I'm cross-posting this comment here. It's in response to a post Josef
Horáček’s made on Montevidayo, probably the most consistently provocative, weird, hilarious, frustrating, interesting poetry-culture-critique blogs I know of.
Here's the original post.
Here's my response:
I’m three days late to the party and now the discussion seems almost over, but I was really irked by the original post and have to chime in. As I see it, the problem with Josef’s post is that he’s only talking about one strand of surrealism, that of the 1924 manifesto (where Breton defines the movement primarily as psychic automatism). Not only do Breton’s definitions of surrealism mutate with each of his polemics, but the practice itself mutates with each offshoot group that wiggles away from Parisian surrealism. Surrealism is this every evolving freak show that’s hardly limited to automatic writing—by the 1930s Breton even admitted automatic writing was a failure (see his essay “The Automatic Message”). Then, to condemn surrealism as a sexist cult of feminine beauty is simplistic—there is certainly a pervasive hetro-normatively glorification of the female body, but this is only a fraction of the surrealist pursuit (probably the most well known because, well, boobs get publicity). But what about these touch points: collage, juxtapositional imagery, the absurd, black humor, paranoiac critical / frottage imagery, dream narrative, objective chance, convulsive beauty, etc.? All of these practices, along with automatism and the simultaneous valorization and interrogation of love & desire, flow in and out of the ever-mutating nexus of activity called “surrealism.” You’re condemning one rivulet of an unwieldy river.
Or consider this passage from Arcane 17, which, in 1945, seems utterly prophetic: “The time has come to valorize woman’s ideas at the expense of those of man, whose failure has come to a rather stormy consummation in our time. In particular, it is the artist’s task… to give the greatest priority to everything that comes from the feminine system of the world, as opposed to the masculine, and, even better, to appropriate to his own jealousy defended use everything which distinguishes woman from man with respect to appreciation and volition.” Okay, we can condemn Breton for operating on a simple masculine-feminine duality, but at least he’s tipping the scale in another direction.
Josef also calls Surrealism’s relationship to Marxism arbitrary. I’d say it was ambivalent, but Breton was attracted to Marxism because of the dialectic. One of the most consistent aims of Breton’s notion of surrealism was to overcome the constraints of binary thinking. “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” (2nd manifesto) It’s Marx through the Hegelian dialectic that interested Breton – not to mention an utter scorn for the social order of his day (thus the flirtation with communism & anarchy). This “opposition to opposites” fits very well with Johannes emphasis on the kitsch problem—surrealism constantly and emphatically overwhelms the tidy distinctions between high and low art (not to mention genres, etc).
As for Perloff’s new book, I haven’t read it yet. But I think that if she really does expel surrealism from venerable canon of the historical avant-garde, a surrealist would say “splendid–get us out of here, away from these stinking artists!”– the last thing surrealism wanted (and this is sad in the end) was to be academically historicized and locked up in museums and libraries along with all the other literary and art movements. Art was only a means to an end for surrealism.
Sorry to be all long-winded and quote-happy, but I think there’s been too much thoughtless (or at least groundless) bashing here.
