Belles-Lettres
New Literary News

The Quarrel of Surrealism.

Mr. André Breton, whose highly significant attitude in the modern movement of ideas is well known, addresses to us, with his usual courtesy, this clarification that the readers of this journal cannot fail to appreciate, as is fitting.

It should be added that the director of the journal Littérature is going to publish under this title: Manifesto of Surrealism, Soluble Fish (and not Poison, as it had been erroneously printed) a work that is at once the theory and the illustration of this Surrealism. We will see in the long and substantial preface that the author borrows nothing from anyone, while preserving the order of his admirations, and that he has been able to formulate in the most decisive manner what we will call a new mode of thinking and acting.

Trusting the welcome that Comœdia has always reserved for new literary formulas, may I allow myself to make him judge of the trial recently brought against nascent surrealism, and which two evening newspapers have echoed?

At the very moment when my friends and I are undertaking to give the surrealist idea the extension that it entails, when we are preparing to publish several works for this purpose (Robert Desnos: Deuil pour deuil, Roger Vitrac: Les Mystères de l'Amour, Louis Aragon: Le Mouvement péripetel, Benjamin Péret: Il était une boulangère, etc...), as well as a magazine: La Révolution surréaliste, malicious spirits maintain that we are only taking up a word of Apollinaire, with all that this word expressed. Apollinaire, Reverdy, would have been surrealists well before us.

In support of the contrary thesis, I would like to put forward these arguments:

a) Guillaume Apollinaire himself borrowed the word surrealism from Gérard de Nerval, slightly modifying it from "supernaturalism", he first made "supernaturalism", then "surrealism". For him, this was a synonym for the word "orphism" which he used to quickly characterize the art of his time. He only wrote the word surrealism once.

b) On the other hand, surrealism is for us a method of expression which consists in the free determination and organization of thought by the word. Inspiration is no longer sufficient; it is a question of no longer expecting help except from the imagination, particularly in that it escapes the systematic, fictitious constructions of memory. A poem by Reverdy, like a battle plan, is systematic. For us, there is no battle plan.

c) We cannot, therefore, consider surrealism as a constructive movement. We do not want to build a monument to the glory of images or to a kind of supreme reason that would emerge from the interpretation of surrealist texts. There is no longer any question here of a poetics; we give the product of thought for what it is worth.