion to use on some patients dur­ing the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were try­ing to obtain from them, namely, a mono­logue spoken as rap­idly as pos­sible without any inter­ven­tion on the part of the crit­ical fac­ulties, a mono­logue con­sequently unen­cumbered by the slight­est inhib­i­tion and which was, as closely as pos­sible, akin to spoken thought. It had seemed to me, and still does — the way in which the phrase about the man cut in two had come to me is an indic­a­tion of it — that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech, and that thought does not neces­sar­ily defy lan­guage, nor even the fast-​moving pen. It was in this frame of mind that Phil­ippe Sou­pault — to whom I had con­fided these ini­tial con­clu­sions – and I decided to blacken some paper, with a praise­worthy dis­dain for what might res­ult from a lit­er­ary point of view. The ease of exe­cu­tion did the rest. By the end of the first day we were able to read to ourselves some fifty or so pages obtained in this man­ner, and begin to com­pare our res­ults. All in all, Soupault’s pages and mine proved to be remark­ably sim­ilar: the same over­con­struc­tion, short­com­ings of a sim­ilar nature, but also, on both our parts, the illu­sion of an extraordin­ary verve, a great deal of emo­tion, a con­sid­er­able choice of images of a qual­ity such that we would not have been cap­able of pre­par­ing a single one in longhand, a very spe­cial pic­tur­esque qual­ity and, here and there, a strong com­ical effect. The only dif­fer­ence between our two texts seemed to me to derive essen­tially from our respect­ive tem­pers. Soupault’s being less static than mine, and, if he does not mind my offer­ing this one slight cri­ti­cism, from the fact that he had made the error of put­ting a few words by way of titles at the top of cer­tain pages, I sup­pose in a spirit of mys­ti­fic­a­tion. On the other hand, I must give credit where credit is due and say that he con­stantly and vig­or­ously opposed any effort to retouch or cor­rect, how­ever slightly, any pas­sage of this kind which seemed to me unfor­tu­nate. In this he was, to be sure, abso­lutely right.* (I believe more and more in the infal­lib­il­ity of my thought with respect to myself, and this is too fair. Non­ethe­less, with this thought-​writing, where one is at the mercy of the first out­side dis­trac­tion, “ebul­lu­tions” can occur. It would be inex­cus­able for us to pre­tend oth­er­wise. By defin­i­tion, thought is strong, and incap­able of catch­ing itself in error. The blame for these obvi­ous weak­nesses must be placed on sug­ges­tions that come to it from without.) It is, in fact, dif­fi­cult to appre­ci­ate fairly the vari­ous ele­ments present: one may even go so far as to say that it is impossible to appre­ci­ate them at a first read­ing. To you who write, these ele­ments are, on the sur­face, as strange to you as they are to any­one else, and nat­ur­ally you are wary of them. Poet­ic­ally speak­ing, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of imme­di­ate absurdity, the qual­ity of this absurdity, upon closer scru­tiny, being to give way to everything admiss­ible, everything legit­im­ate in the world: the dis­clos­ure of a cer­tain num­ber of prop­er­ties and of facts no less object­ive, in the final ana­lysis, than the others.

In homage to Guil­laume Apol­lin­aire, who had just died and who, on sev­eral occa­sions, seemed to us to have fol­lowed a dis­cip­line of this kind, without how­ever hav­ing sac­ri­ficed to it any mediocre lit­er­ary means, Sou­pault and I bap­tized the new mode of pure expres­sion which we had at our dis­posal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwell­ing any fur­ther on this word and that the mean­ing we gave it ini­tially has gen­er­ally pre­vailed over its Apol­lin­arian sense. To be even fairer, we could prob­ably have taken over the word SUPERNATURALISM employed by Gérard de Nerval in his ded­ic­a­tion to the Filles de feu.* (And also by Thomas Carlyle in Sar­tor Resartus ([Book III] Chapter VIII, “Nat­ural Super­nat­ur­al­ism”), 1833 – 34.) It appears, in fact, that Nerval pos­sessed to a tee the spirit with which we claim a kin­ship, Apol­lin­aire hav­ing pos­sessed, on the con­trary, naught but the let­ter, still imper­fect, of Sur­real­ism, hav­ing shown him­self power­less to give a valid the­or­et­ical idea of it. Here are two pas­sages by Nerval which seem to me to be extremely sig­ni­fic­ant in this respect:

I am going to explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phe­nomenon of which you have spoken a short while ago. There are, as you know, cer­tain storytellers who can­not invent without identi­fy­ing with the char­ac­ters their ima­gin­a­tion has dreamt up. You may recall how con­vin­cingly our old friend Nod­ier used to tell how it had been his mis­for­tune dur­ing the Revolu­tion to be guil­lotined; one became so com­pletely con­vinced of what he was say­ing that one began to won­der how he had man­aged to have his head glued back on.

…And since you have been indis­creet enough to quote one of the son­nets com­posed in this SUPERNATURALISTIC dream-​state, as the Ger­mans would call it, you will have to hear them all. You will find them at the end of the volume. They are hardly any more obscure than Hegel’s meta­phys­ics or Swedenborg’s MEMORABILIA, and would lose their charm if they were explained, if such were pos­sible; at least admit the worth of the expres­sion.…** (See also L’Idéoréalisme by Saint-​Pol-​Roux.)

Those who might dis­pute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very spe­cial sense that we under­stand it are being extremely dis­hon­est, for there can be no doubt that this word had no cur­rency before we came along. There­fore, I am defin­ing it once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic auto­mat­ism in its pure state, by which one pro­poses to express — verbally, by means of the writ­ten word, or in any other man­ner — the actual func­tion­ing of thought. Dic­tated by the thought, in the absence of any con­trol exer­cised by reason, exempt from any aes­thetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philo­sophy. Sur­real­ism is based on the belief in the super­ior real­ity of cer­tain forms of pre­vi­ously neg­lected asso­ci­ations, in the omni­po­tence of dream, in the dis­in­ter­ested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mech­an­isms and to sub­sti­tute itself for them in solv­ing all the prin­cipal prob­lems of life. The fol­low­ing have per­formed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boif­fard, Bre­ton, Car­rive, Crevel, Delteil, Des­nos, Elu­ard, Gérard, Lim­bour, Malk­ine, Mor­ise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Sou­pault, Vitrac.

They seem to be, up to the present time, the only ones, and there would be no ambi­gu­ity about it were it not for the case of Isidore Ducasse, about whom I lack inform­a­tion. And, of course, if one is to judge them only super­fi­cially by their res­ults, a good num­ber of poets could pass for Sur­real­ists, begin­ning with Dante and, in his finer moments, Shakespeare. In the course of the vari­ous attempts I have made to reduce what is, by breach of trust, called genius, I have found noth­ing which in the final ana­lysis can be attrib­uted to any other method than that.

Young’s Nights are Sur­real­ist from one end to the other; unfor­tu­nately it is a priest who is speak­ing, a bad priest no doubt, but a priest nonetheless.

Swift is Sur­real­ist in malice,

Sade is Sur­real­ist in sadism.

Chat­eau­bri­and is Sur­real­ist in exoticism.

Con­stant is Sur­real­ist in politics.

Hugo is Sur­real­ist when he isn’t stupid.

Desbordes-​Valmore is Sur­real­ist in love.

Ber­trand is Sur­real­ist in the past.

Rabbe is Sur­real­ist in death.

Poe is Sur­real­ist in adventure.

Baudelaire is Sur­real­ist in morality.

Rim­baud is Sur­real­ist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.

Mal­larmé is Sur­real­ist when he is confiding.

Jarry is Sur­real­ist in absinthe.

Nou­veau is Sur­real­ist in the kiss.

Saint-​Pol-​Roux is Sur­real­ist in his use of symbols.

Far­gue is Sur­real­ist in the atmosphere.

Vaché is Sur­real­ist in me.

Reverdy is Sur­real­ist at home.

Saint-​Jean-​Perse is Sur­real­ist at a distance.

Rous­sel is Sur­real­ist as a storyteller.

Etc.

I would like to stress the point: they are not always Sur­real­ists, in that I dis­cern in each of them a cer­tain num­ber of pre­con­ceived ideas to which — very naively! — they hold. They hold to them because they had not heard the Sur­real­ist voice, the one that con­tin­ues to preach on the eve of death and above the storms, because they did not want to serve simply to orches­trate the mar­velous score. They were instru­ments too full of pride, and this is why they have not always pro­duced a har­mo­ni­ous sound.* (I could say the same of a num­ber of philo­soph­ers and paint­ers, includ­ing, among the lat­ter, Uccello, from paint­ers of the past, and, in the mod­ern era, Seurat, Gust­ave Mor­eau, Matisse (in “La Musique,” for example), Derain, Picasso, (by far the most pure), Braque, Duch­amp, Pic­a­bia, Chirico (so admir­able for so long), Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and, one so close to us, André Masson.)

But we, who have made no effort what­so­ever to fil­ter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple recept­acles of so many echoes, mod­est record­ing instru­ments who are not mes­mer­ized by the draw­ings we are mak­ing, per­haps we serve an even nobler cause. Thus do we render with integ­rity the “tal­ent” which has been lent to us. You might as well speak of the tal­ent of this plat­inum ruler, this mir­ror, this door, and of the sky, if you like.

We do not have any tal­ent; ask Phil­ippe Soupault:

“Ana­tom­ical products of man­u­fac­ture and low-​income dwell­ings will des­troy the tallest cities.”

Ask Roger Vitrac:

“No sooner had I called forth the marble-​admiral than he turned on his heel like a horse which rears at the sight of the North star and showed me, in the plane of his two-​pointed cocked hat, a region where I was to spend my life.”

Ask Paul Eluard:

“This is an oft-​told tale that I tell, a fam­ous poem that I reread: I am lean­ing against a wall, with my verd­ant ears and my lips burned to a crisp.”

Ask Max Morise:

“The bear of the caves and his friend the bit­tern, the vol-​au-​vent and his valet the wind, the Lord Chan­cel­lor with his Lady, the scare­crow for spar­rows and his accom­plice the spar­row, the test tube and his daugh­ter the needle, this car­ni­vore and his brother the car­ni­val, the sweeper and his monocle, the Mis­sis­sippi and its little dog, the coral and its jug of milk, the Mir­acle and its Good Lord, might just as well go and dis­ap­pear from the sur­face of the sea.”

Ask Joseph Delteil:

“Alas! I believe in the vir­tue of birds. And a feather is all it takes to make me die laughing.”

Ask Louis Aragon:

“Dur­ing a short break in the party, as the play­ers were gath­er­ing around a bowl of flam­ing punch, I asked a tree if it still had its red ribbon.”

And ask me, who was unable to keep myself from writ­ing the ser­pent­ine, dis­tract­ing lines of this preface.

Ask Robert Des­nos, he who, more than any of us, has per­haps got closest to the Sur­real­ist truth, he who, in his still unpub­lished works* (NOUVELLES HÉBRIDES, DÉSORDRE FORMEL, DEUIL POUR DEUIL.) and in the course of the numer­ous exper­i­ments he has been a party to, has fully jus­ti­fied the hope I placed in Sur­real­ism and leads me to believe that a great deal more will still come of it. Des­nos speaks Sur­real­ist at will. His extraordin­ary agil­ity in orally fol­low­ing his thought is worth as much to us as any num­ber of splen­did speeches which are lost, Des­nos hav­ing bet­ter things to do than record them. He reads him­self like an open book, and does noth­ing to retain the pages, which fly away in the windy wake of his life.

---

SECRETS OF THE MAGICAL SURREALIST ART

Writ­ten Sur­real­ist com­pos­i­tion or first and last draft

After you have settled your­self in a place as favor­able as pos­sible to the con­cen­tra­tion of your mind upon itself, have writ­ing mater­i­als brought to you. Put your­self in as pass­ive, or recept­ive, a state of mind as you can. For­get about your genius, your tal­ents, and the tal­ents of every­one else. Keep remind­ing your­self that lit­er­at­ure is one of the sad­dest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any pre­con­ceived sub­ject, fast enough so that you will not remem­ber what you’re writ­ing and be temp­ted to reread what you have writ­ten. The first sen­tence will come spon­tan­eously, so com­pel­ling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sen­tence unknown to our con­scious­ness which is only cry­ing out to be heard. It is some­what of a prob­lem to form an opin­ion about the next sen­tence; it doubt­less par­takes both of our con­scious activ­ity and of the other, if one agrees that the fact of hav­ing writ­ten the first entails a min­imum of per­cep­tion. This should be of no import­ance to you, how­ever; to a large extent, this is what is most inter­est­ing and intriguing about the Sur­real­ist game. The fact still remains that punc­tu­ation no doubt res­ists the abso­lute con­tinu­ity of the flow with which we are con­cerned, although it may seem as neces­sary as the arrange­ment of knots in a vibrat­ing cord. Go on as long as you like. Put your trust in the inex­haust­ible nature of the mur­mur. If silence threatens to settle in if you should ever hap­pen to make a mis­take — a mis­take, per­haps due to care­less­ness — break off without hes­it­a­tion with an overly clear line. Fol­low­ing a word the ori­gin of which seems sus­pi­cious to you, place any let­ter what­so­ever, the let­ter “l” for example, always the let­ter “l,” and bring the arbit­rary back by mak­ing this let­ter the first of the fol­low­ing word.

How not to be bored any longer when with others

This is very dif­fi­cult. Don’t be at home for any­one, and occa­sion­ally, when no one has forced his way in, inter­rupt­ing you in the midst of your Sur­real­ist activ­ity, and you, cross­ing your arms, say: “It doesn’t mat­ter, there are doubt­less bet­ter things to do or not do. Interest in life is indefens­ible Sim­pli­city, what is going on inside me, is still tire­some to me!” or an other revolt­ing banality.

To make speeches

Just prior to the elec­tions, in the first coun­try which deems it worth­while to pro­ceed in this kind of pub­lic expres­sion of opin­ion, have your­self put on the bal­lot. Each of us has within him­self the poten­tial of an orator: mul­ti­colored loin cloths, glass trinkets of words. Through Sur­real­ism he will take des­pair unawares in its poverty. One night, on a stage, he will, by him­self, carve up the eternal heaven, that Peau de l’ours. He will prom­ise so much that any prom­ises he keeps will be a source of won­der and dis­may. In answer to the claims of an entire people he will give a par­tial and ludicrous vote. He will make the bitterest enemies par­take of a secret desire which will blow up the coun­tries. And in this he will suc­ceed simply by allow­ing him­self to be moved by the immense word which dis­solves into pity and revolves in hate. Incap­able of fail­ure, he will play on the vel­vet of all fail­ures. He will be truly elec­ted, and women will love him with an all-​consuming passion.

To write false novels

Who­ever you may be, if the spirit moves you burn a few laurel leaves and, without wish­ing to tend this mea­ger fire, you will begin to write a novel. Sur­real­ism will allow you to: all you have to do is set the needle marked “fair” at “action,” and the rest will fol­low nat­ur­ally. Here are some char­ac­ters rather dif­fer­ent in appear­ance; their names in your hand­writ­ing are a ques­tion of cap­ital let­ters, and they will con­duct them­selves with the same ease with respect to act­ive verbs as does the imper­sonal pro­noun “it” with respect to words such as “is rain­ing,” “is,” “must,” etc. They will com­mand them, so to speak, and wherever obser­va­tion, reflec­tion, and the fac­ulty of gen­er­al­iz­a­tion prove to be of no help to you, you may rest assured that they will credit you with a thou­sand inten­tions you never had. Thus endowed with a tiny num­ber of phys­ical and moral char­ac­ter­ist­ics, these beings who in truth owe you so little will there­after devi­ate not one iota from a cer­tain line of con­duct about which you need not con­cern your­self any fur­ther. Out of this will res­ult a plot more or less clever in appear­ance, jus­ti­fy­ing point by point this mov­ing or com­fort­ing dénoue­ment about which you couldn’t care less. Your false novel will sim­u­late to a mar­velous degree a real novel; you will be rich, and every­one will agree that “you’ve really got a lot of guts,” since it’s also in this region that this some­thing is located.

Of course, by an ana­log­ous method, and provided you ignore what you are review­ing, you can suc­cess­fully devote your­self to false lit­er­ary criticism.

How to catch the eye of a woman you pass in the street

---

Against death

Sur­real­ism will usher you into death, which is a secret soci­ety. It will glove your hand, bury­ing therein the pro­found M with which the word Memory begins. Do not for­get to make proper arrange­ments for your last will and test­a­ment: speak­ing per­son­ally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a mov­ing van. May my friends des­troy every last copy of the print­ing of the Speech con­cern­ing the Modicum of Reality.

---

Lan­guage has been given to man so that he may make Sur­real­ist use of it. To the extent that he is required to make him­self under­stood, he man­ages more or less to express him­self, and by so doing to ful­fill cer­tain func­tions culled from among the most vul­gar. Speak­ing, read­ing a let­ter, present no real prob­lem for him, provided that, in so doing, he does not set him­self a goal above the mean, that is, provided he con­fines him­self to car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion (for the pleas­ure of con­vers­ing) with someone. He is not wor­ried about the words that are going to come, nor about the sen­tence which will fol­low after the sen­tence he is just com­plet­ing. To a very simple ques­tion, he will be cap­able of mak­ing a lightning-​like reply. In the absence of minor tics acquired through con­tact with oth­ers, he can without any ado offer an opin­ion on a lim­ited num­ber of sub­jects; for that he does not need to “count up to ten” before speak­ing or to for­mu­late any­thing whatever ahead of time. Who has been able to con­vince him that this fac­ulty of the first draft will only do him a dis­ser­vice when he makes up his mind to estab­lish more del­ic­ate rela­tion­ships? There is no sub­ject about which he should refuse to talk, to write about pro­lific­ally. All that res­ults from listen­ing to one­self, from read­ing what one has writ­ten, is the sus­pen­sion of the occult, that admir­able help. I am in no hurry to under­stand myself (basta! I shall always under­stand myself). If such and such a sen­tence of mine turns out to be some­what dis­ap­point­ing, at least moment­ar­ily, I place my trust in the fol­low­ing sen­tence to redeem its sins; I care­fully refrain from start­ing it over again or pol­ish­ing it. The only thing that might prove fatal to me would be the slight­est loss of impetus. Words, groups of words which fol­low one another, mani­fest among them­selves the greatest solid­ar­ity. It is not up to me to favor one group over the other. It is up to a mira­cu­lous equi­val­ent to inter­vene — and inter­vene it does.

Not only does this unres­tric­ted lan­guage, which I am try­ing to render forever valid, which seems to me to adapt itself to all of life’s cir­cum­stances, not only does this lan­guage not deprive me of any of my means, on the con­trary it lends me an extraordin­ary lucid­ity, and it does so in an area where I least expec­ted it. I shall even go so far as to main­tain that it instructs me and, indeed, I have had occa­sion to use sur­really words whose mean­ing I have for­got­ten. I was sub­sequently able to verify that the way in which I had used them cor­res­pon­ded per­fectly with their defin­i­tion. This would leave one to believe that we do not “learn,” that all we ever do is “relearn.” There are feli­cit­ous turns of speech that I have thus famil­i­ar­ized myself with. And I am not talk­ing about the poetic con­scious­ness of objects which I have been able to acquire only after a spir­itual con­tact with them repeated a thou­sand times over.

The forms of Sur­real­ist lan­guage adapt them­selves best to dia­logue. Here, two thoughts con­front each other; while one is being delivered, the other is busy with it; but how is it busy with it? To assume that it incor­por­ates it within itself would be tan­tamount to admit­ting that there is a time dur­ing which it is pos­sible for it to live com­pletely off that other thought, which is highly unlikely. And, in fact, the atten­tion it pays is com­pletely exter­ior; it has only time enough to approve or reject — gen­er­ally reject — with all the con­sid­er­a­tion of which man is cap­able. This mode of lan­guage, moreover, does not allow the heart of the mat­ter to be plumbed. My atten­tion, prey to an entreaty which it can­not in all decency reject, treats the oppos­ing thought as an enemy; in ordin­ary con­ver­sa­tion, it “takes it up” almost always on the words, the fig­ures of speech, it employs; it puts me in a pos­i­tion to turn it to good advant­age in my reply by dis­tort­ing them. This is true to such a degree that in cer­tain patho­lo­gical states of mind, where the sen­sorial dis­orders occupy the patient’s com­plete atten­tion, he lim­its him­self, while con­tinu­ing to answer the ques­tions, to seiz­ing the last word spoken in his pres­ence or the last por­tion of the Sur­real­ist sen­tence some trace of which he finds in his mind.

Q. “How old are you?” A. “You.” (Echolalia.)

Q. “What is your name?” A. “Forty-​five houses.” (Ganser syn­drome, or beside-​the-​point replies.)

There is no con­ver­sa­tion in which some trace of this dis­order does not occur. The effort to be social which dic­tates it and the con­sid­er­able prac­tice we have at it are the only things which enable us to con­ceal it tem­por­ar­ily. It is also the great weak­ness of the book that it is in con­stant con­flict with its best, by which I mean the most demand­ing, read­ers. In the very short dia­logue that I con­cocted above between the doc­tor and the mad­man, it was in fact the mad­man who got the bet­ter of the exchange. Because, through his replies, he obtrudes upon the atten­tion of the doc­tor examin­ing him — and because he is not the per­son ask­ing the ques­tions. Does this mean that his thought at this point is stronger? Per­haps. He is free not to care any longer about his age or name.

Poetic Sur­real­ism, which is the sub­ject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on rees­tab­lish­ing dia­logue in its abso­lute truth, by free­ing both inter­locutors from any oblig­a­tions and polite­ness. Each of them simply pur­sues his soli­lo­quy without try­ing to derive any spe­cial dia­lect­ical pleas­ure from it and without try­ing to impose any­thing what­so­ever upon his neigh­bor. The remarks exchanged are not, as is gen­er­ally the case, meant to develop some thesis, how­ever unim­port­ant it may be; they are as dis­af­fected as pos­sible. As for the reply that they eli­cit, it is, in prin­ciple, totally indif­fer­ent to the per­sonal pride of the per­son speak­ing. The words, the images are only so many spring­boards for the mind of the listener. In Les Champs mag­nétiques, the first purely Sur­real­ist work, this is the way in which the pages grouped together under the title Bar­rières must be con­ceived of — pages wherein Sou­pault and I show ourselves to be impar­tial interlocutors.

Sur­real­ism does not allow those who devote them­selves to it to for­sake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it cre­ates a cer­tain state of need and can push man to fright­ful revolts. It also is, if you like, an arti­fi­cial para­dise, and the taste one has for it derives from Baudelaire’s cri­ti­cism for the same reason as the oth­ers. Thus the ana­lysis of the mys­ter­i­ous effects and spe­cial pleas­ures it can pro­duce — in many respects Sur­real­ism occurs as a new vice which does not neces­sar­ily seem to be restric­ted to the happy few; like hashish, it has the abil­ity to sat­isfy all man­ner of tastes — such an ana­lysis has to be included in the present study.

1. It is true of Sur­real­ist images as it is of opium images that man does not evoke them; rather they “come to him spon­tan­eously, des­pot­ic­ally. He can­not chase them away; for the will is power­less now and no longer con­trols the fac­ulties.”* (Baudelaire.) It remains to be seen whether images have ever been “evoked.” If one accepts, as I do, Reverdy’s defin­i­tion it does not seem pos­sible to bring together, vol­un­tar­ily, what he calls “two dis­tant real­it­ies.” The jux­ta­pos­i­tion is made or not made, and that is the long and the short of it. Per­son­ally, I abso­lutely refuse to believe that, in Reverdy’s work, images such as

In the brook, there is a song that flows

or:

Day unfol­ded like a white tablecloth

or:

The world goes back into a sack

reveal the slight­est degree of pre­med­it­a­tion. In my opin­ion, it is erro­neous to claim that “the mind has grasped the rela­tion­ship” of two real­it­ies in the pres­ence of each other. First of all, it has seized noth­ing con­sciously. It is, as it were, from the for­tu­it­ous jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the two terms that a par­tic­u­lar light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infin­itely sens­it­ive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, con­sequently, a func­tion of the dif­fer­ence of poten­tial between the two con­duct­ors. When the dif­fer­ence exists only slightly, as in a com­par­ison,* (Com­pare the image in the work of Jules Renard.) the spark is lack­ing. Now, it is not within man’s power, so far as I can tell, to effect the jux­ta­pos­i­tion of two real­it­ies so far apart. The prin­ciple of the asso­ci­ation of ideas, such as we con­ceive of it, mil­it­ates against it. Or else we would have to revert to an ellipt­ical art, which Reverdy deplores as much as I. We are there­fore obliged to admit that the two terms of the image are not deduced one from the other by the mind for the spe­cific pur­pose of pro­du­cing the spark, that they are the sim­ul­tan­eous products of the activ­ity I call Sur­real­ist, reason’s role being lim­ited to tak­ing note of, and appre­ci­at­ing, the lumin­ous phenomenon.

And just as the length of the spark increases to the extent that it occurs in rar­efied gases, the Sur­real­ist atmo­sphere cre­ated by auto­matic writ­ing, which I have wanted to put within the reach of every­one, is espe­cially con­du­cive to the pro­duc­tion of the most beau­ti­ful images. One can even go so far as to say that in this dizzy­ing race the images appear like the only guide­posts of the mind. By slow degrees the mind becomes con­vinced of the supreme real­ity of these images. At first lim­it­ing itself to sub­mit­ting to them, it soon real­izes that they flat­ter its reason, and increase its know­ledge accord­ingly. The mind becomes aware of the lim­it­less expanses wherein its desires are made mani­fest, where the pros and cons are con­stantly con­sumed, where its obscur­ity does not betray it. It goes for­ward, borne by these images which enrap­ture it, which scarcely leave it any time to blow upon the fire in its fin­gers. This is the most beau­ti­ful night of all, the lightning-​filled night: day, com­pared to it, is night.

The count­less kinds of Sur­real­ist images would require a clas­si­fic­a­tion which I do not intend to make today. To group them accord­ing to their par­tic­u­lar affin­it­ies would lead me far afield; what I basic­ally want to men­tion is their com­mon vir­tue. For me, their greatest vir­tue, I must con­fess, is the one that is arbit­rary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to trans­late into prac­tical lan­guage, either because it con­tains an immense amount of seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion or because one of its terms is strangely con­cealed; or because, present­ing itself as some­thing sen­sa­tional, it seems to end weakly (because it sud­denly closes the angle of its com­pass), or because it derives from itself a ridicu­lous formal jus­ti­fic­a­tion, or because it is of a hal­lu­cin­at­ory kind, or because it very nat­ur­ally gives to the abstract the mask of the con­crete, or the oppos­ite, or because it implies the neg­a­tion of some ele­ment­ary phys­ical prop­erty, or because it pro­vokes laughter. Here, in order, are a few examples of it:

The ruby of cham­pagne. (LAUTRÉAMONT)

Beau­ti­ful as the law of arres­ted devel­op­ment of the breast in adults, whose propensity to growth is not in pro­por­tion to the quant­ity of molecules that their organ­ism assim­il­ates. (LAUTRÉAMONT)

A church stood dazzling as a bell. (PHILIPPE SOUPAULT)

In Rrose Sélavy’s sleep there is a dwarf issued from a well who comes to eat her bread at night. (ROBERT DESNOS)

On the bridge the dew with the head of a tabby cat lulls itself to sleep. (ANDRÉ BRETON)

A little to the left, in my firm­a­ment fore­told, I see — but it’s doubt­less but a mist of blood and murder — the gleam­ing glass of liberty’s dis­turb­ances. (LOUIS ARAGON)

In the forest aflame

The lions were fresh. (ROBERT VITRAC)

The color of a woman’s stock­ings is not neces­sar­ily in the like­ness of her eyes, which led a philo­sopher who it is point­less to men­tion, to say: “Ceph­alo­pods have more reas­ons to hate pro­gress than do quadrupeds.”

(MAX MORISE)

1^st. Whether we like it or not, there is enough there to sat­isfy sev­eral demands of the mind. All these images seem to attest to the fact that the mind is ripe for some­thing more than the benign joys it allows itself in gen­eral. This is the only way it has of turn­ing to its own advant­age the ideal quant­ity of events with which it is entrus­ted.* (Let us no for­get that, accord­ing to Novalis’ for­mula, “there are series of events which run par­al­lel to real events. Men and cir­cum­stances gen­er­ally modify the ideal train of cir­cum­stances, so that is seems imper­fect; and their con­sequences are also equally imper­fect. Thus it was with the Reform­a­tion; instead of Prot­est­ant­ism, we got Luther­an­ism.”) These images show it the extent of its ordin­ary dis­sip­a­tion and the draw­backs that it offers for it. In the final ana­lysis, it’s not such a bad thing for these images to upset the mind, for to upset the mind is to put it in the wrong. The sen­tences I quote make ample pro­vi­sion for this. But the mind which rel­ishes them draws there­from the con­vic­tion that it is on the right track; on its own, the mind is incap­able of find­ing itself guilty of cavil; it has noth­ing to fear, since, moreover, it attempts to embrace everything.

2^nd. The mind which plunges into Sur­real­ism relives with glow­ing excite­ment the best part of its child­hood. For such a mind, it is sim­ilar to the cer­tainty with which a per­son who is drown­ing reviews once more, in the space of less than a second, all the insur­mount­able moments of his life. Some may say to me that the par­al­lel is not very encour­aging. But I have no inten­tion of encour­aging those who tell me that. From child­hood memor­ies, and from a few oth­ers, there eman­ates a sen­ti­ment of being unin­teg­rated, and then later of hav­ing gone astray, which I hold to be the most fer­tile that exists. It is per­haps child­hood that comes closest to one’s “real life”; child­hood bey­ond which man has at his dis­posal, aside from his laissez-​passer, only a few com­pli­ment­ary tick­ets; child­hood where everything nev­er­the­less con­spires to bring about the effect­ive, risk-​free pos­ses­sion of one­self. Thanks to Sur­real­ism, it seems that oppor­tun­ity knocks a second time. It is as though we were still run­ning toward our sal­va­tion, or our per­di­tion. In the shadow we again see a pre­cious ter­ror. Thank God, it’s still only Pur­gat­ory. With a shud­der, we cross what the occult­ists call dan­ger­ous ter­rit­ory. In my wake I raise up mon­sters that are lying in wait; they are not yet too ill-​disposed toward me, and I am not lost, since I fear them. Here are “the ele­phants with the heads of women and the fly­ing lions” which used to make Sou­pault and me tremble in our boots to meet, here is the “sol­uble fish” which still fright­ens me slightly. POISSON SOLUBLE, am I not the sol­uble fish, I was born under the sign of Pisces, and man is sol­uble in his thought! The flora and fauna of Sur­real­ism are inadmissible.

3^rd. I do not believe in the estab­lish­ment of a con­ven­tional Sur­real­ist pat­tern any time in the near future. The char­ac­ter­ist­ics com­mon to all the texts of this kind, includ­ing those I have just cited and many oth­ers which alone could offer us a logical ana­lysis and a care­ful gram­mat­ical ana­lysis, do not pre­clude a cer­tain evol­u­tion of Sur­real­ist prose in time. Com­ing on the heels of a large num­ber of essays I have writ­ten in this vein over the past five years, most of which I am indul­gent enough to think are extremely dis­ordered, the short anec­dotes which com­prise the bal­ance of this volume offer me a glar­ing proof of what I am say­ing. I do not judge them to be any more worth­less, because of that, in por­tray­ing for the reader the bene­fits which the Sur­real­ist con­tri­bu­tion is liable to make to his consciousness.

Sur­real­ist meth­ods would, moreover, demand to be

heard. Everything is valid when it comes to obtain­ing the desired sud­den­ness from cer­tain asso­ci­ations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the intro­duc­tion of a plat­it­ude into a lit­er­ary ana­lysis of the most rig­or­ous sort. It is even per­miss­ible to entitle POEM what we get from the most ran­dom assemblage pos­sible (observe, if you will, the syn­tax) of head­lines and scraps of head­lines cut out of the newspapers:

POEM

A burst of laughter

of sap­phire in the island of Ceylon

The most beau­ti­ful straws

HAVE A FADED COLOR

UNDER THE LOCKS

on an isol­ated farm

FROM DAY TO DAY

the pleas­ant

grows worse

cof­fee

preaches for its saint

THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY

MADAM,

a pair

of silk stockings

is not

A leap into space

A STAG

Love above all

Everything could be worked out so well

PARIS IS A BIG VILLAGE

Watch out for

the fire that covers

THE PRAYER

of fair weather

Know that

The ultra­vi­olet rays

have fin­ished their task

short and sweet

THE FIRST WHITE PAPER

OF CHANCE

Red will be

The wan­der­ing singer

WHERE IS HE?

in memory

in his house

AT THE SUITORS’ BALL

I do

as I dance

What people did, what they’re going to do

And we could offer many many more examples. The theater, philo­sophy, sci­ence, cri­ti­cism would all suc­ceed in find­ing their bear­ings there. I hasten to add that future Sur­real­ist tech­niques do not interest me.

Far more ser­i­ous, in my opin­ion* (Whatever reser­va­tions I may be allowed to make con­cern­ing respons­ib­il­ity in gen­eral and the medico-​legal con­sid­er­a­tions which determ­ine an individual’s degree of respons­ib­il­ity — com­plete respons­ib­il­ity, irre­spons­ib­il­ity, lim­ited respons­ib­il­ity (sic) — however dif­fi­cult it may be for me to accept the prin­ciple of any kind of respons­ib­il­ity, I would like to know how the first pun­ish­able offenses, the Sur­real­ist char­ac­ter of which will be clearly appar­ent, will be judged. Will the accused be acquit­ted, or will he merely be given the bene­fit of the doubt because of exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances? It’s a shame that the viol­a­tion of the laws gov­ern­ing the Press is today scarcely repressed, for if it were not we would soon see a trial of this sort: the accused has pub­lished a book which is an out­rage to pub­lic decency. Sev­eral of his “most respec­ted and hon­or­able” fel­low cit­izens have lodged a com­plaint against him, and he is also charged with slander and libel. There are also all sorts of other charges against him, such as insult­ing and defam­ing the army, incit­ing to murder, rape, etc. The accused, moreover, wastes no time in agree­ing with the accusers in “stig­mat­iz­ing” most of the ideas expressed. His only defense is claim­ing that he does not con­sider him­self to be the author of his book, said book being no more and no less than a Sur­real­ist con­coc­tion which pre­cludes any ques­tion of merit or lack of merit on the part of the per­son who signs it; fur­ther, that all he has done is copy a doc­u­ment without offer­ing any opin­ion thereon, and that he is at least as for­eign to the accused text as is the presid­ing judge himself.

What is true for the pub­lic­a­tion of a book will also hold true for a whole host of other acts as soon as Sur­real­ist meth­ods begin to enjoy wide­spread favor. When that hap­pens, a new mor­al­ity must be sub­sti­tuted for the pre­vail­ing mor­al­ity, the source of all our tri­als and tribulations.) — I have intim­ated it often enough — are the applic­a­tions of Sur­real­ism to action. To be sure, I do not believe in the proph­etic nature of the Sur­real­ist word. “It is the oracle, the things I say.”* (Rim­baud.) Yes, as much as I like, but what of the oracle itself?** (Still, STILL.… We must abso­lutely get to the bot­tom of this. Today, June 8, 1924, about one o’clock, the voice whispered to me: “Béthune, Béthune.” What did it mean? I have never been to Béthune, and have only the vaguest notion as to where it is loc­ated on the map of France. Béthune evokes noth­ing for me, not even a scene from The Three Mus­ket­eers. I should have left for Béthune, where per­haps there was some­thing await­ing me; that would have been to simple, really. Someone told me they had read in a book by Chester­ton about a detect­ive who, in order to find someone he is look­ing for in a cer­tain city, simply scoured from roof to cel­lar the houses which, from the out­side, seemed some­how abnor­mal to him, were it only in some slight detail. This sys­tem is as good as any other.

Sim­il­arly, in 1919, Sou­pault went into any num­ber of impossible build­ings to ask the con­ci­erge whether Phil­ippe Sou­pault did in fact live there. He would not have been sur­prised, I sus­pect, by an affirm­at­ive reply. He would have gone and knocked on his door.) Men’s piety does not fool me. The Sur­real­ist voice that shook Cumae, Dodona, and Delphi is noth­ing more than the voice which dic­tates my less iras­cible speeches to me. My time must not be its time, why should this voice help me resolve the child­ish prob­lem of my des­tiny? I pre­tend, unfor­tu­nately, to act in a world where, in order to take into account its sug­ges­tions, I would be obliged to resort to two kinds of inter­pret­ers, one to trans­late its judge­ments for me, the other, impossible to find, to trans­mit to my fel­low men whatever sense I could make out of them. This world, in which I endure what I endure (don’t go see), this mod­ern world, I mean, what the devil do you want me to do with it? Per­haps the Sur­real­ist voice will be stilled, I have given up try­ing to keep track of those who have dis­ap­peared. I shall no longer enter into, how­ever briefly, the mar­velous detailed descrip­tion of my years and my days. I shall be like Nij­in­ski who was taken last year to the Rus­sian bal­let and did not real­ize what spec­tacle it was he was see­ing. I shall be alone, very alone within myself, indif­fer­ent to all the world’s bal­lets. What I have done, what I have left undone, I give it to you.

And ever since I have had a great desire to show for­bear­ance to sci­entific mus­ing, how­ever unbe­com­ing, in the final ana­lysis, from every point of view. Radios? Fine. Syph­ilis? If you like. Pho­to­graphy? I don’t see any reason why not. The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms. War? Gave us a good laugh. The tele­phone? Hello. Youth? Charm­ing white hair. Try to make me say thank you: “Thank you.” Thank you. If the com­mon man has a high opin­ion of things which prop­erly speak­ing belong to the realm of the labor­at­ory, it is because such research has res­ul­ted in the man­u­fac­ture of a machine or the dis­cov­ery of some serum which the man in the street views as affect­ing him dir­ectly. He is quite sure that they have been try­ing to improve his lot. I am not quite sure to what extent schol­ars are motiv­ated by human­it­arian aims, but it does not seem to me that this factor con­sti­tutes a very marked degree of good­ness. I am, of course, refer­ring to true schol­ars and not to the vul­gar­izers and pop­ular­izers of all sorts who take out pat­ents. In this realm as in any other, I believe in the pure Sur­real­ist joy of the man who, fore­warned that all oth­ers before him have failed, refuses to admit defeat, sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reas­on­able one, and arrives wherever he can. Such and such an image, by which he deems it oppor­tune to indic­ate his pro­gress and which may res­ult, per­haps, in his receiv­ing pub­lic acclaim, is to me, I must con­fess, a mat­ter of com­plete indif­fer­ence. Nor is the mater­ial with which he must per­force encum­ber him­self; his glass tubes or my metal­lic feath­ers… As for his method, I am will­ing to give it as much credit as I do mine. I have seen the inventor of the cutaneous plantar reflex at work; he manip­u­lated his sub­jects without res­pite, it was much more than an “exam­in­a­tion” he was employ­ing; it was obvi­ous that he was fol­low­ing no set plan. Here and there he for­mu­lated a remark, dis­tantly, without non­ethe­less set­ting down his needle, while his ham­mer was never still. He left to oth­ers the futile task of cur­ing patients. He was wholly con­sumed by and devoted to that sac­red fever.

Sur­real­ism, such as I con­ceive of it, asserts our com­plete non­con­form­ism clearly enough so that there can be no ques­tion of trans­lat­ing it, at the trial of the real world, as evid­ence for the defense. It could, on the con­trary, only serve to jus­tify the com­plete state of dis­trac­tion which we hope to achieve here below. Kant’s absent­minded­ness regard­ing women, Pasteur’s absent­minded­ness about “grapes,” Curie’s absent­minded­ness with respect to vehicles, are in this regard pro­foundly symp­to­matic. This world is only very rel­at­ively in tune with thought, and incid­ents of this kind are only the most obvi­ous epis­odes of a war in which I am proud to be par­ti­cip­at­ing. “Ce monde n’est que très rel­at­ive­ment à la mesure de la pensée et les incid­ents de ce genre né sont que les épis­odes jusqu’ici les plus mar­quants d’une guerre d’indépendence à laquelle je me fais gloire de par­ti­ciper.” Sur­real­ism is the “invis­ible ray” which will one day enable us to win out over our oppon­ents. “You are no longer trem­bling, car­cass.” This sum­mer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verd­ant cloak, makes as little impres­sion upon me as a ghost. It is liv­ing and ceas­ing to live which are ima­gin­ary solu­tions. Exist­ence is elsewhere.

---

A SURREALIST MANIFESTO

The Sur­real­ist Mani­festo was writ­ten in 1924 by Andre Bre­ton and then signed by such artists as Louis Aragon, Ant­onin Artaud, Jacques Baron, Joe Bousquet, J.-A. Boif­fard, Jean Car­rive, Rene Crevel, Robert Des­nos, Paul Elaurd, Max Ernst, and Bre­ton him­self. Released to the pub­lic on Janu­ary 27^th 1925.

With regard to a false inter­pret­a­tion of our enter­prise, stu­pidly cir­cu­lated among the pub­lic, we declare as fol­lows to the entire bray­ing lit­er­ary, dra­matic, philo­soph­ical, exeget­ical and even theo­lo­gical body of con­tem­por­ary cri­ti­cism:
1. We have noth­ing to do with lit­er­at­ure; but we are quite cap­able, when neces­sary, of mak­ing use of it like any­one else,
2. Sur­real­ism is not a new means or expres­sion, or an easier one, nor even a meta­physic of poetry. It is a means of total lib­er­a­tion of the mind and of all that resembles it.
3. We are determ­ined to make a Revolu­tion.
4. We have joined the word sur­real­ism to the word revolu­tion solely to show the dis­in­ter­ested, detached, and even entirely des­per­ate char­ac­ter of this revolu­tion.
5. We make no claim to change the mores of man­kind, but we intend to show the fra­gil­ity of thought, and on what shift­ing found­a­tions, what cav­erns we have built our trem­bling houses.
6. We hurl this formal warn­ing to Soci­ety; Beware of your devi­ations and faux-​pas, we shall not miss a single one.
7. At each turn of its thought, Soci­ety will find us wait­ing.
8. We are spe­cial­ists in Revolt. There is no means of action which we are not cap­able, when neces­sary, of employ­ing.
9. We say in par­tic­u­lar to the West­ern world: sur­real­ism exists. And what is this new ism that is fastened to us? Sur­real­ism is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind turn­ing back on itself, and it is determ­ined to break apart its fet­ters, even if it must be by mater­ial hammers!

Bur­eaus de Recherches Sur­real­istes,
15, Rue de Grenelle

Tags: Series: Surrealism

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