Octavio Paz has written, 'It is impossible to speak of André Breton in a language that is not that of passion.' This testifies to the great force of Breton's ideas and to their undiminished capacity for provoking heated controversy. André Breton was born on 18 February 1896, in Tinchebray, department of Orne, in France. 'It is perhaps childhood', he said in the Surrealist Manifesto, 'that comes closest to true life'. But bourgeois civilization remains a succession of monstrous crimes against childhood: the family, the inhuman moral codes, the awe of private property, the stifling atmosphere of religion with its abject prayers, clangorous church bells and odious smiles of priests. Over the childhood of André Breton, as of everyone else, hovered the shadow of boredom. Breton tells us very little of his childhood; it is not a matter of importance for him, or for us. An accurate and detailed biography has yet to be published in any language, as one may see odd gaps in André Breton's life.
It was a major turning point in his life when, in the military hospital at Nantes, he met the extraordinary personage Jacques Vaché, a soldier undergoing treatment. Vaché was an iconoclast of a new type, the flamboyant protagonist of a devastating form of wit which he designated umor. His total contempt for literary etiquette, his vehement rejection of the alibi of art, his sense of the 'theatrical and joyless uselessness of everything', initiated Breton decisively into the realm of pure subversion and revolt. Vaché's influence was emphatically extraliterary, to say the least. A few additional texts by him have recently been unearthed; but during Breton's lifetime the 'complete works' of Jacques Vaché consisted of a page or two of prose and letters to a few of his friends; these were published posthumously, at Brenton's initiative, under the title War Letters. Umor was for Vaché no mere theoretical proposition; he lived it. He cultivated a manner of extreme ridicule aimed in all directions at once. This evolution from the path of "estheticism" and "literature" toward a more revolutionary path, can be traced through the journals Nord-Sud and Littérature toward the eventual La Révolution surréaliste.
Vaché's influence on Breton and surrealism cannot be stressed enough. Truly a man of ideas, he was also very much a man of action-- dramatic, disquieting, and new. Vaché's umor sufficed to carry him, and his friends as well, irrevocably beyond the stale conventions, mediocre ambitions, cringing lassitude and morbid 'good taste' that defined the intellectual climate of France during the first world war. It fell to this shrill, startling sage, whose cosmic foundations retain even to-day their unsurpassed 'umoristic' power, to set in motion a veritable machine of war, which, in spite of everything, including himself, is situated intrepidly in the service of human freedom and a certain lost sense of dignity. Is it any wonder that the umor that guided his life should also have pervaded his death? When, one fine day in January 1919, he who had written that 'it's too boring to die alone' chose to depart this life through an overdose of opium. And thus Jacques Vaché, the absolute vagabond, entered immortality, the annihilating beacon of the 'new spirit' awakened by the war.
Of influences on Breton during his earlier years, Vaché's was obviously the most substantial and the most personally intense. There was also the overwhelming impact of Freud, whose works Breton began to study at the time, initially in connection with his medical curriculum. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and, more generally, researches by him and his colleagues into unconscious life, as well as the psychoanalytic technique of free association, placed at Breton's disposal an immense store of scientific knowledge and-- more importantly-- irreplaceable instruments of psychic exploration, which seemed to him especially valuable in unveiling the mechanisms of inspiration, lyricism, and poetic creation. The first materials of surrealism were the deliriums, nightmares, and hysteria witnessed by Breton during his stint in medicine and neuropsychiatric centers. The discoveries of psychoanalysis did more than confirm, clarify and extend conclusions already reached, following altogether different roads by poets and artists. It is a mark of Breton's perspicacity that he was among the first in France to champion Freud's ideas.
From 1915 through 1918 Breton corresponded with Guillaume Appolinaire, of whom Jacques Vaché wrote: "It's already been said, but it's got to be repeated: HE MARKS AN EPOCH. The beautiful things we can do now!' Apollinaire was the undisputed leader of the Parisian avant-garde in the years just before the first world war. He was the greatest French poet of his time; he invented the word surrealist. An essay by Breton in Les Pas perdus (1924) credited him with the 'reinvention of poetry'.
Breton also came to know Pierre Reverdy, whose poetry abounds in unforeseeable juxtapositions of images evoking a soundless mystery of ceaselessly shifting apparitions. Reverdy wrote some important reflections on the poetic image, which Breton quoted in the Surrealist Manifesto.
Breton's attention was also drawn, in the general period of the first world war, to the works of others who were to exert a strong influence on him and on the whole course of surrealism. One of the most significant was Arthur Rimbaud (especially Illuminations), whose 'power of incantation' Breton found overwhelming, and who would remain always a key source in the development of surrealist thought. Another, was D.A.F. de Sade, known as the Marquis, author of such works as Justine, Julliette and the 120 Days of Sodom, all imbued with an anti-religious, erotic and revolutionary spirit. Mention must be made, too, of the little-known Saint-Pol-Roux, whom Breton would pronounce the 'Master of the Image' in a 1925 essay; Alfred Jarry, author at fifteen of the raucous play Ubu roi and later the inventor of pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions'; poets Charles Cros and Germain Nouveau; and Raymond Roussel, author of Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, whose star in surrealism has risen steadily.
Above all, Breton learned about Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont, whose influence on surrealism has been and remains of unparalleled magnitude and depth. To give an adequate sense of Lautréamont's towering majesty is impossible. To describe him merely as the greatest poet of all time would be to say too little. With Lautréamont human proportion loses every footing furnished by Christian civilization; in Poésies and Les Chants de Maldoror poetry overflows every limit. Not without reason has his work been called a 'bible of the unconscious'. Breton wrote a preface to Lautréamont's Complete Works: "In the eyes of certain poets of today, Les Chants de Maldoror and the Poésies sparkle with an incomparable brilliance. They are the expression of a total revelation that seems to exceed human possibilities... For centuries to come, everything thought and explored most audaciously will find here, formulated in advance, its magic law."
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