Maurice Rollinat

Mostly untranslated until recently, Maurice Rollinat's dark poetry evokes obsessed phantasmagoric images of death and the unpleasant. A disciple of Baudelaire, he joined the literary group Hydropathes ("those who are afraid of water"), an anti-clerical literary group with ties to the decadent literary movement. Many of Rollinat's poems were set to piano accompaniment, as he would attract a number of celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, to the cabaret Le Chat Noir-- infamous for being the bohemian nineteenth-century absinthe-fueled nightclub in the Montmartre district of Paris. Rollinat's friend, and author Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, wrote that "Rollinat might be Baudelaire superior  in the sincerity and depth of diabolism."

Aside from a couple of poems from magazines and e-zines, English translations of Maurice Rollinat's poems are difficult to come by. Though for the most part dismissed throughout his lifetime, his poetry certainly bears surrealist traits. A collection of his translated poetry would be monumental, as such a collection is long overdue. 

                                                       Maurice Rollinat (1846-1903)




IN THE LIBRARY

It calls up dreams of ancient forests.
Thirteen oblong lamps cast a spectral light,
A sepulchral glare throughout day and night,
On books full of shadows and secrets.

I always shuddered when entering there:
I felt myself, among its railings and haze,
Drawn by the pale arms of thirteen chairs
And watched by thirteen portraits' gaze.

From out of a high window, with midnight near,
I saw floating one night, and disappear,
The goblin who dances at the door of doom,

When suddenly I trembled to the sound of chimes:
The clock had just struck thirteen times
In the gruesome silence of that accursed room. m.


THE SOMNAMBULIST

A hat on his head and a cane in his hand,
His rigid frame squeezed into black frock tails,
He goes to and fro up along the garrett rails,
With a mechanical mien and a step not of man.

Strange stroller, spectre, and sham,
Endlessly repeating his terrible trail.
Against storm-shrivelled skies, parchment pale,
He makes his towering funereal stand.

Suddenly, in the hellish lightning's spasm,
As he teeters toward a channel-side chasm
With the grace of a dancer or tightrope artiste,

Horror seizes my being and congeals my blood,
For a great ebony cat (gnashing Hydrophobe!)
Has come to awaken Monsieur Somnabuliste.


THE EVIL EYE

The Evil Eye's tormenting me:
An eye in which harsh censure gleams,
In which cold hate reverberates,
A glassy, staring eye like that
Of one to execution damned.

Without surcease, relentlessly,
It goes before or after me,
No matter where I go or lurch.
The Evil Eye!

So very vuln'rable am I
To that malignant yellow eye
That even in the dark it glows;
A tamer whose foiled beast I be,
Transfixing, scrutinizing me,
The Evil Eye!

André Breton: The Early Years of Revolt (Pre-Dada)

*Those new to surrealist thought must bear in mind that surrealism remains, as it began, a collective and international adventure, and that the preeminence of André Breton's position, as the leader of the Surrealist movement, does not detract from the contributions made by a host of others. 

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." 

"The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration'. Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history."

What is Surrealism?

As this online publication is still in its earliest stages, I thought it most appropriate to provide a succinct exposition of the Surrealist movement, contrary to prevalent misdefinitions. The primary aim of La Révolution surréaliste is to rectify invalid misinterpretations of surrealism over the years, and more importantly focus on crucial aspects of the movement that otherwise have been ignored or distorted. Taking this investigation even further, and in the tradition of the Dada and Surrealist movements that swept over Europe, La Révolution surréaliste will build upon its predecessors and introduce a newly committed revolution to contemporary society: in light of current revolutionary and poetic needs. 

This small essay is a presentation of surrealism as an introduction. In it are the most basic principles of the surrealist movement. In no way does it pretend to be a 'complete' study of surrealism as a whole. As La Révolution surréaliste continues to grow, it will further outline the aims, principles, theories and history of the international surrealist movement, and soon may it show its intimate and even inseparable relationship to the theory and practice of proletarian emancipation. The following is a book review of What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings by André Breton, an incredibly wealthy source of detailed information involving the Surrealist movement. 

Where rises the spirit of revolt, there will be the living presence of André Breton. This superb collection of Breton's writings provides not only a necessary analyzation of surrealist thought, but an equally necessary corrective to the confusion about everything that pertains to surrealism in the English-speaking world. Disseminated by television, newspapers and textbooks, these misconceptions regarding the revolutionary movement of surrealism, may be regarded as the 'vulgar' reinforcement of the anti-surrealist confusion which would seem to constitute, to-day, a component of all repressive ideology. As bourgeois civilization remains a succession of monstrous crimes against childhood, the boredom of the mundane initiated Breton decisively into the realm of pure subversion and revolt. The Surrealist Manifesto, a declaration aiming at nothing less than complete human emancipation, and the reconstruction of society governed by the watchword, 'To each according to his desire', appeared in October 1924. In it, surrealism refused to accept rigid definition, boundaries assigned by conventional rationality, or academic compartmentalization. These young men representing the surrealist movement, were intelligent geniuses capable of extreme hatred; adventurers drawn towards the exceptional. Together they had through a war and were bored by the conventional opportunities awaiting them and truly lived the surrealist life: complete human freedom. 

In 1925 the French surrealist group took its first steps in the direction of revolutionary politics, thus reaffirming surrealism's fidelity to the tenets of 'total revolt, complete insubordination, formal sabotage,' The movement's fundamental perspectives were global from the very beginning, and during the next decade, the list of countries involved in the movement lengthened, the number of activists expanded, and their activity intensified. The misconception of America's role in the movement is discussed as well, and Breton's efforts to globalize surrealism are documented, as well as the surrealist transformation in America. The selected writings of Breton, include essays (some of which have never been printed before in English) that place a significant emphasis on the surrealist adventure, the surrealist interrogation of dreams, the magisterial triumph of mad love, the 'systematic derangement of the senses' proclaimed by Rimbaud, and other methods which force inspiration and make it work to order. 

Art and anti-art are imaginary solutions; surrealism lies elsewhere. It cannot be emphasized too strongly: Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances. Only the social revolution, 'from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom'-- will enable the true life of poetry and mad love to cast aside, definitively, the fetters of degradation and dishonor and to flourish will unrestrained splendor. Vainly will one search in surrealism for a motive inconsistent with this fundamental aspiration. 

'Human emancipation', wrote André Breton in Nadja, 'remains the only cause worth serving'. For the surrealists, surrealism remains precisely the best means of serving that cause. Historically, the advent of surrealism meant the end of a long succession of avant-garde cultural tendencies, constituting a qualitatively new basis for exploration along and beyond the lines formerly delimited by art and literature. This epochal achievement, comprehensible only within the framework of world revolutionary development, is roughly analogous, on the poetic plane, to the theory of permanent revolution, Freudian psychoanalysis, general relativity theory, quantum mechanics and other revolutionary developments of twentieth-century thought. 

Turned forever toward the automatic message, André Breton will forever remain the surest guide to poetic action. Within these selected writings, are a compilation of various perspectives of international surrealism as they evolved over more than half of a century. Breton is forever instilled as and the principal spokesman of a movement, and an instrument of exploration and revolt, that still to-day, demands to be carried further. As Breton mentions in the introduction, "this book is dedicated to all who will take these risks, who will fan the flames of every true revolt, who will defend the revolutionary cause of poetry, freedom, and love-- no matter what." What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings is an obvious must-have for the initiated surrealist, placing the surrealist revolutionary movement in perspective-- a historical movement that is typically misinformed by biased critics. Despite any one person's political affiliation, surrealism's true political intent was based solely upon imagination. 'The imagination is revolutionary or it is nothing.' 

Agenda of La Révolution surréaliste

In Remembrance of Jacques Vaché...

Yesterday, ninety-four years ago, marked the suicide of Jacques Vaché (7 September 1895- 6 January 1919), who took his life by overdosing on opium. Vaché was the preeminent inspiration behind the Surrealist movement in France, teaching Breton the values of nonconformism and revolt. Revolution for Vaché was no mere theoretical proposition; rather, he stood by his teachings all the way to his eventual death. For obvious reasons,  Vaché should be the first canonization of Surrealism, if there were such a thing. This online journal is dedicated to Vaché. 

"The most heroic word in all languages is Revolution." -Eugene V. Debs