Disjecta Membra: Mad Love by André Breton
More than taking sleep-dreams as a source of artistic inspiration, the fundamental lens of the Surrealist Weltanschauung was the understanding and taking up of waking life itself as a dream (what Dalí called “paranoiac criticism”), thus justifying the employment of “Freudian” dream analysis to penetrate reality’s enigmas. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, nine years after Walter Benjamin declared the end of the “heroic phase” of Surrealism, André Breton, emerging from his “forest of symbols,” first published his theory of art, arrived at via his interpretation of the “delirium” of love:
And it is there — right in the depths of the human crucible, in this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where however, loneliness rages also, in one of nature’s fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow — it is there that years ago I asked that we look for a new beauty, a beauty “envisaged exclusively to produce passion.” I confess without the slightest embarrassment my profound insensitivity in the presence of natural spectacles and of those works of art which do not straight off arouse a physical sensation in me, like the feeling of a feathery wind brushing across my temples to produce a real shiver.
Paul Cézanne, La Pendule Noir, 1870.
He continues:
The word “convulsive,” which I use to describe the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion. There can be no beauty at all, as far as I am concerned — convulsive beauty — except at the cost of affirming the reciprocal relations linking the object seen in its motion and in its repose.
Breton coins three dialectical categories which constitute convulsive beauty: “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.” The absence of a conjunction in the original French implies a fluidity between these three concepts. But each term has a deeper history in the 19th century: veiled-erotic in Freudian psychoanalysis, fixed-explosive in Marx’s theory of crisis, and magic-circumstantial in Hegel’s philosophy of history. For Breton, convulsive beauty is an experience of the crystallization of the resonance between the objective world and modern subjectivity.
What is the measure of difference between the object wished-for and the object received? As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved. What is taste if not type? The history of one’s art and one’s love affairs evince the gradual distillation of one’s subjective relationship to the world. But by what mechanism? Magic or fate or randomness? Is such a process indicated in veiled symbols of attraction littered throughout life? And how ought the event of the acquisition of the desired object be registered other than as an explosion “at the exact moment of its expiration?”
Such questions form the substance of Mad Love. In writing which weaves seamlessly between ecstatic poetics, theoretical reflections, and personal memoir, Breton intensifies life into art. In the wake of the Surrealist’s achievement, they have been turned on their heads: in the century since the drying up of the last drop of their “meager stream,” art has been liquidated into mere life. And it is here that we must look for a new beauty.
— Grant Tyler
Alberto Giacometti, Hands Holding the Void (L’objet Invisible), 1934-35. slam.org
Boys of harsh discipline, nameless actors, chained and brilliant, from the grand musical that will always occupy the mental theatre, with no hope for change, have always mysteriously evoked for me certain theoretical beings, whom I interpret as key-bearers, possessing the clues to situations. I mean that they hold the secret of the most meaningful attitudes I shall have to take in the presence of some rare events which will have left their mark upon me. These characters habitually appear to me dressed in black — probably in full dress; their faces escape me, but I think there are seven or so of them, seated next to each other on a bench, talking among themselves, always looking straight ahead. That is the way I should have liked to put them on stage in the play's opening scene, their role being to unveil, with a certain cynicism, the motives for the action. At nightfall and often much later (I know perfectly well that psychoanalysis would have something to say about this), as if they were submitting to a ritual, I find them wandering speechless by the sea, in single file, winding lightly around the waves. Coming from them, this silence is no hardship, their conversation on that bench always having seemed to me, to tell the truth, singularly disconnected. If I were to try to find an antecedent in literature for them, I might well come up with Jarry's Haldernablou, where a litigious language like theirs flows easily, with no immediate exchange value, Haldernablou, which also ends with an evocation very close to my own: "in the triangular forest after dusk.”
Why must this phantasm be irresistibly followed by another one, obviously located at the antipodes of the first? In the constriction of the ideal play I was speaking of, it manages to have the final curtain fall upon an episode that is lost backstage, or is at least played out on this stage at an uncommon depth. Some imperious concern for equilibrium is in control here, opposing, from one day to the next, any variation. The rest of the play is a matter of caprice — that is, as I immediately tend to understand it, it is scarcely worth dreaming up. I like to imagine all the enlightenment that the spectator will have enjoyed converging in this shadowy point. Oh what a praiseworthy grasp of the problem, what good-hearted laughter and tears, a human taste for accepting or rejecting: what temperate climes! But suddenly, perhaps again the bench we just saw, it doesn't matter, or some café bench, the scene is blocked off once more. Blocked off, this time, by a row of seated women in pale clothes, the most appealing they have ever worn. Symmetry dictates they must be seven or nine. A man enters... and recognizes them: one after the other, all at once? They are the women he has loved, who have loved him, some for years, others for one day. How dark it is!
It's because I'm absolutely forbidden to imagine, in such a case, the behavior of any man at all — as long as he is a coward — this man in whose place I have so often been, that I can't think of anything more pathetic. He scarcely is at all, this living man who would hoist himself up on this treacherous trapeze of time. He would be unable even to exist without forgetfulness, that ferocious beast with its larva-like features. The wonderful little diamond slipper was heading off in several directions.
We must try to glide, not too quickly, between the two impossible tribunals facing each other: the first, of the lovers I shall have been, for example; the other, of these women I see, all in pale clothes. So the same river swirls, snatches, sheds its veils, and runs by, under the spell of the sweetness of the stones, the shadows, and the grasses. The water, mad for its swirls like a real mane of fire. To glide like water into pure sparkle — for that we would have to have lost the notion of time. But what defense is there against it; who will teach us to decant the joy of memory?
History does not say that romantic poets, although they have composed for themselves a less dramatic conception of love than ours, have succeeded in confronting the storm. On the contrary, the examples of Shelley, Nerval, Arnim, illustrate in a striking way the conflict which will be progressively more bitter until our time, for the mind chooses to believe that the loved object is a unique being, whereas often social conditions of life can destroy such an illusion. This largely explains, I believe, the feeling of malediction weighing on man today and expressing itself so acutely through the most characteristic works of this last century.
Making due allowance for the use of any means needed to transform the world and notably to suppress these social obstacles, it is nevertheless perhaps not useless to persuade ourselves that this idea of a unique love comes from a mystic attitude — which doesn't mean it can't be nourished by contemporary society for its own dubious ends. All the same I think I see a possible synthesis of this idea and its negation. It is not, in fact, just the parallel lineup of these two rows of men and women I was just pretending to see earlier as equals, that persuades me how likely it is that the man in question — in all these faces of men called up in which he finally recognizes only himself — will discover at the same time in all these women's faces one face only: the last face loved. How many times, moreover, have I noticed that under extremely dissimilar appearances one exceptional trait was developing, and one attitude that I might have thought taken from me forever. However distressing such an hypothesis remains for me, it could be that in this domain, substituting one person for another or even several others, tends towards an always clearer definition of the physical aspect of the beloved, through the always increasing subjectivization of desire. The beloved would then be the one in whom would mingle a certain number of particular qualities considered more appealing than the others and appreciated separately, successively, in all the beings loved to some extent previously. This proposition corroborates in a dogmatic form the popular notion of the “type” of woman or man or of the individual man or woman considered alone. I am saying that here as elsewhere this notion, being the fruit of a collective judgement tried and proved, appears fortunately to correct another one emerging from one of those innumerable idealistic pretensions which have proved themselves intolerable in the long run.
And it is there — right in the depths of the human crucible, in this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where however, loneliness rages also, in one of nature's fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow — it is there that years ago I asked that we look for a new beauty, a beauty “envisaged exclusively to produce passion.” I confess without the slightest embarrassment my profound insensitivity in the presence of natural spectacles and of those works of art which do not straight off arouse a physical sensation in me, like the feeling of a feathery wind brushing across my temples to produce a real shiver. I could never avoid establishing some relation between this sensation and that of erotic pleasure, finding only a difference of degree. Although I never manage to exhaust by analysis all the elements of this disquiet — it must in fact come from my repressed feelings — all I know of it persuades me that there sexuality alone presides. Naturally, in these conditions, the very special emotion aroused can rise up for me at the most unexpected times and be caused by something or someone not, on the whole, particularly dear to me. It is nonetheless clearly a question of that kind of emotion and not of another: I insist that I cannot be mistaken in this — it is really as if I had been lost and they had come to give me some news about myself. The first time I visited Paul Valéry, when I was seventeen, I remember his insistent questions about my reasons for devoting myself to poetry. I responded already along the same lines: I was only trying, I said to him, to obtain (to procure for myself?) states of mind like those which certain odd poetic movements had aroused in me. It is striking and admirable that such states of perfect receptivity suffer no diminution in time because, among the examples I am now tempted to give of those short formulas having a magic effect on me, several of those I proposed to Valéry more than twenty years ago return. For example, I remember so well “How salubrious a wind!” from Rimbaud's “The River at Cassis,” or “Then, as the night was aging,” of Mallarmé from Poe, and perhaps most of all the conclusion of this advice from a mother to her daughter in a story by Louys: to be wary, I think, of the young men going along the road “with the evening wind and winged dust.” Need I say that such extremely rare cases, with the discovery some time later of Isidore Ducasse and his Chants de Maldoror and his Poems, then blossomed into an unexpected profusion? Lautréamont's “Beautiful as a… ” constitutes the very manifesto of convulsive poetry. Big bright eyes, of dawn or willow, of fern-crozier, of rum or saffron, the most beautiful eyes of museums or of life open wide at their approach as flowers spread open so as to see no longer, upon all the branches of the air. These eyes, expressive beyond all nuance of ecstasy, rage, fear, these are the eyes of Isis (“And the ardor of yesteryear…”), the eyes of women fed to the lions, the eyes of Justine and Juliette, of Lewis’ Mathilda, of several of Gustave Moreau's faces, of certain contemporary wax effigies. But if Lautréamont reigns without question over the immense country source of most of these irresistible appeals, I shall nonetheless continue to call upon all those whose wording has utterly transfixed me some time or another, placing me entirely under the sway of Baudelaire (“And strange flowers...”), of Cros, of Nouveau, of Vaché, less often of Apollinaire, or even of a poet more than forgettable, Michel Féline (“And the postulant virgins… Repose for their breasts”).
The word “convulsive,” which I use to describe the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion. There can be no beauty at all, as far as I am concerned — convulsive beauty — except at the cost of affirming the reciprocal relations linking the object seen in its motion and in its repose. I regret not having been able to furnish, along with this text, the photograph of a speeding locomotive abandoned for years to the delirium of a virgin forest. Besides wanting to see risk, which I find particularly exaltating, it seems to me that the most magical aspect of this monument to victory and to disaster would have been that of capturing ideas. Moving from force to fragility, I see myself now in a grotto in the Vaucluse, contemplating a little limestone deposit upon the very dark earth, looking just like an egg in an eggcup. From the ceiling of the grotto, drops fell with regularity against its delicate upper part, of a blinding white. Within that luminosity seemed to dwell the very apotheosis of those wonderful Prince Rupert’s Drops. It was almost unsettling to watch such a marvel forming. In another grotto, the Grotto of the Fairies near Montpellier, you walk between high quartz walls, your heart stopping a few seconds at the spectacle of this gigantic mineral overlay called “the imperial mantle,” whose drapery forever defies that of any statuary, covered with roses by a spotlight's beams so that it became, even in this way, quite as dazzling as the splendid and convulsive cloak made of the infinite repetition of a unique little red feather of a rare bird that the ancient Hawaiian chieftains used to wear. But it is completely apart from these accidental figurations that I am led to compose a eulogy to crystal. There could be no higher artistic teaching than that of the crystal. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. Please understand that this affirmation is constantly and categorically opposed, for me, to everything that attempts, esthetically or morally, to found formal beauty on a willed work of voluntary perfection that humans must desire to do. On the contrary, I have never stopped advocating creation, spontaneous action, insofar as the crystal, nonperfectible by definition, is the perfect example of it. The house where I live, my life, what I write: I dream that all that might appear from far off like these cubes of rock salt look close up.
This dominion of the senses which stretches over all the domains of my mind, residing in a sheaf of light rays within reach, is, I think, fully shared from time to time only by those absolute bouquets formed in the depths by the alcyonaria, the madrepores. Here the inanimate is so close to the animate that the imagination is free to play infinitely with these apparently mineral forms, reproducing their procedure of recognizing a nest, a cluster drawn from a petrifying fountain. After some castle towers three-quarters ruined, rock crystal towers with their summit in the sky and their feet in fog, from one of whose blue and gilt windows there streams the hair of Venus, after these towers, I was saying, a whole garden appears: the giant reseda, the hawthorn whose stem, whose leaves, whose thorns even, are of the very substance of flowers, the fans of frost. If the very place where the “figure” — in the Hegelian sense of the material mechanism of individuality, beyond magnetism — attains its reality is above all the crystal, then in my view the place where it ideally loses this omnipotent reality is the coral, reintegrated as it should be in life, into the dazzling sparkle of the sea. Life, in its constant formation and destruction, seems to me never better framed for the human eye than between the hedges of blue titmouses of aragonite and the treasure bridge of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
To these first two conditions to which convulsive beauty must respond, in the deepest sense of the term, I think it necessary to add a third, which will suffice to fill in any gaps. Such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths. It is a matter — in such a case — of a solution which is always superior, a solution certainly rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need. The image, such as it is produced in automatic writing, has always constituted for me a perfect example of this. In just such a way, I have wanted to see some very special object constructed in response to some poetic fantasy. This object, in its matter, in its form, I more or less predicted. Now I have chanced to discover it, unique, doubtless, among so many other fabricated objects. It was obviously this one, it always differed in every way from what I had foreseen. You might have said that, in its extreme simplicity, which did not keep it from answering the most complicated needs of the problem, it put the elementary character of my predictions to shame. I shall return to that. In any case, what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found. This trouvaille, whether it be artistic, scientific, philosophic, or as useless as anything, is enough to undo the beauty of everything beside it. In it alone can we recognize the marvelous precipitate of desire. It alone can enlarge the universe, causing it to relinquish some of its opacity, letting us discover its extraordinary capacities for reserve, proportionate to the innumerable needs of the spirit. Daily life abounds, moreover, in just this sort of small discovery, where there is frequently an element of apparent gratuitousness, very probably a function of our provisional incomprehension, discoveries that seem to me not in the least unimportant. I am profoundly persuaded that any perception registered in the most involuntary way — for example, that of a series of words pronounced off-stage — bears in itself the solution, symbolic or other, of a problem you have with yourself. You only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth. Interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols. But I maintain that for anyone, watchfulness would do anything rather than pay a second's notice to whatever remains exterior to his desire.
Photograph by Brassaï.
Photograph by J.E. Williamson, published in the New York Times, 1929.
What attracts me in such a manner of seeing is that, as far as the eye can see, it recreates desire. How can you resist the hope of calling forth the beast with miraculous eyes, how can you stand the idea that, sometimes for a long time, it cannot be brought out of its retreat?” It's really a question of charms. So that, in order to have a woman appear, I have seen myself opening a door, shutting it, opening it again — when I had noticed that it was not enough to slip a thin blade into a book chosen at random, after having postulated that such and such a line on the left page or the right should have informed me more or less indirectly about her dispositions, confirming her immediate arrival or her nonarrival — then starting to displace the objects, setting them in strange positions relative to each other, and so on. This woman did not always come, but then it seems to me, it helped me to understand why she wasn't coming; I seemed to accept her not coming more easily. Other days, when the question of absence, of the invincible lack, was solved, I used to consult my cards, interrogating them far beyond the rules of the game, although according to an invariable personal code, precise enough, trying to obtain from them for now and the future a clear view of my fortune and my misfortune. For years on end, I had always used the same deck, which has on its back the flag of the Hamburg-America Line, and its magnificent motto, “Mein Feld ist die Welt,” probably also because in this deck the queen of spades is more beautiful than the queen of hearts. The ways of questioning the deck that I preferred and still prefer supposed from the beginning that you place the cards in a cross, placing in the center what I am asking about: myself and her, love, danger, death, mystery; above, what is hovering; on the left, what can frighten or harm; on the right, what is certain; below, what has been overcome. My impatience at too many evasive answers caused me to interpose, rapidly and within the figure, some central object, highly personalized, such as a letter or a snapshot, which seemed to me to bring better results. This time I alternated two little disturbing characters which I had taken in: a mandrake root, slightly smaller, looking to me like Aeneas carrying his father, and the statuette, in raw rubber, of some strange young person listening, bleeding as I observed, at the slightest scratch with an unstoppable dark sap, a being who particularly touches me insofar as I know neither its origin nor its ends and whom, wrongly or rightly, I have decided to consider as a spell-casting object. Taking into account the rule of probability and any hesitation I might have about it, nothing prevents my declaring that this last object, mediated by my cards, has never told me about anything other than myself, bringing me back always to the living center of my life.
On April 20, 1934, at the height of the “occultation” of Venus by the moon (this occurrence only supposed to happen once in the year), I was having lunch in a little restaurant rather unfortunately situated near the entrance of a cemetery. To get there, you have to pass in front of a depressing flower display. That day, the sight of a faceless clock on the wall did not seem very tactful. But having nothing better to do, I continued to observe the charming life of the place. In the evening the owner, “who does the cooking,” always went home on his motorbike. A few workers appear to be enjoying the cooking. The dishwasher, really good-looking, and evidently quite sharp, sometimes comes out to lean on the counter and discuss apparently serious things with the customers. The waitress is quite pretty: poetic, rather. On April 10 in the morning, she was wearing, over her white collar with red polka dots which harmonized so well with her black dress, a very delicate chain containing three clear drops like moonstones above a crescent of the same material, set in the same way. I again admired the way in which this brooch coincided with the eclipse. As I was trying to situate this young woman, who had been so inspired in this circumstance, the voice of the dishwasher suddenly announced: “Here, l’Ondine!” and the exquisite and childish answer came in a whisper, perfect: “Ah, yes, one dines here!" Could there be a more touching scene? I was still wondering about that in the evening, listening to the actors in the Atelier Theater as they massacred a play by John Ford.
Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.
Man Ray, Me, She, 1934.