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Writing the Marvelous
Surrealism, Revolutionary Poetics and the Contagion of Elephants

by Franklin Rosemont
09.26.03

"ELEPHANTS ARE CONTAGIOUS!"

This 1925 proverb by Surrealist poets Benjamin Peret and Paul Eluard reminds us that the Surrealist movement, often misrepresented simply as a school of painting, was in fact founded by poets, and that the Surrealist idea of poetry departs radically from prevailing conceptions. Founded in the chauvinistic aftermath of World War I, Surrealism put the accent on freedom, starting with the freedom of the imaginary. Refusing to regard poetry in an aesthetic light or as a form of edification or consolation, Surrealists have identified it as a passionate risk-taking adventure involving nothing less than the emancipation of language. In their view poetry is humankind’s fundamental experience and the true source of all knowledge, but it can come into being only by disrupting and breaking through what they regard as the debased, fragmented, and stultifying language of ordinary, “rational” discourse.

Surrealists found in automatic writing – writing without conscious control – a means of releasing the unconscious, thereby freeing the mind of inhibitions and expressing what Andre Breton, in his first Surrealist Manifesto, called “the real functioning of thought.” Breton’s initial definition of Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism” proved highly elastic, and many other approaches have been developed since then. The movement’s overarching aspiration has always been to reduce and ultimately resolve the disabling contradictions of modern society – between the real and the imaginary, conscious and unconscious, dream and action – thus pointing the way toward a non-repressive civilization.

In the elaboration of this project, Breton and his friends were influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic studies of dreams and unconscious life as well as by the philosopher Georg Wilheim Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectical method they readily adopted and whose equation of poetry with the “unfettered imagination” confirmed their own experience. Convinced that poetry provided answers to the fundamental problems of life and society, the Surrealist Group in December 1924 brought out the first of 12 issues of the premier Surrealist journal, La revolution surrealiste, signifying their intention to transform the world by realizing poetry in everyday life.

The first Surrealists’ insistence on “unfettering,” their call for “complete nonconformism,” and their bold self-identification as “specialists in revolt” has far-reaching implications. Their rejection of a large part of Europe’s established literary culture quickly extended to a critique of its broader values and institutions, including the family, church, and state. The title of one of their early tracts, Open the Prisons! Disband the Army! (1925), summed up their attitude toward what they regarded as the inherently authoritarian character of Western civilization.

The founders of Surrealism were European, but never Eurocentric. Indeed, their enthusiasm for the art of Africa, Oceania, and the pre-Columbian Americas and their deep interest in Asian philosophy gave the movement a distinctly international orientation. In 1925, due to their support for Abd el-Krim and the North African Rif tribes’ uprising against French colonialism, their internationalism assumed a political dimension and hastened the evolution of a specifically Surrealist critique of white supremacy and imperialism. Similarly, Surrealism’s quest for the unrepressed life led to a radical questioning of gender stereotypes. Breton’s aphorism, “I wish I could change my sex the way I change my shirt,” significantly predated a later generation’s sexual revolution.

Surrealism’s openness to the “other” – other conceptions of poetry, other cultures, other ways of thinking and behaving – had impressive results. Of the many so-called major avant-garde movements that emerged in Europe during the first half of the 20th century – Fauvism, Cubism, and their sequels – Surrealism is the only one in which women and people of color have participated actively and in sizable numbers. By the mid-1930s the original Paris Surrealist Group had blossomed into a world movement, with dozens of groups all over Europe and Latin America as well as North Africa and Japan. These groups expanded and transformed Surrealist theory and practice in many ways.

The movement’s aims and activities were not appreciated by everyone, of course. Driven underground in Nazi-occupied Europe, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and later in Hirohito’s Japan, Surrealism was routinely ridiculed in the liberal democracies and was virulently attacked on the floor of the U.S. Congress in 1949. In other words, its fundamentally subversive character did not go unnoticed.

Indeed, starting with poetry, Surrealists developed not only a critique of the existing order but also a constantly expanding range of imaginative strategies to transform it, and these strategies bring us back to poetry. Surrealism’s revolution has been advanced in painting, collage, film, dance, and other arts, but its primary vehicle has always been the written word.

Disregarding restrictive notions of “reality” and putting language “in a state of effervescence,” as Breton put it, Surrealist writing always aims to upset routine, overturn conventions, champion the Marvelous, liberate desire, and often – as our opening proverb suggests – provoke laughter. In many Surrealist poems the magic of the unexpected turns linear time inside out and transcends so-called “natural law” in vivid waking dreams:

I wish the sun were shining tonight…
I wish I were a root in the tree of the sky

—André Breton (Selected Poems, 1969)

Your name was shaped by that magician
Who orchestrated rainbows

—Mary Low (Where the Wolf Sings, 1994)

The skylight drowns
As you walk into my voice
Carrying a box of flames

—Philip Lamantia (Becoming Visible, 1981)

Sometimes poetry itself is the subject:

Words, phrases, syllables, stars turning about a fixed center. Two bodies, many beings meeting in one word. The paper becomes covered with indelible letters, spoken by nobody, dictate by nobody, that burn and flame up and go out. This, then, is how poetry exists. And if I no not exist, you do…

The poem prepares a loving order.

—Octavio Paz (Early Poems, 1935-1955, 1973)

Humor, too, can reinvent the world. Peret’s riots of outrageous images hurl us into a free-for-all carnival:

The piano devil that roars like a severed head of hair
And the fourteen oval rays from the belly of the sea
Whose presence is desirable only in the morning
When weeds cover up reason and sing

—(Peret’s Score, 1965)

African-American poet Ted Joans spoofs airline security systems:

Mismanage your child care
To insure softer mattresses
From smoke stacking
Due to fast food fever

Shake all airplane underwear
To destroy wheelbarrow seeds
From sprouting
Due to altitudinal changes

(Teducation: Selected Poems, 1999)

Hatred of injustice, combined with a deep love of the natural world, fires the poetry of African-American Surrealist Jayne Cortez:

Every time I think about us women
I think about the trees…
I feel like a tree
A tree caught
In the catacomb of bones
Enslaved in the red light districts of oppression

(Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, 1996)

Criticism in Service of Poetry

ll Surrealist writing not immediately recognizable as poetry may legitimately be considered the continuation of poetry by other means. Many of the movement’s most forceful works focus on intrusions of the marvelous in daily life. These chronicles of chance encounters and other “irrational” experiences are a kind of initiation into the dialectics of desire and necessity. Breton’s Nadja—often mistaken for a novel—as well as his Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and Arcanum 17, are classics of this genre. Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant explores hidden dimensions of urban life: the enchantment of certain streets, flea markets, parks and cafes. English-born Leonora Carrington’s deeply moving Down Below chronicles the traumatizing adventures she endured after she was institutionalized by her family and declared “incurably insane.”

Few Surrealists have written fiction, choosing rather to focus on the surreality within reality, but there are important exceptions. Rene Crevel’s Babylon and Putting My Foot In It are notable for their scathing indictment of social inequality, while Robert Desnos’s Liberty or Love! Has the frenzied atmosphere of a pulp thriller. Combining Surrealism and feminism, Carrington’s hilarious The Hearing Trumpet tells of a nursing-home revolt led by a 92-year-old woman. In the haunting Zenobia, by Romanian poet Gellu Naum, a quixotic pair of lovers triumphs over bureaucratic terror and desolation.

American novelist Rikki Ducornet’s darkly humorous tales (The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition) reveal highly disturbing characters in constant metamorphosis on the edge of multiple disasters. While diverging from the traditional novel form, these writers emphasize the ritual and art of storytelling.

Surrealism has also produced a wealth of critical writing, from Louis Aragon’s excoriating assault on modern literature, Treatise on Style (1928) to Paul Garon’s celebration of the poetics of African-American music, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (1975; revised 1996). Highlighting creative playfulness and high humor, such criticism is virtually the opposite of the jargon-filled, dry-as-dust school of formalist literary analysis.

Especially vital is Surrealism’s far-reaching social criticism. In Breton’s writings (Manifestoes of Surrealism, What is Surrealism? Free Rein), rigorous theory and the utopian imagination—dialectics and dreams—join forces in the struggle for freedom and a better world. English-born Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology, with contributions by Crevel, Peret, Raymond Michelet, and others, concentrates on the critique of white supremacy, as does Martinican Aime Cesaire’s powerful Discourse on Colonialism. Surrealism’s feminist dimension is also amply reflected in a wide range of critical writings. Searching essays on sexism, racism, ecology, love, and work—by French lesbian Claude Cahun, Martinican Suzanne Cesaire, Bulgarian-born Nora Mitrani, and Iraqi-born Haifa Zangana, among others—are featured in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998).

Surrealism’s lively agitational tracts exemplify some of the movement’s best lyrical invective and reflect the movement’s approach to topical issues, from war and censorship to sex scandals and the Columbus quincentennial. A selection of the French Group’s declarations is included in What is Surrealism?, and the U.S. Surrealist Group’s tracts are collected in The Forecast is Hot!

If “language has been given to humankind to make Surrealist use of,” as Breton once said, Surrealists have certainly been keeping their part of the bargain by putting poetry—the urgency of poetry—first on the agenda. For Surrealists, poetry is not only the “philosopher’s stone” effecting marvelous transmutations, it is also the elixir of life with an infinite capacity for renewal.

That’s why those elephants are still contagious.