Surrealist irreligion is methodical and rational. At first it established itself on the idea of the absolute nonculpability of man, to whom one should render «all the power that he has been capable of putting into the word God.»
As in every history of rebellion, this idea of abso lute non-culpability, springing from despair, was little by little transformed into a mania for punishment. The surrealists, while simultaneously exalting human innocence, believed that they could exalt murder and suicide. They spoke of suicide as a solution and Crevel, who considered this solution «the most probable, just, and definitive,» killed himself, as did Rigaut and Vache.
Later Aragon was to condemn the «babblers about suicide.» Nevertheless the fact remains that to extol annihilation, without personal involvement, is not a very honorable course. On this point surrealism has retained, from the «litterature» it despised, the most facile excuses and has justified Ri-gaud’s staggering remark: «You are all poets, and I myself am on the side of death.»
Surrealism did not rest there. It chose as its hero Violette Noziere or the anonymous common-law criminal, affirming in this way, in the face of crime, the innocence of man. But it also was rash enough to say and this is the statement that Andre Breton must have regretted ever since 1933—that the simplest surrealist act consisted in going out into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd.
Whoever refuses to recognize any other determining factor apart from the individual and his desires, any priority other than that of the unconscious, actually succeeds in rebelling simultaneously against society and against reason. The theory of the gratuitous act is the culmination of the demand for absolute freedom.
What does it matter if this freedom ends by being embodied in the solitude defined by Jarry: «When I’ll have collected all the ready cash, in the world, I’ll kill everybody and go away.» The essential thing is that every obstacle should be denied and that the irrational should be triumphant.
What, in fact, does this apology for murder signify if not that, in a world without meaning and without honor, only the desire for existence, in all its forms, is legitimate? The instinctive joy of being alive, the stimulus of the unconscious, the cry of the irrational, are the only pure truths that must be professed. Everything that stands in the way of desire—principally society must therefore be mercilessly destroyed.
Now we can understand Andre Breton’s remark about Sade: «Certainly man no longer consents to unite with nature except in crime; it remains to be seen if this is not one of the wildest, the most incontestable, ways of loving.» It is easy to see that he is talking of love without an object, which is love as experienced by people who are torn asunder.
But this empty, avid love, this insane desire for possession, is precisely the love that society inevitably thwarts. That is why Breton, who still bears the stigma of his declarations, was able to sing the praises of treason and declare (as the surrealists have tried to prove) that violence is the only adequate mode of expression.
But society is not only composed of individuals. It is also an institution. Too well-mannered to kill everybody, the surrealists, by the very logic of their attitude, came to consider that, in order to liberate desire, society must first be overthrown. They chose to serve the revolutionary movement of their times.
From Walpole and Sade—with an inevitability that comprises the subject of this book— surrealists passed on to Helvetius and Marx. But it is obvious that it is not the study of Marxism that led them to revolution.4 Quite the contrary: surrealism is involved in an incessant effort to reconcile, with Marxism, the inevitable conclusions that led it to revolution. We can say, without being paradoxical, that the surrealists arrived at Marxism on account of what, today, they most detest in Marx.
4 The Communists who joined the party as a result of having studied Marx can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are first converted and then they read the Scriptures.
Knowing the basis and the nobility of the motives that compelled him, particularly when one has shared the same lacerating experiences, one hesitates to remind Andre» Breton that his movement implied the establishment of «ruthless authority» and of dictatorship, of political fanaticism, the refusal of free discussion, and the necessity of the death penalty.
The peculiar vocabulary of that period is also astonishing («sabotage,» «informer,» etc.) in that it is the vocabulary of a police-dominated revolution. But these frenetics wanted «any sort of revolution,» no matter what as long as it rescued them from the world of shopkeepers and compromise in which they were forced to live.
In that they could not have the best, they still preferred the worst. In that respect they were nihilists. They were not aware of the fact that those among them who were, in the future, to remain faithful to Marxism were faithful at the same time to their initial nihilism. The real destruction of language, which the surrealists so obstinately wanted, does not lie in incoherence or automatism. It lies in the word order. It was pointless for Aragon to begin with a denunciation of the «shameful pragmatic attitude,» for in that attitude he finally found total liberation from morality, even if that liberation coincided with another form of servitude.
The surrealist who meditated most profoundly about this problem, Pierre Naville, in trying to find the denominator common to revolutionary action and surrealist action, localized it, with considerable penetration, in pessimism, meaning in «the intention of accompanying man to his downfall and of overlooking nothing that could ensure that his perdition might be useful.» This mixture of Machiavellianism and Augustinism in fact explains twentieth-century rebellion; no more audacious expression can be given to the nihilism of the times.
The renegades of surrealism were faithful to most of the principles of nihilism. In a certain way, they wanted to die. If AndreBreton and a few others finally broke with Marxism, it was because there was something in them beyond nihilism, a second loyalty to what is purest in the origins of rebellion: they did not want to die.
Certainly, the surrealists wanted to profess materialism. «We are pleased to recognize as one of the prime causes of the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin that terrible piece of meat.» But there is not with them, as with the Marxists, a feeling of friendship, even intellectual, for that piece of meat. Putrid meat typifies only the real world, which in fact gives birth to revolt, but against itself. It explains nothing, even though it justifies everything.
Revolution, for the surrealists, was not an end to be realized day by day, in action, but an absolute and consolatory myth. It was «the real life, like love,» of which Eluard spoke, who at that time had no idea that his friend Kalandra would die of that sort of life. They wanted the «communism of genius,» not the other form of Communism. These peculiar Marxists declared themselves in rebellion against history and extolled the heroic individual. «History is governed by laws, which are conditioned by the cowardice of individuals.» Andr6 Breton wanted revolution and love together and they are incompatible.
Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist. But he who loves a living being, if he really loves, can only consent to die for the sake of the being he loves. In reality, revolution for Andre Breton was only a particular aspect of rebellion, while for Marxists and, in general, for all political persuasions, only the contrary is true. Breton was not trying to create, by action, the promised land that was supposed to crown history. One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation.
The advantage of revolution was not that it gives mankind happiness, «abominable material comfort.» On the contrary, according to Breton, it should purify and illuminate man’s tragic condition. World revolution and the terrible sacrifices it implies would only bring one advantage: «preventing the completely artificial precariousness of the social condition from screening the real precariousness of the human condition.» Quite simply, for Breton, this form of progress was excessive. One might as well say that revolution should be enrolled in the service of the inner asceticism by which individual men can transfigure reality into the supernatural, «the brilliant revenge of man’s imagination.»
With Andre Breton, the supernatural holds the same place as the rational does with Hegel. Thus it would be impossible to imagine a more complete antithesis to the political philosophy of Marxism. The lengthy hesitations of those whom Artaud called the Amiels of revolution are easily explained. The surrealists were more different from Marx than were reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, for example.
The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution—in other words, to preserve a historical situation. The Marxists made use of it to justify revolution—in other words, to create another historical situation. Both make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends. But Breton made use of revolution to consummate the tragedy and, in spite of the title of his magazine, made use of revolution to further the surrealist adventure.
Finally, the definitive rupture is explained if one considers that Marxism insisted on the submission of the irrational, while the surrealists rose to defend irrationality to the death. Marxism tended toward the conquest of totality, and surrealism, like all spiritual experiences, tended toward unity. Totality can demand the submission
