From Poisson Soluble to Constellations: Breton's Trajectory for Surrealism Author(s): Anna Balakian Source: Twentieth Century Literature,

Vol. 21, No. 1, Essays on Surrealism (Feb., 1975), pp. 48 -58 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/440528 Accessed: 25/09/2009 09:06
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From

Poisson

Soluble Breton's

to

Constellations:

Trajectory Surrealism

for

ANNA BALAKIAN

It is true that among the many conditions of life and the arts, in which surrealismsought to make reforms, the social and political ones received at first the most publicity; but they were also precisely the areas in which results, assessed with the distance in time, remained academic rather than real. Fifty years after the First Manifesto the concordanceof action with the dream still remains in the category of a theoretical ideal. Liberty from the chains of economic servitude has not reached the standardof surrealistaspiration, (surrealism has not brought releasefrom the nine to five work day); the primitive, unbridled eye has not been recuperated; quite to the contrary,the forces of a mechanizedsociety, working in direct opposition to the desires of surrealism, have attained far greater control of the human eye than was dreamedpossible in 1924. The forces of advertisementand the adages of a still rigid educational system make us see what they want us to see. The Prometheanindividualism that Andre Breton and his colleagues claimed, not only for themselves but as the common birthright of everyman,is light years away from the conformist society which encroachesmore and more on the human spirit. But let me hasten to add that this pessimistic preamble is not meant to lead to the declarationthat surrealismfailed in its purpose and impact. There is one essential area in which Andre Breton'smanifesto succeededand proved indeed to be that Porte Albinos (The White Gateway) which he conceived in the companion piece to the Manifesto, entitled Poisson soluble. Those who catch surrealism'sprincipal message can proceed to the region of Absolute spring and take away from God, as Breton suggested, that which they had to surrendered God. Not the revolver,not the dream,not even love, but language 48

BRETON'SSURREALISTTRAJECTORY was to be in his own intellectualand human development the constant among the variables,the Porte Albinos of freedom and the structureof his reality. In has the First Manifestohe had made this significantstatement: "Language been to man that he may make surrealistuse of it." And after dismissing in a given few brief lines the common commerceof language, he pondered on its metamorphic reality: "To listen to oneself, to read oneself, have no other effect than to suspend the occult, that admirable recourse." If we analyze this sentence, we find several interesting factors in it. Whereas a few sentences earlierhe had referredto the commercialnotion of language with active forms of the verb: to speak, to write,--here he uses the reflexive in its passive connotation and implying a critical supervision which he rejects. The one who writes must be the objective recorderof the data but must restrainhimself from correction;and verbalismis viewed not as a form of communicationbetween two or more human beings but rather as an activity which we might as characterize recorderand amplifier,leaving the activatorof the phenomenon in a state of attentivenessand self-enlightenment. Psychiatrists, from whom Breton learned the procedure, subject their patients to this kind of betrayalthrough language in an effort to unravel and release those inhibitions that cause traumaticbehavior. Breton used the device for exactly the opposite purpose: to uncover what, in the non-pathological individual, could lead from constriction to liberty: liberty for unprogrammed activity, liberty of the mind to take a more total advantage of its vision of the common habitat. The information gleaned from the verbal register was not meant to serve as an index of existing alienation but was ratherto become a clue to latent power, which according to Breton was identifiablewith love, which in turn was identifiable with conjunction not only in terms of the male-femaleprinciple but of human relation with the three kingdoms of the naturalworld: the animal,plant, and mineral.In Poisson soluble he had given this primal definition of "amour":"C'est qu'il s'agit de vivre oi' la vie est capablede provoquerla convulsion ... L'amoursera. Nous reduironsl'art a sa plus simple expression qui est l'amour."l In illustrating this principle, examples such as the following abounded in Poisson soluble: "Dans sa chair transparentese conjuguent la ros&edu soir et la sueur des astres."2 In a document of the same vintage, "Les Mots sans rides,"he made the statement that became an adage: "jeux de mots, quand ce sont nos plus suiresraisons d'etrequi sont en jeu. Les mots du reste ont fini de jouer.Les mots font l'amour."3 "Wordsmake love": it is, I believe, in this global sense that the word "amour" must be taken with all that the word connotes of involuntaryattraction,union, recognitionand ecstasyas a releaseof creativeenergy.This motivating principle of word unions was the apex of Breton'spoetry. However, the principle needs to be examined more closely in terms of 49

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE what it became. If Breton's concept of the surrealist use of language had stopped there, we would be finding in his creative writings nothing more pervasive than automaticword play. In truth, I may observe, not in the sense of criticism but as a simple statement of fact, that for many of Breton's followers this recording, receiving, and transcribing character of automatic language sufficed;with this device they created astonishing verbal structures, word games now widely identifiedas surrealistpoetry.Overtly comical,symptomatic of release from moral censure, a reservoir of irony pouring out social becauseof the non-sequitur censure,these writings can be designatedas "absurd" of character the images they unfurl or shoot into space. In emphasizingthe involuntarycharacter the encounterof nonsequential of word groups and of the images they conjure, Breton did not agree with his elder colleague Pierre Reverdy that this was an active, voluntary exercise on the part of poets. He came to see in this kind of rapprochement a consciously not inventive process but a self-instructiveone, a training device rather than one of artistic expression.In other words, the poet did not bring these words or images together; rather, he observed them gravitate toward each other by making himself open-mindedor dreamprone so that he would not impede their course and not interpret their collision in terms of meanings that have been inculcatedin him by his culture. In rejecting the principle of active verbal associations, Breton appears to be rejecting the notion of what he called "elliptic" art, what Mallarme had so well practiced in the latter part of his career, particularlyin those obscure sonnets. If we were to make a concrete analogy, we might say that the surrealistpoet, as Breton understood the term in the early stage of his of career,is not a manipulator a power plant,who at will turnson the switch and but an observer of the verbal lights generated: generates light II en va des images surrealistescomme de ces images de l'opium que l'homme n'evoque plus, mais qui s'offrent a lui, spontanement, despotiquement. II ne peut pas les congedier; car la volonte n'a plus de force et ne gouverne plus les facultes.4 Thus he describesin the first part of the First Manifesto the passive character of a man in the face of the convulsive characterof words. In the next page he describesthe state of surrealism createdthroughthe practiceof languagewith a galaxy of images-the word "image"replacing that of "light";the movement of the image creates in the observer a vertigo comparableto the effect of a pharmaceuticalstimulant; it takes over as the sole compass of the mind. Two elements of this part of the discussion are interesting and significant in terms of the evolution of Breton's own art. He states that the purpose of his discoveryis not to guard jealously for himself a divine and unique secret, but to put it, as he says, at the disposal of everyone. In other words, if we 50

BRETON'S SURREALISTTRAJECTORY define this unfurling of disconnected images as surrealistpoetry, they would have meaning only to the perpetrator;the object would be meaningful only to its subject, and what Breton would have communicated to his readers would not be the result of his own self-probe but the methodology by which each could do the same and all become surrealistpoets. It would appear,then, that Breton was going counter to Mallarme,not only in his rejection of elliptic poetry but also in the rejection of the notion that poetry is a lonely and elitist means of communication for the happy few. Language would not be the expression of one man's expansion of consciousnessbut a clarificationof one of the channelsof the expansion.Psychic language is then a creation. Breton's faith in the validity of this processis sustainedby his conviction that automatic language is equally availableto all, the common treasure,commonly corrupted; all men, equally deprived of spontaneouslanguage by the curbs society has put on their imagination,reach,in Breton'sview, a negative equalityfrom which he presumesthem to be recuperablefor a collective dreamof life in high gear. The final part of this passageof the Mlanifestorelating to language refers to the eventual result of the practiceof surrealistlanguage on the poet in his role as self monitor. Se bornant d'aborda les subir, il s'aper5oitbientot qu'elles flattent sa raison, augmentent d'autant sa connaissance.II prend conscience des etendues illimitees ou se manifestent ses desirs, oui le pour et le contre se reduisentsans cesse, oiu son obscuritene le trahit pas. II va, porte par ces images qui le ravissent,qui lui laissenta peine le temps de soufflersur le feu de ses doigts. C'est la plus belle des nuits, la nuit des eclairs: le jour, aupresd'elle est la nuit.5 In the process of self-instruction,he foresees progress from the passive role to implied by the verb "subir" that of an active role inherent in the verb "va." Endowed with the knowledge of his own prowess he goes. Notice the word "va"used in isolation here, in the same indefinite and total way that Victor Hugo used "va" to characterizeHernani. Many years later, Breton was to give a variation of this sentence in his poem, Les Etats-Generaux,in selfcharacterization. suis celui qui va." In the First Manifesto the power of "Je light first illuminateshis own cognizanceof the scope of the human self, then sets him ablaze in Promethean splendor. But, mark that the "feu de ses doigts" does not imply the use of exterior implements like a torch. The powerhousehas become the self, and the ignition is self-contained.He becomes whose luminosity ignited matter.The vision is consumedin "lanuit des eclairs," is such that in contrastday is as night. How did the initial monitoring of the surrealist language lead Breton from the practiceof automaticwriting to the strategicinvasion of the unlimited spaces of desire and illumination? It was not a rapid process but one which 51

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE took him from 1924 to 1959, at which time he published Constellations,his final poetic work, which shamefullyremainedunavailableto the literarypublic and even to the critic-scholaruntil it was collected in Gallimard'spaperback, Signe ascendantin 1968. The linguistic evolution of Breton'spoetic writings would make a volume, a very importantvolume, in itself. I hope that it may become one soon in the hands of some linguistically knowledgeableand poetically sensitive scholar. I have myself shown elsewhere the broad lines of his progressivechange in the utilization of language. For this particularoccasion,I shall limit myself to the support of a certain point of view on the basis of an examinationof that final work-a point not sufficientlyrecognizedby scholarsof surrealismand certainly not by the general public, and stunningly revealedby this last work which still remainspracticallyunreadand unexamined.The hypothesisI want to state and try to support is that Breton's surrealismwas not a static posture but that it underwentvery significantevolution,similar to the phenomenonwhich occurred in Mallarme,who after having served as spokesman and pathblazer to the symbolists, had proceeded on his own astral course, leaving far behind the coterie he had helped to fashion. In the case of Breton, the general attitude is that his relationship with fellow surrealists was periodically marred by the defections from the ranks whereas he stood unflinchingly and stubbornly by his initial creed. But if we scrutinize the progress of his poetic diction and linger a while on his final work, we realize that the more significant point of conflict was the fact that Breton'ssurrealismevolved, developed, and went beyond the tenets of the First Manifesto,whereasmany of his followers learned the lesson of automatic writing and the juxtapositionof distant realities, and whether as card carrying surrealists or liberated ones, practiced surrealist language in its initial and pristine form. Breton abandonedthe passive form of surrealistlanguage fairly early in his career; the fact was consciously acknowledged by Breton; according to his second wife, Jacqueline,by the time he wrote L'Air de l'eau in 1934 he had alreadyabandoned"automaticwriting." (If we need outside evidence to in support what is self-revelatory the poems themselves!) It is obvious that in Poisson soluble, which is a much more thorough work of automaticlanguage than Les Champsmagnetiques,and is the companion and illustrativepiece of the Manifesto,Breton is his own monitor as he transcribesthe psychic rhythm of his flow of language; but by the time he is writing the long poems of the War years, he is producing intricately structuredworks. The unleashing of verbal energy in the course of the forty years of practice culminates in the series of prose poems, Constellations, first printed in an edition of only 350 copies. 52

BRETON'SSURREALISTTRAJECTORY
After writing free verse for more than thirty years, Breton arrives in Constellations to the prose stanza, reminiscent not of Baudelaire's poems in prose, nor of Reverdy's, but of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations in its compactness and concrete ellipsis. As he says himself: "Plus entre les mots la moindre brise." Internal evidence shows that he had Rimbaud in mind. He echoes Rimbaud's "le sang coula," of "Apres le deluge," continues the garland-decked festivities and the natural but antediluvian settings of his earthscapes illuminated by astral spectrums. He also creates a long series of variations on the image of nature as a burning caldron conjured up at the end of Rimbaud's first illumination, "Apres le deluge." The immediate inspiration of Constellations was the series of gouaches of Mir6 which date from the 1940's. But the structured ellipsis of Breton's word paintings bears a direct connection to Mallarme's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard. In Mallarme's poem, "Constellation" is a single word, central in the void where the poet's will meanders and confronts the absurdities of chance. Un Coup de des is a sad masterpiece, a one man's journey in a cosmos whose rules are outside of his dominion, where his will and the whims of objective chance are pitted in uneven battle, and the struggle culminates in the poet's disastrous awareness of his losing score. As we shall see, Breton's Constellations is a cosmic venture in which man joins nature through his manipulation of language which extends the receptivity of his five senses and achieves, over and above the verbal synaesthesia, an ontological one as well. When Mallarme died, they found on his work table reams of mathematical formulas. It is interesting to note that Breton also, in this last stage of his poetic activity, refers to mathematics. He had always been fascinated by the law of probability. Here in his last poems we find a mathematical series. We are in the realm of numbers, and numbers are the tools both of organization and of chance. Breton is no longer a simple monitor here. He sets out to structure the forces of chance and thereby returns to the poetic ellipsis from which he had originally sought release. But if indeed there occurs at the end of his career a conciliation between the forces of the unconscious and the conscious in terms of the poetic act, and if the general appearance of these poems reminds one of the deliberate crytographic writing of Mallarme, the vision derived from similar poetic mechanics is of an entirely different character. Breton tells us that the twenty-two units of Miro's painting progress as a mathematical series, deliberate yet drawing from the resources of chance. He calls it "une succession delibere d'oeuvres," the result, as he sees it, of a successful combination of dexterity and chance (adresse et hasard). Gerard Legrand, in whose anthology of the works of Breton I first found Constellations,6 suggests that the same structure is paralleled in the prose poems of Breton.

53

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE He is absolutely right. In fact, the two words Breton uses to characterize Mir6's feat, "adresse et hasard,"could be used to define his own verbal composition. What these poems show, in fact, as they multiply and elaborate certain fundamentalimages in mathematicalprogression,is that Breton is one of the most prominent nature poets of the twentieth century. But as a nature poet, he does not describeits manifestations,but rather,what he has come to believe to be the central mechanism of nature: the phenomenon of metamorphosis, reflected in human nature in the functioning of love. We observe that Breton'svision of nature relies neither on the pathetic fallacy of the Romanticistsnor does it representthe objectivity and impersonality of natural laws, senseless in their relation to human intentions. Breton does not try to draw nature into his own private orbit, neither does he let himself fall adrift in nature'sscheme as an uncomprehending,alien element. He expected no solace from God, no confidentialityfrom nature,no exit from the human condition. Rather, he enters into the universal pattern whose metamorphic form and activity he has grasped and can convey through a mode unique to the human species: language. By the use of language to parallel natural metamorphoses,he arrives at a more profound sense of the convulsive nature of all existence. Although the alchemistic language was a device he explored in his earliest writings, resplendentlyin Poisson soluble, the structureduse of this device reached its apogee in Constellations. Whereas structuralist criticism has been trying to show in literary works subconsciousorganizationcontradictory the rationalintentions of the authors to in question, in Breton'slast set of poems we have the case of a poet superbly versed in the psychic, syntactic and connotative functioning of language, who puts this knowledge at the service of poetry. In his deliberately structured language, channelling the powers of the unconscious, he draws his lexicon from three broadlyseparatereservoirs:the specializedlanguageof bio-botanical terminology (words that have never before appeared in poetic context!), the demotic speech of daily usage, and the visionary language to which his Rimbaudand Mallarme,had accustomedhim. predecessors, As you read these compact poems you have to work for the meanings they contain rather than convey. It is not a question of de-coding but of grasping the multitudinous digits of the code. Poetry becomes a scientific occupationboth for the writer and the reader.You receive multiple meanings not simultaneously in the graphiccombinationof linear and verticalannotations, as they were inducedin Mallarme's Coup de des, (i.e. throughsuperpositions Un and juxtapositions), but rather in the manner of the ancient rebus of the Cabala and of latterday alchemists from whom Breton derived his model: the one in the other image, "l'un dans l'autre,"contained and containing, 54

BRETON'S SURREALISTTRAJECTORY which Breton found primordiallyand essentially characteristicof the nature of the universe and of the humans within it. This use of the rebus image had often been manifested in Breton's poetry by the substitution of the preposition "de" for "dans."The most spectacularexample of a total poem constructedin this fashion is of course L'Union libre where the beauty of the woman and her power over him are not simply likened to manifestationsof naturalscapes but actually contained in them. In Constellationsone of the more obvious thematic recurrencesof the one in the other image is that of the embracesuggested by the evocation of a series of images of clinging plants such as the vine, the clematis,the madder. At the heart of clusters of images they suggest the interdependenceof things and beings. The word-images are graphicallysimple, presented on a purely non-connotativebasis; any connotationthat the readerwill derive is subjective and of course arbitrary.But the subtle recurrencesof such images, unheeded the first time perhaps, rememberedthe second, soon loom as patterns even as in a musical composition, and they create a magnetic field of connotations for the reader. Another rich source of words of multiple containing and contained connotations are the homonyms and words used in more than one sense or context. Of this group we find in Constellationsin key positions words like heraut,navette, gland, palette, braise,calice: they serve indeed, in the function to he had attributedto language in the First Manifesto, as "springboards the mind," leaving each reader to tide over from one possible meaning to the next, all catalyzed by the single word unit. Many of these have depository meaning, like palette, coffret, calice, botes. The most important perhaps of these depository words is "fossile," that container and transformer of the animal and vegetable world into the mineral, the supreme and durable container. In fact, the integral connection of all things and beings, working through the combined forces of creation and destruction toward the basic unity of the two processes,is centrallyascertainedby the image of fossil, very prominently featured in these word tapestries. They elaborate on the more explanatoryexpression of the same image, seen earlier in Arcane 17. There the stunning image of the monolith, Perce Rock, was contemplatedin its dual representationof division and consolidationas a fossiliferous container of the organicreality of the earth. As anyone who has read Breton's poetry in continuity is aware, light and fire images were recurrentand resplendent in his poems from the very beginning. What happens to these in the final counting of the numbers? They are combined and contained in the most unlikely places, and carry on the pattern of the container and the contained. Light through water, through ice, through a leaf, from enclosed trees. Most often what emerges is the light 55

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE created through fire. But the phenomenon of fire is not conveyed through the usual process of combustion;instead, it is revealed in its inherent aspects, in the state of what the alchemists would call "ignited nature."This ignited matter emerges in Constellationsin the form of igneous rocks, feldspar,incandescent thorns, and in the incarcerationof the color red in lead, in water, in land, and in wood. Fire and water are also involved in another set of images that convey fertility and all that the fertilizing process involves in nature and in terms of decomposition and recomposition. Along with the containing and contained images, we also have the connecting ones, involving principally birds and women. An obvious one, already familiar in Breton's poetry, is the egret (aigrette), here carrying an acorn. In the case of the woman images, the love process is closely related to the establishmentof intimate connection with the whole range of protoplasmic existence, an elaborationof the earlier poems. Woman plays a role analogousto the encircling vine, the rainbow, the bird carryingseed. In Constellationswords not only make love but Breton makes love with them: he penetrates language and through language establishes a deep and intimate relationship with the physical world. Far from being automatic, poetry thus becomes a very studied and learned activity in which the poet as molder of language seizes on the propitious, aleatory associations of his mind, tests them against nature'slaws, cultivates them by directing and constructingaround them. It is not by chance that the dominant images of these twenty-two tapestries are "navette,"and words relating to weaving. We are involved with the poet in a back and forth activity and in a virtually manual linking of threads.We are introducedinto the throes of process and through processwe venture towardthe secretsof life itself. Each object designated has more than one function, and it is always in a state of change. We proceed in the evolution of Breton's poetry from metaphor to metonymy where the part suggests the whole, the microcosm evokes the macrocosm.If in the case of William Blake a universe is mirrored in the grain of sand, in Breton's cosmographyit is contained in a far wider range of animal, mineral, vegetable entities, constantly woven together or engaged in dialogue with each other, the sand with the vine, the morning star with the shepherd. What is the role of the poet in the contemplationof all these phenomena and conditions of living reality? He is identifiedwith homely, humble workers involved in manuallabor: the cobbler,the silk-weaver,the miller, the jugglerall workers, they can relate to the work of the poet in the sense in which Rimbaud classified the poet as a worker, among what he called "horribles in travailleurs," his Lettredu voyant. But Breton is also evoking a series of creatorsof magic. Back in Poisson 56

BRETON'S SURREALISTTRAJECTORY soluble he had envisaged himself with a five-leaf clover on his left shoulder. Here the magical gamut includes the dexterity of children playing games, the wonders of fairy tale prestidigitatorssuch as Oberon, all building up to the most miraculous hand of all, that of the artist: Mir6's presence first of all, whom Breton long consideredthe purest surrealistof all the artists who joined him, and then on from the hand that drawsto the hand that writes. Toward the end of this series of what we might call myth capsules, in no. 18, entitled "L'Oiseaumigrateur,"he is obviously again identifying the poet: "le petit homme nu, qui tient la cle des rebus, est toujours assis sur sa pierre." But the identificationof the poet is a double one. If on the one hand he is grouped with dexterousartisans,epitomized in the patient and sedentary weaver, on the other hand we have another set of images, those of people in movement: the migrantand the vagabond,the shepherd,the pilgrim progressing like a latter-dayTheseus through a labyrinth. We had already met Breton earlier in his work in the labyrinth image; what is evolutionaryhere is that the labyrinth has become vertical. If in Poisson soluble we remember the young poet as a masked man, holding the keys of the mystery of life, here we see him alighting from the labyrinth-as he had promised he wouldand shooting for the stars. The steps of his progress are transcribedin his language. He has dug creuse, je moule, je l'abime, je vrille); he has woven; he has proceeded (je from the street maze to the padlocked woods; his forces have burst out of their limits (with verbs like sublimer, evaser, extravaser) pushed up through spirals until no. 12 which is entitled "le 13 l'chelle a fr61l le firmament." He proceeds toward the rainbow in no. 15, toward the universal attraction which he recognizes as the quality of space in no. 20, and in the final piece, entitled "Le Passage de l'oiseau divin" he alludes to the flight of the butterfly, escaping even as it dies. In fact, here the upward movement joins another series of images that have been gradually building up to make an impact on our consciousness,a series which unlike the others here mentioned, was not previously predominant in Breton's normal referential system: that of music. In Poisson soluble we had had a suggestion of the music of the earth; here we build up to the music of the spheres. Poetic composition finds its closest ally in harmonic composition. References to musical instruments and musical function recur from one piece to the next, too numerous to enumeratehere, but leading to an embracebetween the creation of the hand and of the ear in that deeper unity of the creative power, of which they are seemingly different but intrinsically concerted manifestations, each in its way fueling the projectile of human desire. The trajectorythat Breton traced from 1924 to 1959 is a voyage from birth in water to absorptioninto the cosmos. 57

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE We may conclude that the Manifesto was indeed a very revolutionary document,not in termsof the limited meaning of political and social revolution, but as a broad recuperationand alignment of the attributes that constitute the common treasure.In retrospecthe appearsas a moment in history,offering an alternate choice to the sense of the absurd which was the more common reaction that was to accompany man's awareness of the cracking of the anthropocentricuniverse. In its global nature Breton's was rebellion without alienation. If, as we examined the progress of his poetic craft, we discerned powers of poetic construction more sophisticated than even Mallarme's,we know full well that in his own mind his art had a secondaryimportance to his comportmentas a human being. Beyond the literary destiny of his poetry was the significance of the new ontological posture it proposed. He used language as a staff and an aura to proclaim and to illustratehis efforts toward a redefinitionof human destiny.
1 AndreBreton,Manifestesdu Surrealisme, Paris:Jean-Jacques Pauvert,1962, p. 82. 2 Ibid., p. 68. 3 Andre Breton, Les Pas perdus, Paris: Gallimard, 1924, p. 171. 4 Ibid., p. 51.

5 Ibid.,p. 53. 6 AndreBreton,Poesieet autre,editedby Gerard Paris: Le Club du Legrand, in Constellations. meilleur livre, 1960: no page numbers sectioncontaining

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