The Surrealists Had No Practical Political Programme: They Were Nothing More Than Idealists and Dreamers Do YouThink This Criticism Is Justified? Discuss.
THE SURREALISTS HAD NO PRACTICAL POLITICAL PROGRAMME: THEY WERE NOTHING MORE THAN IDEALISTS AND DREAMERS" DO YOU THINK THIS CRITICISM IS JUSTIFIED? DISCUSS.
As much as they wanted to deny it, the surrealists did inherit the Dadaist's nihilism and love of violence. They retained the antisocial character of Dada in many respects, however, they did so in the name of a new principle, that of revolution which at first, meant the liberation of the mind and spirit, but later came to include political and social revolution. Their major primary goal was to place the dream and the unconscious at the highest level of Art but like the Dadaists, they were determined to destroy traditional culture by ridicule and even by violence.
The first manifesto of surrealism was published in 1924 and was fundamental for the understanding of surrealist thought, such as their desire to have a global revolt.
The surrealists have been accused of being nothing more than being idealists, dreamers and anarchists. They were interested in dream and free association purely as a method of liberating man's creativity, and they claimed that poetry came from the unconscious, the irrational part of man's nature. They also believed that man has been inhibited by logic and rational thought and so saw it their task to liberate man's mind and wanted to teach him how to rediscover his own unconscious and show him how to grasp the imaginative fantasies that lay hidden.
The surrealist's used methods to explore their New World, the unconscious, the dream the fantastic or the marvellous. Those methods included automatic writing1. They had their own definition of science, which had nothing to do with logic, quite the contrary. All surrealists were trying automatic writing until eventually it became their gateway to the marvellous, the key to the liberation of man's imagination.
Surrealists often published accounts of dreams along with automatic poems in La Rèvolution Surrèaliste2. Breton explained the revolutionary goal of surrealism as being the merging of two opposites into one continuum. "I believe in the future resolution of these two states of dream and reality seemingly so contradictory into a kind of absolute reality, surreality" (Breton). A vital part of their philosophy was that there is no true dichotomy between dream and reality. They were very much influenced by pièrre Janet, a French psychologist who was against Cartesian dualism and stressed the material nature of the products of mind. He believed that word and image did not exist independently, and like him, the surrealists stressed that they were not idealists and that they believed that thought is inseparable from its physical manifestation.
However the surrealists were still considered to be idealists and dreamers with no practical political action for revolution.
The surrealists were also anarchists and tried not to miss a chance to cause a scandal against the bourgeois. One of their famous scandals and their first public protest was their protest against Antanole France, which was very much a national hero but to them he resembled everything they hated. The scandal was cause by an insulting pamphlet, which was written by them, called un Cadavre, on the death of France, who to them symbolised the hated literary establishment and the epitome of bourgeois pretension.
Breton was behind the attack in which all the surrealists had participated. The protest provoked a very hostile reaction from the press, which very much pleased the surrealists.
The surrealists published their own periodicals, which appeared irregularly until 1929. They were essentially apolitical; however, the contents of the periodicals were showing changes in their thought. They were surprised when the letter they issued provoked a hostile reaction from the left.
In many of their articles, the surrealists demanded total liberty without any restrictions for anyone. They demanded the freedom of prisoners, freedom from all the traditional taboos of western culture, freedom from military service, freedom for mental patients and sexual freedom. They did not admire the Russian Revolution as it seemed too orderly, too ...
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The surrealists published their own periodicals, which appeared irregularly until 1929. They were essentially apolitical; however, the contents of the periodicals were showing changes in their thought. They were surprised when the letter they issued provoked a hostile reaction from the left.
In many of their articles, the surrealists demanded total liberty without any restrictions for anyone. They demanded the freedom of prisoners, freedom from all the traditional taboos of western culture, freedom from military service, freedom for mental patients and sexual freedom. They did not admire the Russian Revolution as it seemed too orderly, too directed and, as Aragon had indicated, too incomplete.
La Rèvolution Surrèaliste often included newspaper reports of strange cases of suicide, that in their continuing fascination with the subject, they undertook to collect. Along with these were dreams, automatic texts, accounts of occult phenomena, and of all sorts of irrational behaviour. They wanted to arrive at a new declaration of the rights of man as, Pièrre Naville, and Benjamin Pèret, the editors of la Rèvolution Surrèaliste said. They were beginning to move forward some kind of action, although the word "revolution" still signified a revolution of ideas. An example of this is a leaflet signed the whole group, which included the following:
"DECLARATION OF JANUARY 27, 1925
With regard to a false interpretation of our enterprise stupidly circulated among the public...we declare as follows...
.We have nothing to do with literature....
2.Surrealism is not a new means of expression, nor even a metaphysic of poetry. It is a means of total liberation of the mind...
3.We are determined to make a revolution.
4.We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the disinterested, detached and even entirely desperate character of this revolution....
8.We are specialists in revolt. There is no means of action, which we are not capable of employing.
9. We say in particular to the western world: surrealism exists...and it is determined to break a part its fetters, even if it must be by material hammers! (Bureau of surrealist research)"3
The surrealists were still talking of revolution and claiming that they are capable of a lot of action n order to achieve it, however they didn't do any practical action to show this is true.
Once they realised that the needed to take more interest in political action in order to achieve revolution, the surrealists were faced with a dilemma which was whether to choose to join a revolutionary movement or to remain isolated and follow their own path "the life of pure surrealism" as Naville called it. A meeting was set up by the undersigned members at La Rèvolution Surrèaliste in order to determine which of the two, surrealism or revolution they were going to follow. The meeting took place on April 2nd 1925; however, they failed to resolve the question but agreed, nonetheless on the following:
"1.Before any surrealist or revolutionary preoccupation, that which dominates their minds is a certain state of fury.
2.They think that on the path of that fury, they are most likely to attain what could be called surrealist illumination.
3.One of the first goals is to elucidate a few points which this fury should most particularly attack.
4.For the moment, they see only one positive point to which all the members of La Rèvolution Surrèaliste must give their support: knowledge that the spirit is an essentially irreducible principle which cannot be fixed either in life or beyond."4
They were not able to agree on a course of action, Breton took over the editorship of La Rèvolution Surrèaliste from Naville, Pèret and Artaud and assorted leadership of the moment once more to guide along the paths he envisioned. However the surrealists were still accused of being armchair revolutionaries and that their revolution had a purely metaphysical value. Threats of violence and revolts were treated as ends in themselves even the calls for bloodshed; destruction and guillotine were merely metaphorical.
The 5th issue of La Rèvolution Surrèaliste showed decisive commitment to revolution in the political sense. Marxist terminology was very widely used in their journal. Breton also started to show some support for the left wing by saying that although he himself was not totally committed to the Russian Revolution "their enemies are our enemies" and that the main major achievement of the Russian Revolution had been to destroy the older rank. He claimed "Communism, by its existence as an organised system, has alone brought about the greatest social upheaval...defensible or not in itself to this instrument that the walls of the old order have crumbled" He concluded by shouting "Hurrah for Lenin" and "I bow to Leon Trotsky".
Breton was able to convince most of the group to make a political commitment along with him. He moreover came to believe that surrealism needed Marxism for its survival " Marxist principles gave surrealism unity and purpose. Without this philosophy, it could never have survived" (Breton).
Their first political protest was provided by the Moroccan War5 and was important enough to give the movement an entirely new ideological direction and field of action as they were disgusted with the resurgence of imperialistic exploitation.
Breton's developing political consciousness was the main reason why the Riff War was able to make a change in surrealist thought. His leadership transformed the group from being anarchists and idealists into becoming an organised movement with revolutionary, political, as well as, aesthetic goals.
The surrealists began to realise that the famous scandals such as Saint-Pol-Roux6 and the letter to Paul Claudel, are nothing more than youthful pranks. This shows that, at this stage, the surrealists were taking politics more seriously or rather they had wanted to take more real political action and avoid being accused of being idealists. The opportunity to prove this had come with in Morocco which had provided the artists with their first real occasion to align themselves with the left.
Although the surrealists in many ways shard ideas with the communists they were still very much against the idea of joining the party. However Breton and four more surrealists, Pèret, Aragon, Eluard and Pièrre Unik officially joined the Communist party as they were hoping to prove there sincerity to the revolution once and for all. Although only five of the group became official members, as far as they were concerned the rest of the group was thereby committed. Therefore now that surrealism had definitely embarked on a political cause, no surrealist could stay apolitical and surely not anti-Marxist.
By joining the Communist party the surrealists were taking more practical action in showing that they had a practical political programme and were not merely idealists and dreamers. However they did not loose any of their creativity. They made a great political contribution as they paved the way to artists to make a commitment to the revolution. The surrealists constituted the Communist party's intellectual life in the 1920s and so their importance to the party should be acknowledged. Although the party was suspicious towards them for a while, however for a while it needed them. The party, as was determined to remain working class, and organising workers was its primary task, it needed intellectuals to run its press, its cultural functions and to be delegates at international congresses. Although there were many conflicts between the group and the communist party, the relations between the 2 remained strong way into the next decade.
Second Manifeste de Surrèalisme was published in the final issue of La Rèvolution Surrèalisme in December 1929. This included most of their original ideas however it settled most of their old quarrels and the movement encompassed Marxist ideology.
La Rèvolution Surrèaliste ceased to appear and was replaced by a new review Le Surrèalisme au Service de la Rèvolution which was published from 1930 to 1933. It included less surrealist accounts of dreams, automatic texts and more overtly political articles, however the themes were more or less the same.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the advent of the Moscow trials was another situation in which the surrealists showed their political commitment as a lot of its members went to fight in Spain. Pèret, the most active revolutionary of the group, Buñuel, Mirò and the English surrealists Roland Penrose and David Gascoyne were amongst those who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. More over the surrealists published several tracts on Spain, one of which the arrest of the Spanish fascist Gil Robles, leader of the Catholic Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas who had taken refuge in France. The surrealists furthermore supported all the left groups in the Spanish war except the Stalinists.
More over the role of art in the revolution was important, surrealist poets wrote about wars and painters painted to show their feelings against the wars. Amongst those painters was Dali who painted Premonition of Civil War, which was linked to the personal unconscious of Dali. In it he expresses his feelings toward the Spanish civil war. Another artist was Picasso who painting Guernica, which deals with a political and social theme. It was motivated not by political dogma but by the artist's shock at a human situation, when for the first time in the West an invisible enemy destroyed an undefended population. The painting showed the suffering and victims of the war. He used traditional symbolism such as the child and used it to communicate the suffering of the women and children in the Spanish civil war.
The surrealists later went on to become members of the A.E.A.R, and they became quite involved in it. They signed protest against Nazi terror, demanded for the freedom of writers held prisoners in Germany, and auctioned paintings for the benefit of anti-fascist committees.
They broke with the A.E.A.R at the end of 1933 however this did not mean that their co-operation with the communists had ended. Crevel, the only surrealist who still had very good relations with the communists, started writing for Commune, and along with Tzara he went on to join Maison de la Culture. Furthermore, Eluard gave a speech to the A.E.A.R in 1934 in which he warned of the dangers of the new policy of the united front because in directing it solely against Germany the French left would be likely to find itself the tool of nationalism.
Another example of surrealist's political activity was Breton's attempt to reaffirm his leadership of the avant-garde. He decided to call a meeting of radical writers and artists to form a common political programme. First on the agenda was the protest against the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union. Thirty-two came to the meeting, even thought they had different ideologies. The project was not successful however, due to the personal conflicts from within. Shortly after the failure of the Trotsky meeting the
As a result of their exclusion from the communist party, the surrealists were free to express their support for Trotsky. Breton had admired Trotsky for a very long time and saw him very much as a hero. During his visit to Mexico, Breton met up with Trotsky who was especially interested in current avant-garde movements and who also shard the surrealists concern for the freedom of art and approved of their stand against socialist realism. Breton and Trotsky agreed to collaborate on a manifesto to be called 'pour un art rèvolutionaire indépendent'. The manifesto was against fascists and Stalinists regimes that stifled and destroyed art, and it also condemned the decadence of the bourgeois democracies. The manifesto was very much a demand for the liberation of art, and, it concluded with an appeal to the artists of the world to unite in forming a new organisation, a popular front for artists to b called La Fédération Internationale de l'art Rèvolutionaire independent or F.I.A.R.I.
In conclusion, we see that although the surrealists had started out to be a group of anarchists and idealists, they however came to have substantial political activity, which be it through their art or manifestos. They continued to have commitment to revolution even after leaving the Communist party. Some left the party for good, however others went back to become permanent members (such as Elouard) Breton's most significant activity in the New World took place whilst on a visit to Haiti, where he unintentionally touched off a revolt that overthrew the government.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
) Alexandrian, Sarane: Chp. on Art and politics
2)Lewis, Helena; Dada turns red. The politics of surrealism
Chp2: P.17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35,
Chp3: P.44
Chp4: P.55-57, 61, 63
Chp5: P.77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88
Chp7: P.119, 123
also known as psychic automatism
2 The surrealists periodical, which was first published in 1924.
3 Taken from Dada turns red.
The politics of surrealism. Helena Lewis. P28
4 The points that the members of La Révolution Surréaliste agreed on after the April 2nd 1925 meeting.
The politics of surrealism. Helena Lewis P31
5 The Riff War 1925
6 One of the surrealist's famous scandals in which they demonstrated in a banquet made in the honour of the poet Saint-Pol-Roux.