The Theory and
Techniques of Surrealist Poetry
Alan Gullette
University of
Tennessee-Knoxville
Spring 1979
English 4240:
Advanced Poetry Writing
Prof. Jon
Manchip White
Alan Gullette, Spring 1979
To speak of the techniques of surrealist
poetry is necessarily to speak of the theory behind their practice, a theory
that is unique in literature because it transcends literature and art
altogether and invades the domains of philosophy, psychology, and even
politics. In fact, as we will see,
surrealism is essentially a technique and an inquiry utilizing that technique
as a key to unlock the limitless within the human mind, effecting an
essentially spiritual liberation. (Or
so the story goes.) I will summarize
this theory, indicate the emphasis on chance and spontaneity in the techniques,
and finally discuss the validity of surrealism as an approach to literature.
Surrealism as a movement in literature had
its formal beginning with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by
André Breton in 1924. Prior to that, in
1919, the first automatic text, The Magnetic Fields, was produced by
Breton and Philippe Soupault. In his
first manifesto Breton explicitly defines surrealism as "psychic automatism in
its pure state" -- the purpose of which is to express and thus reveal
"the true functioning of thought."1 There is a need, of course, to discuss the
signal importance of this claim -- that is, if the claim has any meaning, and
if the techniques prescribed by surrealism achieve what it purported of them. Insofar as western civilization (and thus
our very lives) is practically built on thought (or was built, and is
sustained, by the activities of thought -- to an extent to be determined by the
very phenomenological inquiry that surrealism intends to be), then surely it is
important to look into surrealism, its basic concepts, to see what is
there. And this is quite apart from the
curiosity one might have about the various techniques employed by the
surrealist poet; though in fact an understanding of the concepts lends
credibility to the techniques and thus one begins to regard them in the light
of their own purported expansive possibilities.
The concept of surreality is that of a
reality "higher" than that to which we are accustomed: the reality of
"waking consciousness." This
surreality is proposed as a unity of the world of waking reality and that of
dream; of objectivity and subjectivity; of world and imagination or mind;
etc. In another important work, The
Communicating Vessels (1931), Breton expresses this plainly
enough: "the world of dream and
the real world are one and the same."2 The analogy contained in the title is that
the mind and the world are not separate but are continuously
"communicating" like two connected "vessels."
At the "living center" of the unity
of surreality is a sublime point -- or "the point
sublime" -- with which some part of the human mind communicates
directly. In these terms, then,
surrealism's aim can be said to be the development of a consciousness of this
communication, and therefore a realization of the surreal unity.3 This is implied by the interest in thought,
especially in thought freed from the usual constraints of convention, logic,
morality, the concern for producing aesthetic beauty, and various other forms
of repression. Logic and tradition are
seen by the surrealists to drastically limit thought and imagination -- and
thus experience, consciousness, and behavior.
The essence of this delimiting is what Breton called "the great
enigma" -- "the permanent cause of the conflict that exists between
man and the world" -- and this is just "the impossibility of
justifying everything by the logical."4 Logic, in this view, attempts to rule in the
conscious mind and in that narrow field of reality which it allows to enter
consciousness; but logic is necessarily frustrated, since the functioning of
logic requires a language which separates the subject from the object. Besides division as a natural operation of
thought as it is normally used (and in surrealist use the word seeks to unify
-- for Breton, "words make love"), however, there is also a movement
toward security which keeps us safely within the confines of the familiar, the
known, the conventional. Breton
criticized contemporary thought for its "extravagant overestimation oft he
known compared with what remains to be known," since knowledge is purely a
function of memory and ceases to have anything to do with reality (which
changes).5 "The key to
the mental prison" -- and thus the device for the liberation of thought --
was to be found in "the free, unlimited play of analogies" which
alone can break the "paltry means of cognition" that ordinarily
prevent us from "associating . . . the unassociable," and by
"breaking without discrimination that which we do not dare to wish to see
broken."6 Hence we have
the spontaneous juxtaposition, the unthought-of combination, the starling
simile, which was actually a device of Dadaist poetry and an element in the
work of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, precursors of surrealism.
In opening up thought, then, by sitting down
to write automatically, having an intention only to record what comes into the
mind spontaneously, without fear as to what might arise from the hidden depths
of the subconscious -- in relinquishing control over one's own thought, one
creates a channel for the "verbal manifestation" of "the cosmic
Word" (no less!).7 To
delineate this radical jump, we have the notion of objective chance, which is
the discovery of a natural link between the personal, collective, and even
"cosmic" unconsciousness, such as occurs with the find (trouvaille),
or found object.8 (A
surrealist will sometimes find an object which seizes his attention with its
uniqueness or with the uniqueness or unusualness of its situation or context --
from which the function of the object, if man-made, would be a puzzle; or it
might be a rock or a piece of wood bearing suggestive markings; or anything
extraordinary or coincidental. Such
objects would be incorporated into the surrealists' sculptures, montages,
collages, or be displayed as "ready-makes," etc.) The find represents the communication of the
vessels of mind and world through the intersection of desire and change at a
particular point in time and space.9 In the case of automatic writing, it is the word that is
"found" -- a voice is given to Chance. And since the point sublime is "the secret source of
objective chance," then surely the automatically written words are
manifestations of the cosmic Word.10 (The Greeks, paradoxically, identified the Word with logic -- or
vice versa -- at any rate that which the surrealist has to escape or suspend in
order to receive the "new" word as a revelation.) It was André Breton's belief that the
"evidence" arrived at through surrealist "research" (as he
termed the results and utilization of automatism and other experimental
techniques) was profoundly meaningful in its revealing some truth about the
nature of thought and of the relationship between the mind and the supreme
point and that between the supreme point and the specific present reality, etc.
A necessary concomitant of this belief is
that literature and art should serve as tools for a surrealist revolution --
primarily conceived as a revolution in consciousness, entailing the infinite
expansion of reality by the growing realization of the coming-together of mind
and matter, the absolute and the specific, etc. And yet, despite the profound relevance or liberating nature of
their transcriptions, the surrealist writers were themselves no more than
"modest recording instruments."
Conceiving of poetry in this way, it was only logical that "Breton
subscribed without question to the opinion that poetic excellence can only be
the result of spontaneity."11
If not spontaneous -- i.e., produced using surrealist techniques -- then
obviously it could not be related to surreality and thus to the ever-present
point sublime. (For we can only posit a
center if we posit a circumference, i.e., a surface; the present would then be
nothing more than the temporal manifestation of that absolute sublime, which
seems to be the position of Zen Buddhism -- which likewise denies the
separation of self and object: deny, in
fact, the existence of either self or object, seeing them as apparitions, the
products of thought.) With the
introduction of the absolute, all values shift, and art must be judged, if at
all, by its revelatory power.12
Let us now look at some of the other forms of
automatism that were used in surrealist "research." The best-known technique after automatic writing
was the modified children's game known as "the exquisite
corpse." This involved several
people consecutively writing entire lines or parts of a sentence without being
able to see what others have written.
The name comes from the first result of this method (in 1925): "Le cadavre
exquis boira le vin nouveau" -- "the exquisite corpse
drinks the new wine."13 Another method was the drawing of words
from a hat after they had been cut out of a newspaper article of the desired
length. The words were copied in that
sequence.14
Akin to the automatic texts were those
produced as dream transcriptions and those that resulted from
"spiritualist séances" conducted by Breton (which sometimes involved
hypnotism) and even from sleep-writing.
Robert Desnos was the most gifted in all of these experiments,
demonstrating the greatest facility, and was also able to speak
"automatically." There were
sleep-dialogues that sometimes became violent.
Desnos, Breton, and probably many of the others experimented with opium
and other drugs, which is only logical considering their essentially
psychedelic (i.e., "mind-revealing") pursuit and the pervading spirit
of experimentation.
In closing, let me return to the question of
validity concerning surrealist literary techniques, about which there has
probably been considerable controversy.
First of all, if we adopt a surrealist viewpoint, then, as we have seen,
art logically must be and naturally will tend to be surrealist, and thus be
justifiable only in its ability to reveal the new, the "never seen,"
the parallel activity of thought and chance in consciousness. But if we reject the surrealist position,
then the poetry cannot be judged on the basis of usual aesthetic standards, simply
because it was theoretically created without concern for any such
standards. Therefore, surrealist poetry
is exempt from aesthetic judgment. More
important by far -- infinitely more important, perhaps -- is the response that
arise in the individual who tries to openly experience the work as "evidence"
in the case for the sublime as the living center of the surreal unity of psyche
and "external reality," of inside and outside.
Notes
1 André
Breton, Manifestoes
of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 28.
2 Quoted
in J. H. Matthews, André Breton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967), p. 13.
3 Mary
Ann Caws, Surrealism
and the Literary Imagination (The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co.,
1966), p. 46.
4 See
Matthews, op
cit., p. 27.
5 Ibid.
p. 19.
6 Ibid.
p. 27.
7 Michel
Carrouges, André
Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism, trans. Maura
Prendergast (University of Alabama Press, 1974), p. 56.
8 Ibid.
p. 7.
9 Matthews,
p. 32.
10 Carrouges,
p. 199.
11 Matthews,
p. 30.
12 Cf.
"Art must draw its justification 'solely from its revelatory power'"
(Breton), Matthews, p. 28.
13 Herta
Wescher, Collage,
trans. Robert Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1968), p. 194-5.
14 Ibid.,
p. 134. Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists
used this technique before the surrealists were "surrealists." Poe, even earlier, suggested a very similar
technique in his instructions for "How to Write a Blackwood Article."
Web Links and Further
Information
Surrealist
Writers
http://alangullette.com/lit/surreal/
Jon Manchip
White (1924- ) is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of
Tennessee and helped develop UTK's Creative Writing Program. His many credits include: Mask of Dust (a.k.a. A Race for Life) (1953), Nightclimber (1968), and The Last Grand Master (1985). His supernatural collection Echoes and Shadows (2004) was recently
published by Tartarus
Press.
Jon
Manchip White at Iris Books
http://www.irisbooks.com/jmw/index.htm
Alan Gullette > Essays