Andre Breton & Surrealism

The Son of Man & Attempting the Impossible, Rene Magritte

The Son of Man, Rene Magritte & Attempting the Impossible, Rene Magritte

Surrealism is an elision of super and realismGuillaume Apollinaire, who Breton hailed as the last great poet, was the first to use the termApollinaire created the word to describe a new drama that did NOT attempt verisimilitude and that was itself a new artistic and literary faith

When man wanted to imitate walking he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. In the same way he has created Surrealism unconsciously.

-- Guillaume Apollinaire

The goal of the early French Surrealist was to transform perception and transcend conventional rational thought. Andre Breton, often considered the father of Surrealism and the consummate surrealist poet, is concerned not only with the destruction of old conceptions about human experience and conventional representations of reality, but also with the discovery of a "super-reality."

Origins and Basic Definitions

At its most basic, Surrealism was a literary, artistic, philosophical and political movement influenced by Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention

Seize Septembre & Black Magic, Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte: Seize Septembre (Der 16. September); Black Magic

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Rene Magritte

Song of Love, Giorgio di Chirico

Giorgio di Chirico, Song of Love

Surrealist writers are interested in the associations and implications of words rather than their literal meanings Surrealism hasnowcome to refer to a style of expression in which fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious mind is used with no intention of making the work logically comprehensible.

Seeking a synthesis of the dreams, as revoked at dawn, and reality, as it disappears at sunset, the surrealists landed on the shifting sands of the subconscious along the shores of the sea of knowledge where rests the concrete manifestation of reality

-- Andre Breton

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

from The First Surrealist Manifesto:

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 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.

Max Ernst, "The Robing of the Bride"

Max Ernst, "The Robing of the Bride", 1939/40 (click image for 576 x 786 size.)

Through radical juxtaposition of images, Breton intends achieve a different understanding of human experienceOne important question is whether or not this delivery to a new state of consciousness and understanding is possible for the reader or only the artist/writer creating the surreal workBreton displays numerous detailed and often incongruous/unexpected/surprising images, stacked one after another. His concern lies with how these images are juxtaposed and contrasted, i.e. their interplay, with the intention of creating a montage or collage of image after image that has the effect of a psychological epiphany

The disjointed, fractured and often disturbing juxtapositions create a dream-like, oneiric world that supposedly enables the reader (perhaps?) finally and ultimately to dwell in a thought process in which perception of this super-reality is made manifest

Galatea of the Spheres, Salvador Dali

(Surrealist collage is) the chance encounter of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane . . . or, in short, the cultivation of the effects of a systematic displacement . . . a function of our will to the complete displacement of everything

-- Max Ernst

Surrealism intends to overturn logic and reason by using images and details that have no apparent rational or sensible connection. Psychic automatism is a condition that results from the use of juxtaposed images and pure expression with an emphasis on luminous detail.

The emphasis on 'automatic writing' whereby the interplay of images that occurs for the reader (perhaps subconsciously) is privileged over what is already known or perceived. Breton suggest that surrealism is an attempt to discover and uncover what transpires in the depths of the minds of all human beings.

Surrealism, in a sense, is a device that allows for psychic automatism, or a thinking and sensibility that is free from the constraints of logic and the modalities of culture.Breton contends that human experience and our myriad perceptions of reality are in some way problematic. He suggests that the commonly held ideologies and sensibilities that describe (and in many ways create) our world are insufficient in representing our actual existence and our relationship to objective reality.

Max Ernst
Fireside Angel
1937

Max Ernst, Fireside Angel,1937

These inadequacies can be transformed to the extent that the reader can at least gain a more lucid and accurate understanding of the human condition and our relationship within the universe. Breton purports that a super-reality exists above and beyond the limitations of objective reality as revealed and constructed by reason.

Psychic automatism is akin to the speech of thought, according to BretonSurrealist writing is escapist in the sense that it alleviates the thinker from psychological rule by convention and cultureFor Breton, poetry emanates from the lives of human beingsThe human attitude behind the poetry is more important than the actual work itself

The only thing I would consider worth doing is escaping, as much as possible, from that human type we all share in. . . . I still see poetry as the terrain on which the terrible difficulties that consciousness has with confidence, in a given individual, have the best chance of being resolved.

(Breton from The Disdainful Confession)

Salvador Dal, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, 1936

He further suggests that our apparently familiar world is in fact what estranges and alienates us most. Surrealist poetry is an attempt to create a re-perception of human existence and reality, in the present moment, which allows for a more accurate, effectual, direct, emotional, intense, realistic, and generally more "human" cosmology.

Poetry is made in bed like love

Its unmade sheets are the dawn of things

The embrace of poetry like the ebrace of the naked body

Protects while it lasts

Against all access by the misery of the world

--Andre Breton (from Poemes)