André Breton

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The French writer André Breton (1896-1966) was the leader of the surrealist movement, which was the most important force in French poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.

André Breton was born in Tinchebray and was studying to be a doctor when he was drafted in 1915. The period of World War I was extremely important for Breton in orienting his career. Already interested in poetry, he met the writers Louis Aragon and Philip Soupault while in the army. Also influenced by meetings with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Valéry and the nihilist Jacques Vaché, Breton became interested in the importance of reform and revolt in literature and in society. While in the army Breton was assigned to work in the psychiatric wards. The patients he observed and the study he made of neurology and psychology were, like his personal encounters, of great importance in forming his literary and social theories.

In 1918, together with Aragon and Soupault, Breton brought out the first issue of the review Littérature. And in 1919 Breton's first book of poems, Mont-de-piété (Pawn Shop), appeared. Breton grew progressively more interested in dreams and psychic automatism. By 1924 he had organized a group dedicated to surrealism and had issued his Manifeste du surréalisme. In 1930 and 1934 he wrote two additional manifestos, which explained the principles of surrealism. From the beginning, surrealism was conceived of as a movement transcending the purely literary or esthetic concerns, and it turned increasingly in the direction of social participation. In 1926 Breton joined the Communist party but withdrew in 1935 because of the incompatibility between the total personal freedom that surrealism advocated and the individual submission that Marxism required.

Meanwhile Breton published some of his most important works, notably Nadja, an account of his relationship with a woman and their explorations of the "daily magic" of Paris, and L'Immaculée Conception (The Immaculate Conception), in which Breton and the poet Paul Éluard simulate various forms of mental derangement. During the rest of the 1930s Breton's chief publication was L'Amour fou (Mad Love), a work illustrating the importance of love, one of the basic articles of surrealist faith. By 1939 it had become apparent that the heyday of surrealism was over. Breton had been its life and soul, but the history of the movement had been marked by noisy repudiations and denunciations. After breaking with his former companions and the Communist party, Breton visited Mexico. He made New York City his headquarters during World War II. When he returned to Paris, existentialism had replaced surrealism, but Breton tried to keep surrealism alive. He organized exhibitions, promoted reviews, and published articles and texts until his death in 1966. Breton's theoretical work continues to have a great impact, and his creative work, although yet not fully appreciated, demonstrates rare poetic gifts.

Further Reading

A recent and thorough biography of Breton is Anna Balakian, André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (1971). J. H. Matthews, André Breton (1967), in the series "Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, " is an introduction by an authority on surrealism. Although older and not as comprehensive, other excellent studies in English are Georges E. Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature (1941; rev. ed. 1947), and Anna Balakian, The Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947; rev. ed. 1965) and Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1959). Other works are Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (1966), and Herbert S. Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in France (1969).

Breton, André (1896-1966). French poet, who was not just a founder-member and the chief theoretician of the Surrealist movement but also its heart and soul. He abandoned his medical studies in favour of poetry, went during his honeymoon to see Freud, was briefly a member of the Communist Party (1927), met Trotsky in Mexico (1938), and spent most of World War II in the USA. Although he could command unswerving loyalty, his detractors saw him as authoritarian—some even labelled him the ‘pope’ of Surrealism.

At first influenced by Mallarmé and the Symbolists, he subsequently discovered Jarry, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont and established contact with Valéry, Apollinaire, and Reverdy. Some of these influences are discernible in the poems of Mont de piété (1919), but his discovery in that year of automatic writing [see Écriture Automatique] led to a radical change of style. This can be seen in his contributions to Les Champs magnétiques (1920), written in collaboration with Philippe Soupault, and especially in the ‘historiettes’ of Poisson soluble published in 1924 in the same volume as the Manifeste du surréalisme. He periodically brought out new collections of poetry, full of surprising and evanescent imagery: Clair de terre (1923, but revised and enlarged in 1966), Le Revolver à cheveux blancs (1932), L'Air de l'eau (1934), Poèmes (1948), and the posthumous Signe ascendant (1968), in addition to significant individual poems, e.g. ‘L'Union libre’ (published anonymously in 1931), ‘Violette Nozières’ (1933), ‘Pleine marge’ (1940), ‘Fata Morgana’ (1941), ‘Les États généraux’ (1944), and Ode à Charles Fourier (1947).

Breton's questioning of the novel genre was seen not only in the Manifeste (1924) but also in Nadja (1928), a quasi-autobiographical work written in a variety of modes despite Breton's avowed quest for a clinical style: here he investigated in turn the nature of his own identity, the special gifts of the eponymous ‘heroine’, and her value as a herald of the new love that enters the text at the end. Nadja may be viewed as the first of a sequence of works (the ‘prose quartet’), continued by Les Vases communicants (1932), essentially an examination of the relationship between dream and reality, L'Amour fou (1937), a presentation of objective chance and the chance encounter as well as a study of love (like the rest of this quartet, based on his own experience), and Arcane 17 (1944), a lyrical prophecy of a veritable emancipation of Woman, an affirmation of Breton's belief in youth and a championing of the three great causes of poetry, love, and liberty.

His lifelong interest in art was demonstrated by the successive editions of Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1928, 1945, 1965), by L'Art magique (1957), written with Gérard Legrand, and the little prose-poems of Constellations (1959), inspired by Miró's wartime set of gouaches. Apart from the 1924 Manifeste, his theoretical or critical works include the Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1930), Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme? (1934), and the collections of essays and articles, published either in his lifetime—Les Pas perdus (1924), Point du jour (1934), La Clé des champs (1953)—or posthumously (Perspective cavalière, 1970). Entretiens (1952), primarily the texts of a series of radio interviews, may be seen as his memoirs.

Breton and his colleagues constantly adopted a revolutionary political stance, but in the widest sense of the term. As early as 1922 he had stressed the importance of a poet's way of life: in his case this is exemplified by his peregrinations around Paris in the cause of Surrealism, by his ‘organization’ of the group's activities, from regular meetings and discussions in cafés to the collective drafting of pamphlets, and by his persistent refusal to compromise his principles.

— Keith Aspley

Bibliography

• M. Bonnet, André Breton: naissance de l'aventure surréaliste (1975)
• H. Béhar, André Breton: le grand indésirable (1990)

1896-1966

A French poet, the founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, André Breton was born February 19, 1896, in Tinchebray, France, and died in Paris on September 28, 1966. Until he was four years old, Breton was raised in Brittany by his maternal grandfather. Nostalgia for those early years of astonishment, fear, and surprise never left Breton. In 1907 he entered the Lycée Chaptal in Paris. In 1913 he began studying medicine, published his first verses, and established literary friendships, first with Paul Valéry, followed by Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy.

Mobilized in 1915, in July 1916 he asked to be assigned to the army's neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier. This period had a "decisive influence" (Conversations, 1952) on Breton. As a student of medicine, he observed his patients with close attention. He developed a strong interest in psychiatry and in Freud, whose ideas he encountered for the first time in Emmanuel Régis's Précis de psychiatrie. As a poet he began to ask questions about literary creation. The discourse of madness contained striking images, how did these come into being? How did madmen and poets develop their language? What was the relationship between subject and object embodied in language?

Freud provided a response to these fundamental questions but Breton had access to them only in the form of Régis's introduction. As a result his concept of Freudian analysis was distorted. Although Breton understood the role of the libido, the conflict between desire and censure, and the dream work that provides insight into the artistic process, he believed with Régis that the analytic method was a mechanized collection of the subject's verbal outpourings, which he repeated as they popped into his mind, like a "recording device" (Régis). This was a formula Breton was to use in his Surrealist Manifesto: "We . . . who have turned ourselves into . . . modest recording devices in our art . . ." (1924). Transference, the analyst's suspended attention in the face of the representations supplied by the subject or their interpretation, dream associations, all of this disappeared. Although Breton continued his medical training until 1920, he was not interested in therapy. His meeting with Freud in 1921 had no affect on him (1924). The problems he wanted to resolve were different: "There is the entire question of language." (1919)

With psychoanalysis, Freud provided Breton with a theory of language. "Those verbal representations that Freud claims are 'memory traces arising principally from acoustic perceptions' are precisely what constitute the raw material of poetry" (1935). The poet as dreamer is the "receiver of Indirect Contributions" supplied by the figurative activity of the preconscious mind, where representations of words and things make contact with one another. He "yields to the collage" of associations (1919). This leads to the creative experiments Breton conducted from 1919 to 1924 (automatic writing, hallucinosis, half-sleep, automatic writing, and others), which found a large number of applications in literature.

In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton condensed the theoretical conclusions he drew from his experiments. This was the founding text of the surrealist movement that did so much to introduce Freudian ideas to France and elsewhere. Although Breton used Hegelian dialectics to criticize Freud (Communicating Vessels, 1932; the republication of 1955 contains three letters from Freud to Breton), he continued to study him (Carnet, 1921, Cahier de la girafe sur la Science des rêves, 1931, Position politique du surréalisme, 1935, Anthology of Black Humor, 1940) and emphasize the importance of his thought. "Surrealism . . . considers the Freudian critique of ideas . . . to be the first and only one with a basis in fact" (1930).

Bibliography

Alexandrian, Sarane. (1974). Le surréalisme et le rêve. Paris: Gallimard.

Bonnet, Marguerite. (1975). La violence du voir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Breton, Andre. (1988, 1992). Œuvres complètes (M. Bonnet, Ed.). Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade.

Carrouges, Michel. (1950). André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard.

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1978). Les vases non communicants. N.R.F, 302, 26-45.

—NICOLE GEBLESCO

Quotes:

"No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily."

"Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads."

"In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again."

"No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist."

"It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."

"To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!"

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