No More Learning

i. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say 'create', not 'imitate', which is enough to squelch the bombast of M. Charles Estienne, who has obviously not understood a word of my argument and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Expe? rience inte? rieure.
4. If you wish to know the origin of this attitude towards language, the following are a few brief indications.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait. In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and obscure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with the prose-writer to declare it unliveable. His job is always to create the myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is s_cked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to
? 334 I Notes to Page 34
describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man is worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their 'little bit of reality', like the engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their 'too full of reality', by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human in so far as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some 'beyond', but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable, It is not that there is another thing to communicate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to redeem them.
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to speak of the commitment of the poet, let us say that he is the man who commits himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that curse with which he always claims kinship and which he always attributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the source and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he challenges, as we shall see, which is what the prose-writer does too. But the challenge of prose is carried on in the name
? Notes to Pages 34--113 \ 335
of a greater success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals.
5. It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and, vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Vale? ry has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social meaning and for certain obscure resonances--let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the purpose of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of'prose' is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry complex becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of structures--impure, but well-defined.
6. The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator's attitude before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc. ). 7. In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end. 8. This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I'd like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people. 'But if there isn't any, that's no reason why someone may not write one some day. ' But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I. For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself to proposing an explanation for a recognized
fact.
9. Etiemble: 'Happy the writers who die for something. ' Combat,
January 24, 1947.
10. Today his public is spread out. He sometimes runs into a hundred
thousand copies. A hundred thousand copies sold means four hundred thousand readers. Thus, for France, one out of a hundred in the population. 11. Dostoyevsky's famous 'If God does not exist, all is permissible' is the terrible revelation which the bourgeoisie has forced itself to conceal
during the one hundred and fifty years of its reign.
12. This was somewhat the case of Jules Valle`s, though a natural
magnanimity constantly struggled within him against bitterness.
13. I am not unaware that workers defended political democracy against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte much more than did the bourgeois, but that was because they thought that by means of it they would be able to bring about
structural reforms.
14. I have so often been accused of being unfair to Flaubert that I cannot
? 336 I Notes to Pages 113-12-/
resist the pleasure of quoting the following texts, which anyone can verify in the correspondence:
'Neo-Catholicism on one hand and socialism on the other have stultified France. Everything moves between the Immaculate Conception and the workers' lunch-boxes' (1868).
'The first remedy would be to put an end to universal suffrage, the shame of the human mind' (September 1871).
'I'm worth twenty Croisset voters' (1871).
'I have no hatred for the communards for the reason that I don't hate mad dogs' (Croisset, Thursday, 1871).
'I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones important are a small group of spirits, always the same, who pass the torch from hand to hand' (Croisset, September 8, 1871).
'As to the Commune, which is on its last legs, it's the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. '
'I hate democracy (at least what it is taken to mean in France)--that is, the exaltation of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of law: in short, anti-sociability. '
'The Commune re-instates murderers. '
'The populace is an eternal minor, and it will always be at the bottom of the scale since it is number, mass, the unbounded. '
'It's not important for a lot of peasants to know how to read and no longer listen to their priest, but it's infinitely important that a lot of men like Renan or Littre? live and be listened to. Our salvation is now in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that a majority which will be composed of something other than mere figures' (1871).
'Do you believe that if France, instead of being governed, in short, by the mob, were in the power of the mandarins, we would be in this mess? If, instead of having wanted to enlighten the lower classes, we had been concerned with educating the upper ones? ' (Croisset, Wednesday, August 3, 1870).
15. In The Devil on Two Sticks, for example, Le Sage novelizesthe characters of La Bruye`re and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; that is, he binds them together by the slender thread of a plot.
16. The procedure of writing the novel in the form of letters is only a variation of what I have just indicated. The letter is the subjective recital of an event; it refers back to the one who wrote it and who becomes both actor and witnessing subjectivity. As to the event itself, although it is recent, it is already re-thought and explained: the letter always supposes a lag between the fact (which belongs to a recent past) and its recital, which is given subsequently and in a moment of leisure.
17. This is the reverse of the vicious circle of the surrealists, who try to destroy painting by painting. In this case one wants to have literature's letters of credit given by literature.
18. When Maupassant writes Le Horla, that is, when he speaks of the madness which threatens him, the tone changes. It is because at last something--something horrible--is going to happen. The man is overwhelmed, crushed; he no longer understands; he wants to drag the reader along with him into his terror. But the twig is bent; lacking a
? Notes to Pages 127-129 | 337
technique adapted to madness, death, and history, he fails to move the reader.
19. Among these procedures I shall first cite the curious recourse to the style of the theatre that one finds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one in Gyp, Lavedan, Abel Hermant, etc. The novel was written in dialogue form. The gestures of the characters and their actions were indicated in italics and parenthetically. It was evidently a matter of making the reader contemporaneous with the action as the spectator is during the performance. This procedure certainly manifests the predomi- nance of dramatic art in polite society around 1900. In its way it also sought to escape the myth of primary subjectivity. But the fact that it was abandoned shows sufficiently that it did not solve the problem. First, it is a sign of weakness to ask for help from a neighbouring art, a proof that one lacks resources in the very domain of the art one practises. Then, the author did not thereby prevent himself from entering into the consciousness of his characters and having the reader enter with him. He simply divulged the intimate contents of the consciousness in parentheses and italics, with the style and typographical methods that are generally used for stage directions. In effect, it was an attempt without a future. The authors who used it had a vague feeling that new life could be put into the novel by writing it in the present. But they had not yet understood that it was not possible if one did not first give up the explanatory attitude.
More serious was the attempt to introduce the interior monologue of Schnitzler. (I am not speaking here of that of Joyce, which has quite different metaphysical principles. Larbaud, who, I know, harks back to
Joyce, seems to me much rather to draw his inspiration from Les Lauriers sont couple? s and from Mademoiselle Else. ) In short, it was a matter of pushing the hypothesis of a primary subjectivity to the limit and of passing on to realism by leading idealism up to the absolute.
The reality which one shows to the reader without intermediary is no longer the thing itself--the tree, the ashtray--but the consciousness which sees the thing; the 'real' is no longer only a representation, but rather the representation becomes an absolute reality since it is given to us as an immediate datum. The inconvenient aspect of this procedure is that it encloses us in an individual subjectivity and that it thereby lacks the intermonadic universe; besides, it dilutes the event and the action in the perception of one and then the other. Now, the common characteristic of the fact and the action is that they escape subjective representation, which grasps their results but not their living movement. In short, it is only with a certain amount of faking that one reduces the stream of consciousness to a succession of words, even deformed ones. If the word is given as an intermediary signifying a reality which in essence transcends language, nothing could be better; it withdraws itself, is forgotten, and discharges consciousness upon the object.
But if it presents itself as the psychic reality, if the author, by writing, claims to give us an ambiguous reality which is a sign, objective in essence--that is, in so far as it relates to something outside itself--and a thing, formal in essence--that is, as an immediate psychic datum--then he can be accused of not having participated and of disregarding the
? 338 I Notes to Pages 129--164
rhetorical law which might be formulated as follows: in literature, where one uses signs, it is not necessary to use only signs; and if the reality which one wants to signify is one word, it must be given to the reader by other words. He can be charged, besides, with having forgotten that the greatest riches of the psychic life are silent. We know what has happened to the internal monologue: having become rhetoric, that is, a poetic transposition of the inner life--silent as well as verbal--it has today become one method among others of the novelist. Too idealistic to be true, too realistic to be complete, it is the crown of the subjectivist technique. It is within and by means of this technique that the literature of today has become conscious of itself; that is, the literature of today is a double surpassing, towards the objective and towards the rhetorical, of the technique of the internal monologue. But for that it is necessary that the historical circumstance change.
It is evident that the writer continues today to write in the past tense. It is not by changing the tense of the verb but by revolutionizing the techniques of the story that he will succeed in making the reader contemporary with the story.
20. American literature is still in the stage of regionalism.
21. When I was passing through New York in 1945, I asked a literary agent to get the translation rights of Miss Lonelyhearts, a work by Nathanael West. He did not know the book and came to a gentleman's agreement with the author of a certain Lonlyheart, an old maiden lady who was very surprised that someone was thinking of translating her book into French. He learned of his mistake and, continuing his search, finally found West's publisher, who admitted that he did not know what had become of the author. I urged them to investigate and finally they learned that West had died several years earlier in an automobile accident. It seems that he still had a bank account in New York and the publisher was still sending him cheques from time to time.
22. In Jouhandeau the bourgeois souls have the same quality of the marvellous; but often this marvellous changes sign; it becomes negative and satanic. As you might well imagine, the Black Masses of the bourgeoisie are still more fascinating than its permissible displays.
23. To make oneself the clerk of violence implies that one deliberately adopts violence as a method of thought, that is, one has common recourse to intimidation, to the principle of authority; one haughtily refuses to demonstrate and discuss. This is what gives the dogmatic texts of the surrealists a purely formal but disturbing resemblance to the political writings of Charles Maurras.
24. A resemblance to L'Action Franc? aise, of which Maurras was able to say that it was not a party but a conspiracy. And don't the punitive expeditions of the surrealists resemble the pranks of the young royalist henchmen?
25. These passionless remarks have stirred up impassioned whirlwinds. However, far from convincing me, the defences and the attacks have made me more convinced than ever that surrealism has lost--perhaps temporarily--its timeliness. As a matter of fact, I find that most of its defenders are eclectics. It is made out to be a cultural phenomenon 'of high
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importance', an exemplary' attitude, and an attempt is being made to integrate it, on the quiet, into bourgeois humanism. If it still had any life in it, would it be willing to spice the slightly stale rationalism of M. Alquie? with the Freudian pepper? In the last analysis, it is a victim of the idealism which it has so fought against; the Gazette des lettres, Fontaine, and Carrefour are stomachs which just can't wait to digest it.
If a Desnos could have read in 1930 the following lines of M. Claude Mauriac, a young sparkplug of the Fourth Republic: 'Man fights against man without realizing that the joint effort of all minds should first be brought to bear against a certain skimpy and false conception of man. But surrealism has known this and has been crying it aloud for twenty years. As an enterprise of knowledge, it proclaims that everything about the traditional modes of thinking and feeling has to be re-invented,' he would certainly have protested; surrealism was not an 'enterprise oi^ knowledge'; he specifically quoted Marx's famous phrase: 'We do not want to understand the world; we want to change it'; he never wanted this 'joint effort of minds' which pleasantly recalls the Rally of the French People [General de Gaulle's Rassemblement Populaire Franc? ais--Translator]. Against this rather silly optimism he always affirmed the strict connection between inner censorship and oppression; if there had to be a joint effort of all minds (that expression minds, in the plural, is hardly surrealistic! ) it would come after the Revolution.
In his heyday he would not have tolerated anyone's brooding over him that way in order to understand him. He considered-- like the Communist Party in this respect--that everything that was not totally and exclusively for him was against him. Is he aware today of the way he is being manoeuvred? In order to enlighten him, I shall therefore reveal to him that M. Bataille, before publicly informing Merleau-Ponty that he was withdrawing his article from us, had notified him of his intentions in a private conversation. [M. Merleau-Ponty is a member of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes of which M. Sartre is editor-in-chief and in which the present work was originally serialized--Translator. ] This champion of surrealism had then declared, 'I have serious charges to make against Breton, but we must unite against communism. ' That should be sufficient! I think that I show more esteem for surrealism by harking back to the time of its ardent life and by discussing its aim than by slyly trying to assimilate it. It is true that it is not going to thank me for it, for, like all totalitarian parties, it affirms the continuity of its views in order to mask their perpetual change and therefore does not at all like anyone to hark back to its previous declarations. Many of the texts I meet with today in the catalogue of the surrealist exhibition (Surrealism in 1947) and which are approved by the chiefs of the movement are closer to the gentle eclecticism
of M. Claude Mauriac than to the bitter revolt of the first surrealism. Here, for example, are a few lines of M. Pastoureau: 'The political experiment of surrealism which has caused it to revolve round the Communist Party for some ten years is very plainly conclusive. To attempt to continue it would be to lock itself up in the dilemma of compromise and ineffectualness. To follow the Communist Party in the way of the collaboration of classes to which it is committed is contradictory to the motives which in the past pushed surrealism into undertaking political action and which are as much
? 34? I Notes to Page 164
immediate demands in the domain of the mind and especially in that of morals as the pursuit of the distant end which is the total liberation of man. And yet,
it is obvious that the politics on which one might base the hope of seeing
the aspirations of the proletariat realized is not that of the so-called left opposition to the Communist Party nor that of the little anarchist groups. . . . 'Surrealism, whose appointed ro^le is to demand innumerable reforms in the domain of the mind, and, in particular, ethical reforms, can
no more participate in a political action which is necessarily immoral in order to be effective than it can participate, unless by renouncing the liberation of man as a goal to be attained, in a political action which is necessarily ineffectual because respectful of principles which it thinks it does not have to violate. Thus, it retires into itself. Its efforts will again tend to fulfil the same demands and to hasten the liberation of man, but by other means. '
(Analogous texts and even identical phrases will be found in 'Rupture inaugurale', a declaration adopted June 21, 1947, by the group in France. ) The reader will note, in passing, the word 'reform' and the extraordi- nary recourse to morals. Will we some day read a periodical entitled 'Surrealism in the Service of Reform'? But above all, this text established surrealism's break with Marxism: everybody now agrees that one can act
on superstructures without the economic substructure's being modified. An ethical and reformist surrealism wanting to confine its action to changing ideologies: that smacks dangerously of idealism. What these 'other means' are remains to be determined. Is surrealism going to offer us new scales of values? Is it going to produce a new ideology? Not a bit; surrealism is going to busy itself, 'pursuing its old-time objectives, in weakening Christian civilization and in preparing the conditions for the coming of the eventual Weltanschauung'. It is still, obviously, a matter of negation. Western civilization--even Pastoureau admits it--is moribund;
a tremendous war threatens it and will attend to burying it; our time calls for a new ideology which permits man to live; but surrealism will continue to attack the 'Christian-Thomist stage' of civilization. And how can it be attacked? By the pretty lollipop of the 1947 Exhibition? Let's rather go back to the real surrealism, that of the Point du Jour, of Nadja, of The Communicating Vessels.
Alquie? and Max-Pol Fouchet stress above everything else the fact that it was an attempt at liberation. According to them, it is a matter of asserting the rights of the human totality without omitting anything, be it the unconscious, the dream, sexuality, or the imaginary. I am in complete agreement with them. That is what surrealism wanted; that is certainly the greatness of its enterprise. It should again be noted that the 'totalitarian' idea is typical of the age; it animates the Nazi, the Marxist, and, today, the 'existentialist' attempt. It must certainly go back to Hegel as the common source of all these efforts. But I discern a serious contradiction at the origin of surrealism: to use Hegelian language, this movement had the concept of totality (that is what is striking in Breton's famous phrase, 'freedom, colour of man') and realized something quite different in its concrete manifesta- tions. The totality of man is, indeed, necessarily a synthesis, that is, the organic and schematic unity of all his secondary structures. A liberation
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which proposes to be total must start with a total knowledge of man by himself (I am not trying to show here that it is possible; it is known that
I am profoundly convinced that it is). That does not mean that we must know--or that we can know--a priori, the whole anthropological content of human reality, but that we can first reach ourselves in both the deep and manifest unity of our behaviour, our emotions, and our dreams. Surrealism, the fruit of a particular epoch, was embarrassed at the start by anti-synthetic survivals: first, the analytic negativity which is practised on everyday reality. Hegel writes of scepticism: Thought becomes perfect thought annihilating the being of the world in the multiple variety of its determinations, and the negativity of free self-consciousness at the heart of this multiform configuration of life becomes real negativity . . . scepticism corresponds to the realization of this consciousness, to the negative attitude in regard to the being who is the other; thus, it corresponds to desire and to work. ' As
a matter of fact, what appears to me essential in surrealist activity is the descent of the negative spirit into work: sceptical negativity becomes concrete; Duchamp's pieces of sugar as well as the fox-table are works, that is, concrete and painstaking destruction of what scepticism destroys only in words. I shall have as much to say for desire, which is one of the essential structures of surrealist love, and which is, as we know, desire of consuming, of destroying. We see the distance that has been covered; it exactly resembles the Hegelian avatars of consciousness: bourgeois analytics and idealistic destruction of the world by digestion. The attitude of the rallie? writers deserves the name Hegel gave to stoicism: 'It is only a concept
of negativity; it raises itself above this life like the spirit of the master. ' Surrealism, on the contrary, 'penetrates this life like the spirit of the slave'. This is certainly its value and, without any doubt, that is the way it can hope to join hands with the worker who experiences his freedom in work. However, the worker destroys in order to construct. By destroying the tree he constructs beams and boards. Thus, he learns the two aspects of freedom, which is a constructive negativity. Surrealism, borrowing meth- ods from bourgeois analysis, inverts the process: instead of destroying in order to construct, it constructs in order to destroy. Its construction is always alienated; it is compounded in a process whose end is annihilation. However, as the construction is real and the destruction is symbolic, the surrealist object may also be directly conceived as an end in itself. It is 'marble sugar' or a contestation of sugar, according to the way one looks at it. The surrealist object is necessarily iridescent because it represents the human order as topsy-turvy and because, as such, it contains within itself its own contradiction. That is what permits its constructor to claim that he is both destroying the real and is poetically creating a super-reality beyond reality. In fact, the super-real thus constructed becomes one object among others in the world, or it is only the crystallized indication of the possible destruction of the world. The fox-table of the last Exhibition is as much a syncretic effort to imbue our flesh with a vague sense of woodiness as it is a reciprocal challenge of the inert by the living and the living by the inert. The effort of the surrealists aims to present these two aspects of their production in the unity of the same movement. But the synthesis is lacking; the reason is that our authors do not want it. They are content
? 342 I Notes to Page 164
with presenting the two moments as blended in an essential unity and, at the same time, as being each essential, which does not remove the contradiction. And doubtless the expected result is achieved: the created object arouses a tension in the mind of the spectator, and it is this tension which is, strictly speaking, the surrealist instant; the given thing is destroyed by internal challenge, but the challenge itself and the destruction are in turn contested by the positive character and the concrete being-there of the creation. But this irritating iridescence of the impossible is, at bottom, nothing, unless it be the irreconcilable divergence between the two terms of a contradiction. W e have a case of technically provoking Baudelairean dissatisfaction. We have no revelation, no intuition of a new object, no seizure of matter or content, but only the purely formal consciousness of the mind as a surpassing, an appeal, and an emptiness. I shall again apply to surrealism Hegel's formula on scepticism: 'In [surrealism] consciousness actually experiences itself as a consciousness contradicting itself within itself. ' Will it at least turn in on itself? Will it bring about a philosophical conversion? Will the surrealist object have the concrete efficiency of the hypothesis of the evil genius? But a second preconception of surrealism intervenes at this point: I have shown that it utterly rejects subjectivity as the free arbiter. Its deep love of materiality (the object and the unfathomable support of its destructions) leads it to
profess materialism. Thus, it immediately covers up the consciousness which it for a moment discovered; it substantiates contradiction. It is no longer a matter of tension of subjectivity but of an objective structure of the universe. Read The Communicating Vessels: the title as well as the text shows the regrettable absence of any mediation; dream and waking are commu- nicating vessels; that means that there is a merging, an ebb and flow but not a synthetic unity. I know perfectly well what will be said: 'But this synthetic unity has to be made and that is precisely the aim which surrealism sets up for itself. ' 'Surrealism', says Mezer, 'starts from realities distinct from the conscious and the unconscious and goes towards the synthesis of those components. ' All well and good; but with what does it propose to do it? What is the instrument of mediation?
To see a whole merry-go-round of fairies whirling round a pumpkin (even if it is possible, which I doubt) is to mix dream and reality; it is not to unify them in a new form which would retain within it, transformed and surpassed, elements of the dream and the real. In fact, we are always on the level of contestation; the real pumpkin supported by the entire real world contests these fading fairies which run about its rind; and vice versa, the fairies contest the gourd. There remains consciousness, the only witness, the only recourse, of this reciprocal destruction; but it is not wanted. Whether we paint or sculpt our dreams, it is sleep which is eaten by waking: the scandalous object, retrieved by the electric lights, presented in a closed room, in the midst of other objects, two yards and ten inches from one wall and three yards and fifteen inches from another, becomes a thing of the world (I place myself here in the surrealist hypothesis which recognizes the same nature in the use as in the perception; it is evident that there would not even be any use in discussing the matter if one thought, as I do, that these natures are radically distinct) in so far as it is a positive
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creation and only escapes in so far as it is a pure negativity. Thus, surrealist man is an addition, a mixture, but never a synthesis.
It is no accident that our authors owe so much to psycho-analysis; it offered them under the name of 'complexes' precisely the model of those contradictory and multiple interpretations which they everywhere make use of and which are without real cohesion. It is true that 'complexes' exist. But what has not been sufficiently observed is that they can exist only on the foundation of a previously given synthetic reality. Thus, for surrealism the total man is only the sum total of all his manifestations. Lacking the synthetic idea, they have organized whirligigs of contraries; this flutter of being and non-being might have been able to reveal subjectivity, just as the contradiction of the sensible sent Plato back to intelligible forms; but their rejection of the subjective has transformed man into a plain haunted house: in that vague atrium of consciousness there appear and disappear self-destructive objects which are exactly similar to things. They enter by the eyes or by the back door. Powerful disembodied voices ring out like those which announced the death of Pan. This odd collection brings to mind American neo-realism even more than it does materialism. After this, as a substitute for the synthetic unifications which are effected by consciousness, one will conceive, by participation, a sort of magical unity which manifests itself capriciously and which will be called objective chance. But it is not the inverted image of human activity. One does not liberate a collection; one makes an inventory of it. And surrealism is just that--an inventory. It is only a matter of fighting against the discredit into which certain portions of the human condition have fallen. Surrealism is haunted by the ready-made, the solid; it abhors gene`ses and births; it never regards
creation as an emanation, a passing from the potential to the act, a gestation; it is the surging up ex nihilo, the abrupt appearance of a completely formed object which enriches the collection. At bottom, a discovery. So how could it 'deliver man from his monsters'? It has perhaps killed the monsters, but it has also killed man. It will be said that there remains desire. The surrealists have wanted to liberate human desire, they have proclaimed that man was desire. But that is not quite true; they have proscripted a whole category of desires (homosexuality, vices, etc. ), without ever justifying this proscription. Then, they have judged it conformable to their hatred of the subjective never to come to know desire except by its products, as psycho-analysis does too. Thus, desire is still a thing, a collection. But instead of referring back from things (abortive acts, objects of oneiric symbolism, etc. ) to their subjective source (which, strictly speaking, is desire) the surrealists remain fixed upon the thing. At bottom, desire is paltry and does not in itself interest them, and then it represents the rational explanation of the contradictions offered by com- plexes and their products. One will find very few and rather vague things in Breton about the unconscious and the libido. What interests him a great deal is not raw desire but crystallized desire, what might be called, to borrow an expression of Jaspers, the emblem of desire in the world. What has also struck me among the surrealists or ex-surrealists whom I have known has never been the magnificence of their desires or of their freedom. They have led lives which were modest and full of restraints; their sporadic
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violence made me think rather of the spasms of a maniac than of a concerted action; as for the rest, they were solidly harpooned by powerful complexes. As far as freeing desire goes, it has always seemed to me that the great roaring boys of the Renaissance or even the Romantics did a great deal more. You may say that, at least, they are great poets. Fine; there we have a meeting-ground. Some naive people have said that I was 'anti-poetic' or
against poetry'. What an absurd phrase! As well say that I am against air or against water. On the contrary, I recognize in no uncertain terms that surrealism is the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century; I even recognize that in a certain way it contributes to the liberation of man. But what it liberates is neither desire nor the human totality, but pure imagination. Now, the fact is that the purely imaginary and praxis are not easily reconciled. I find a touching admission of this in a surrealist of 1947, whose name seems predisposed to the utmost honesty:
'I must recognize (and probably I am not alone among those who are not easily satisfied) that there is a divergence between my feeling of rebellion, the reality of my life, and the fields of the battle of poetry which I may be waging, which the works of those who are my friends help me to wage. Despite them, despite myself, I hardly know how to live.
'Does recourse to the imaginary, which is a criticism of the social order, which is a protestation and a hastening of history, risk burning the bridges which connect us with other men and, at the same time, with reality? I know that there can be no question of freedom for man himself (Yves Bonnefoy, Surrealism in 1947, p. 68). [Bonnefoy (la bonnefoi)--good faith, honesty. This will explain M. Sartre's play on words in the sentence immediately preceding the quotation. --Translator. ]
But between the two wars surrealism spoke in a quite different tone. And it's something quite different that I attacked above concerning the surrealists' singing political manifestoes, their bringing judgement to bear against those among them who did not stick to the line, their defining a method of social action, their entering the C. P. and leaving it with a flourish, their rapprochement with Trotsky, and their concern about clarifying their position with regard to Soviet Russia. It's hard for me to believe that they thought they were acting as poets. It may be objected that man is a whole and that he is not to be divided up into a politician and a poet. I agree, and I will even add that I am more at ease for knowing that there are authors who make poetry a product of automatism and politics a conscious and reflective effort. But after all it is a truism; it is both true and false. For if man is one and the same, if, in a way, his mark is found everywhere, that does not at all mean that the activities are identical; and if, in each case, they bring the whole mind into question, one need not conclude that they do so in the same way, nor that the success of one justifies the failures of the other. Besides, does one think that one would be flattering the surrealists by telling them that they have been carrying on political activity as poets?
Still, it is reasonable for a writer who wants to mark the unity of his life and his work to show by a theory the community of aims of his poetry and his practice. But the fact is that this theory can itself only belong to prose. There is a surrealist prose, and that is the only thing I was considering in
? Notes to Pages 164-174 \ 345
the pages that are under attack. But surrealism is hard to pin down; it is Proteus. Sometimes it presents itself as completely involved in reality, struggle, and life; and if you call it to account, it starts screaming that it's pure poetry and that you're murdering it, and that you don't know what poetry is all about. This is shown rather clearly in the following anecdote which everyone knows but which is pregnant with meaning: Aragon had written a poem which rightly appeared as a provocation to murder; there was talk of legal prosecution; whereupon, the whole surrealist group solemnly asserted the irresponsibility of the poet; the products of autom- atism were not to be likened to concerted undertakings. However, to anyone who had some experience with automatic writing, it was apparent that Aragon's poem was of a quite different kind. Here was a man quivering with indignation, who, in clear and violent terms, called for the death of the oppressor; the oppressor was stirred to action, and all at once he found before him nothing more than a poet who woke up and rubbed his eyes and was amazed that he was being blamed for his dreams. This is what has just happened again: I attempted a critical examination of the totality of the fact 'surrealism' as a commitment in the world, in so far as surrealists were attempting, by means ofprose, to make its meanings clear. I was answered that I am harming poets and that I misunderstand their contribution' to the inner life. But really, they didn't give a rap about the inner life; they wanted to shatter it, to break down the walls between subjective and objective, and to wage the Revolution on the side of the
proletariat.
To conclude: surrealism is entering a period of withdrawal; it is breaking with Marxism and the C. P. It wants to demolish the Christian-Thomist edifice stone by stone. Very well, but I should like to know what public it expects to reach. In other words, in what souls it expects to ruin western civilization. It has said over and over again that it could not affect the workers directly and that they were not yet accessible to its action. The facts show that they are right: how many workers visited the 1947 Exhibition? On the other hand, how many bourgeois? Thus, its purpose can only be negative: to destroy the last remnants of the Christian myths in the minds of the bourgeois who form their public. That was what I wanted to show.
26. Which has particularly characterized them for the last hundred years because of the misunderstanding which has separated them from the public and has obliged them to decide upon the marks of their talent themselves.
27. Pre? vost declared, more than once, his sympathy for Epicureanism as revised and corrected by Alain.
28. If I did not speak of Malraux or Saint-Exupe? ry earlier, it is because they belong to our generation. They were writing before we were and are doubtless a little older than we. But whereas we needed the urgency and the physical reality of a conflict in order to discover ourselves, Malraux had the immense merit of recognizing as early as his first work that we were at war and of producing a war literature when the surrealists and even Drieu were devoting themselves to a literature of peace. As to Saint-Exupe? ry, against the subjectivism and the quietism of our predecessors he was able
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to sketch the chief features of a literature of work and tool. I shall show later that he is the precursor of a literature of construction which tends to replace the literature of consumption. War and construction, heroism and work, doing, having and being--it will be seen, at the end of this chapter, that these are the chief literary and philosophical themes of today. Consequently, when I say we, I believe that I can speak of them too.
29.