Article still unpublished, it seems to me, delivered in Lyon in June 2013, before philosophers and literary scholars.

Intro: the Hubert de Phalèse method

The era is one of contractualization. If I have well understood the intentions of the organizers of this conference, they invited me on the condition that I shed light on the history of the concept of imagination within surrealism. But they already have an idea of the thing, since they assert in the preamble: "surrealist theorization, which remains an unavoidable reference".

This works well, since I consider myself a terminologist in this field, which remains French literature, in all its states.

Now, this terminologist profession, quite poorly perceived nowadays, implies a rigorous discipline. For a long time, I have formulated the Hubert de Phalèse method, the steps of which I must summarize before entering into the heart of the subject[i].

First step: constitution of the corpus. I have digitized a certain number of so-called surrealist texts, for collective use when it came to works free of rights (tracts, journals: Literature, The Surrealist Revolution, Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution, The Breach, etc.), the complete works of René Crevel (deceased in 1935) and, for my personal use, those which are not yet in the public domain of André Breton, René Char, Benjamin Péret, Julien Gracq, Tristan Tzara, finally of Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon during their surrealist period.

Armed with this important corpus, which theoretically has the merit of coherence with respect to the sought goal, I engaged in rapid automatic processing, aiming, not only to count the forms, which, in the present case, has little importance, but to make the digitized text usable by any public, which is not self-evident, contrary to the received ideas of the "button-press" generation. Let us recall that we call form any chain of characters separated by a white space or punctuation.

The third step consists in extracting the occurrences of the sought form, at the center of a more or less extended context. We use this signifier "form" in preference to vocable, or word, and a fortiori concept, insofar as it implies no philosophical or ideological choice, and designates only a sequence of letters delimited by a white space or punctuation.

Then comes a fourth step, undoubtedly the most important, that of returning to the text, that is to say to the page, to the poem, to the chapter, even to the book in its totality, in case it had escaped my mind, and to verify the meaning of words according to their context.

One is then able to analyze the occurrences, to disambiguate them, to order them, to classify them according to their use and their meaning: this is the object of the fifth step, opening onto exploitation and interpretation.

Excuse this methodological preamble, which has nothing imaginary about it. It seemed indispensable to me to make you understand on what what I am going to say about imagination is founded in reason!

Let no one expect here a panorama of the surrealist imaginary, nor an appreciation of the forms of imagination developed by their care: I will limit myself, from the forms listed as I have said, to go back towards the concept, and therefore the content that they gave to it.

I will examine in a first time the use of the form "imagination" among the surrealists, then the system of opposition that it represents with reason; finally I will try to draw up a topology of usage in surrealist texts.

I. Use among surrealists

When they refer to the concept of imagination, the surrealists present themselves globally as the heirs of romanticism, and notably of Baudelaire, but we must not forget that they are at the origin of the (re)discovery of Lautréamont, who assured without laughing (?): "Lice are incapable of committing as much evil as their imagination meditates." (The Songs of Maldoror - Song II). It is the same speaker who, bluffed by the recent pseudo-scientific operation creating the trunk-rat, invited the reader to incorporate his mortifying reasonings: "What, has one not succeeded in grafting on the back of a living rat the tail detached from the body of another rat? Try then similarly to transport into your imagination the various modifications of my cadaverous reason." (The Songs of Maldoror - Song V).

This reserve, and this concern for rational appearance, considerably distances us from the Baudelairian "queen of faculties". It is no longer the imaginary Count of Lautréamont, but indeed his creator, Isidore Ducasse, who affirms the necessity of being wary of "hollowing imaginations", concluding peremptorily: "it is time to react finally against what shocks and bends us so sovereignly" (Poems I). And in these writings that, let us recall, André Breton went to copy at the National Library in order to publish them in Literature, here appears already the conciliation of contraries, in a vigorously shaken salad: "the soul being one, one can introduce into discourse sensibility, intelligence, will, reason, imagination, memory." (Poems II)

A. Recognition to imagination

Strong from his decapitating reading of Lautréamont-Ducasse, which had above all the merit of dialectically integrating the considerations of previous generations on imagination, the same André Breton will propose in 1930, in the first issue of the journal Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution (SASDLR), the very one which, in response to an interrogation from Moscow, replied that the surrealists were putting themselves at the service of the Soviet revolution, Breton will propose, I say, a reflection on which I will return, significantly entitled "There will be once". As much as a reverie, it is a theoretical essay opening on the expression which serves as the title of the present communication: "Imagination is not a gift, but par excellence object of conquest". Formula of autobiographical character (Breton considers that he is not gifted with imagination, which is worked on) that he develops until these practical considerations: "To be wary, as one does, beyond measure, of the practical virtue of imagination, is to want to deprive oneself, at all costs, of the help of electricity, in the hope of bringing white coal back to its absurd consciousness of cascade." (SASDLR, n° 1, p. 3)

Here I am anticipating, evoking Breton's position in 1930, before even treating the irruption of surrealism on the intellectual scene through the journal The Surrealist Revolution and the Manifesto of Surrealism, published simultaneously in October 1924. And here is the leader of the new movement who, after having regretted the fate made to imagination in contemporary society, exclaims beautifully: "Dear IMAGINATION, what I love above all in you is that you do not forgive." (AB, Manifesto, OC I, 312). Pursuing his lyrical reasoning, he exalts Liberty, which, according to him, could not do without the faculty of imagining: "To reduce imagination to slavery, even if it meant what is coarsely called happiness, is to evade everything one finds, in the depths of oneself, of supreme justice." (ibid.) In short, it is the guarantor of a possible existence, and cannot know limits, even at the risk of madness: "Only imagination gives me account of what can be, and it is enough to lift a little the terrible prohibition" (ibid.)

It is the same intention that made Tzara say about Mr. Aa the antiphilosopher: "the abundant hair of imagination turns his head magnificently" (OC II, 298).

Much later, during the sinister period of the Occupation, a clandestine surrealist signing Adolphe Champ (Adolphe Acker) will exalt in the same way liberty raising the flag of the imaginary: "You who are obsessed, you whose imagination easily sees a horse galloping on a tomato, make the world in your image, project your shadows, project your fantasies, liberty needs you." (Tracts, 1944, p. 20)

It then falls to Gérard Legrand, Breton's second after the war, to define before the students of the House of Letters, in Paris, "Some aspects of the surrealist ambition", by drawing the lesson of the Bachelardian experience: "imagination, or if you prefer, this 'super-rational' intelligence whose love of poetry is the most spontaneous form (since one encounters it sometimes on the benches of a high school, before any theoretical study), this intelligence never gorges itself on its products to the point of ceasing to function: at most it happens to it to mirror itself in them, to suspend itself in them, the time to perceive there, according to Apollinaire's word, 'a beautiful lightning that would last'." (The Breach, n° 5, 1963, p. 76)

This is to say how much, from the beginning to the "official" end of the movement, imagination is and remains one of the pillars of living surrealism.

I would lack objectivity if I did not signal some drops in tension, like this one, due to the pen of Julien Gracq, which is not without evoking the popular madwoman of the house: "In rereading what precedes, I smile bitterly to see the deviations to which an imagination that claims to be well governed can indulge. How to explain to myself this almost incredible, and so unjustified failure — this relaxation of all nerves before an infantile terror?" (Gracq, Dark, OC II, 196)

Such a reserve will serve me as a transition to approach the voluntary, not to say voluntarist, rehabilitation of this faculty so controversial in previous centuries.

B. Rehabilitation through automatism and dream

It should not be believed that the surrealists were satisfied with a passive attitude before what took on the value of revelation in their eyes. In exploring the all too neglected continent of the unconscious, they had to promote new means, such as automatism or dream narrative, which brought grain to the mill of the imaginary. It is thanks to Freud that "imagination is perhaps on the point of regaining its rights" declared Breton in the Manifesto (OC I, 316). He then explains the raison d'être of the collection of automatic texts, entitled Soluble Fish, to which the manifesto was to serve as a preface: "It was a question of going back to the sources of poetic imagination, and, what is more, of staying there." (Manifesto, ibid. 322).

The first Manifesto opens with a magnificent praise of madness, that of Christopher Columbus setting out to discover America, and of so many other adventurers of the spirit. Using then a gendarmerie metaphor that Roger Vitrac will have a good game to reproach him, at the hour of settling accounts, Breton imperatively dismisses the major obstacle that stands before these explorations: "It is not the fear of madness that will force us to leave the flag of imagination at half-mast." (Manifesto, OC I, 313)

So that it is not said that I rely solely on André Breton's remarks, I will conclude this section with late (or more recent, according to the point of view from which one places oneself) considerations of René Char: "Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons to, putting to contribution the magical and subversive powers of desire, obtain their return under the form of an entirely satisfying presence." (Only remain, OC 153)

This is not to say that such a rehabilitation of the imaginary does not run some dangers. From the rationalist adversaries, this goes without saying: "A little patience, I beg you: the sanctions are only beginning and tomorrow it will be the turn of dream, of imagination, to draw the reprisals that their delinquent nature requires." signals Albert Valentin at the threshold of the group's second organ ("All shame drunk", SASDLR, n° 1, p. 27), in the same way that Paul Éluard presents the results of a collective investigation appealing to the most unbridled imagination of the participants: "Everything accompanies man, but he runs a danger in letting the productions of his imagination act. It is possible that one day we will be tempted for example to let ourselves live in a still life, to found our hopes and despairs on the flank of a petal, a leaf or a fruit" (Éluard, "Experimental researches, on certain possibilities of irrational enrichment of a city", SASDLR, n° 6, p. 22)

If Freud is the incontestable guarantor of any exploration of the imaginary, it is appropriate to recall the role that the surrealists themselves have, rightly or wrongly, attributed to the Marquis de Sade in this great journey, if not by rehabilitating his work, at least by accompanying his rediscovery by their traveling companions: "For having wanted to give back to civilized man the force of his primitive instincts, for having wanted to deliver amorous imagination and for having fought desperately for absolute justice and equality, the marquis de Sade was locked up almost all his life in the Bastille, in Vincennes and in Charenton" writes Paul Éluard in The Surrealist Revolution, n° 8, p. 9.

C. "Imagination is not a gift, but par excellence object of conquest." (Breton)

Certain writers, such as Jarry, categorically affirm that they have no imagination. It is probably thinking of the author of Gestures and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, on whom he investigated at his beginnings, that Breton comes to pose this apophthegm at the lintel of the already evoked article: "Imagination is not a gift, but par excellence object of conquest. 'Where, wonders Huysmans, in what time, under what latitudes, in what waters could this immense palace rise, with its soaring domes in the cloud, its phallic columns, its pillars emerged from a mirroring and hard pavement?' [At anchor] Quite lyrical, quite pessimistic manner, of erasing gradually everything one thinks, which should be. ("There will be once", SASDLR n° 1, p. 2) One thinks of the famous knife without blade whose handle is missing, emblematic of black humor. Imagination does not proceed otherwise. And to continue: "But where are the snows of tomorrow? I say that imagination, to whatever it borrows — and this for me remains to be demonstrated — if truly it borrows, has not to humiliate itself before life. There will always be, notably, between the so-called received ideas and the ideas, who knows, to make receive, a difference susceptible of rendering imagination mistress of the situation of the spirit. It is the whole problem of the transformation of energy that poses itself once more. To be wary, as one does, beyond measure, of the practical virtue of imagination, is to want to deprive oneself at all costs of the help of electricity in the hope of bringing white coal back to its absurd consciousness of cascade./The imaginary is what tends to become real." (Ibid., p. 3)

Having reached this point in the reasoning, I cannot help but report here an appreciation of Julien Gracq bearing on the modalities of the Bretonian imaginary: "Now, what is quite piquant, it is a question of a writer in whom novelistic fabulation plays no role, and creative imagination appears at least seriously held in check..." (Gracq, Breton, OC, 866) Beautiful euphemism tending to prove that Breton's assertions are founded on his own experience, I would even say his deep nature.

So that imagination is worked on, with the help of the recipes provided, ironically it seems to me, in the Manifesto of Surrealism, with the association of ideas, automatism, dream, provoked sleeps, etc. "It is thus that an uncertain individual whose imagination, reason and heart at the critical state go astray in all directions, finds a way in surrealism and holds to it" explains Aragon in commenting on The Queens of the Left Hand, this essay which attests to Pierre Naville's belonging to the surrealist movement (OP II, 222).

It should not be believed, however, that this exercise of imagination is the prerogative of the group's literati alone. Tzara shows well that painters too have affirmed their "right to the liberty of imagination" (OC IV, 302). René Char, his friend of the time, confirms this conquering aspect attached to the exercise of imagination, which "enjoys above all what is not granted to it, for it alone possesses the ephemeral in totality." (Mill, OC 69)

These principles, visibly shared by all the members of the group, led Breton and Trotsky to pose an intangible rule for the society to come: "In matters of artistic creation, it is essentially important that imagination escape all constraint, not let itself be imposed under any pretext a channel" (FIARI Manifesto, 1938). I admit not very well understanding what these channels refused by the revolutionaries are. The essential thing is well that the exercise of imagination suffers no law and no limit.

In the ardor of the young Cuban revolution, the surrealist hosts of Fidel Castro did not hesitate to recognize this same imagination, free of all control, within the society recently liberated from dictatorship and American grip. So they signed this appeal which, in the light of history, is worth the Kharkov Congress resolution: "The Surrealist Movement... - considering the diversity of objective conditions, estimates that creative imagination is an essential revolutionary spring and that it falls to it in each circumstance to define the original ways leading to the conquest of power; after the taking of power, recognizes the action of the same spring in the Cuban revolution and welcomes with the greatest hopes its refusal of all petrification in the political, economic and cultural domains" For Cuba, November 14, 1967.

What the same history persists in naming by euphemism the events of May 68, has led, to a certain extent, to the dissolution of the movement, pronounced by Jean Schuster in an article of the daily Le Monde. His considerations demand, today as then, to be analyzed with the greatest care: "... we intend to contribute to resolving a crisis otherwise serious than the one from which we are emerging, that of imagination. To this effect, we will have to proceed, on the one hand, to the critical analysis of the situation resulting from the events of May 68, on the other hand to the systematic search for new means of communication between men." J. Schuster, Le Monde, n° 7690, October 4, 1969.

Despite the intentions of individuals and various regroupings, it seems well that we have remained there. Perhaps it is for lack of having considered the relations both adverse and complementary of imagination and reason within the movement, to which I will now devote myself.

II. Imagination vs Reason

A. "The Beauty to deliver is imagination"

The general public, this formless monster of our modernity, has great difficulty imagining this, that Breton and his friends have, at the beginnings of their movement, taken lesson from the symbolists, and that they have held to it. This is not the place here to draw up a picture of the influences and deference of some towards their predecessors. It suffices to recall the Homage to Saint-Pol-Roux to which they associated themselves both in the special issue of Literary News and by the scandalous banquet that history has retained. In prelude, Breton does not hesitate to quote in the journal Literature a personal letter that the author of The Lady with the Scythe had addressed to him after a visit to his manor of Camaret: "The Beauty to deliver is Imagination: great queen of the World. She is the genial Adventure, of which Reason remains the dead body." (Saint-Pol-Roux, Letter to André Breton, Literature, n.s., n° 13, p. 23) Here then is the program traced for the surrealists, on this point unrecognized heirs of symbolism: to defend imagination, to liberate it from the shackles of reason.

For this one cannot easily free itself from certain constraints, that Breton does not hesitate to designate, for what concerns him: "A landscape where nothing earthly enters is not within reach of our imagination" he concedes before the paintings of Max Ernst, issued from procedures still unsuspected by him (Lost Steps, OC I, 245). From there the sad observation drawn up in the Manifesto of Surrealism which calls, of course, to a mobilization: "This imagination which admitted no bounds, one no longer allows it to exercise itself except according to the laws of an arbitrary utility" (Manifesto, OC I, 311). The same deploration, clothed this time in poetic rags, unfolds in the famous "Letter to the seers", by which Breton entrusts himself, a little naively it seems to me, to the dark powers: "His imagination is a theater in ruins, a sinister perch for parrots and crows" (RS, n° 5, Oct. 1925)

However, this recourse to "obscure forces", as Freud would have said, is soon followed by an inverse reaction, which has nothing surprising about it in Breton as in his friends who frequented Madame Sacco, seer rue des Usines in Paris, while indulging in scientific reverie, like Roger Vitrac, for example, in Knowledge of Death. If need be, a friend of the group, surrealist in his hours, bears witness to it. Julien Gracq writes about Breton: "just as we see at the end of the eighteenth century the data of chemistry yet in its beginnings opening almost instantly new outlets to motor imagination, so in our days one can expect, it seems, that new knowledge on the structure of the atom, absorbed instantly by imagination as by an altered sand, intervene rapidly (popular language is already guarantor) to submit associations of images to new causal attractions." Let us recall, in this regard, all the images linked to electricity in Breton, his "wireless imagination" due, one must be convinced, to his modern training at the Chaptal College, and the "magnetic fields" discovered by psychoanalysis.

Thus the combat to deliver imagination is endless. It is still expressed in the last issues of the surrealist movement's journals, notably concerning erotic representations. To the questionnaire addressed by The Breach, the novelist Jacques Abeille replies: "Only the living forces of imagination constitute the safeguard of my love" (The Breach, n° 7, p. 84)

Let us be convinced, the surrealists did not delay in taking up the flag of imagination, fallen from the hands of the previous generation, to transmit it to future generations.

B. The grandeurs of establishment

I said that the combat in favor of imagination was endless. The surrealists knew it, and proclaimed it loudly. If they admitted that the first adversary was in them, the enemy from within consequently, to take up a formula of Georges Bataille, the well-named, they did not ignore the external forces, society to say everything, with its institutions, its powers of establishment.

In the same order of ideas, I will give here the floor to Paul Éluard: "The noblest of desires is that of fighting all the obstacles posed by bourgeois society to the realization of man's vital desires, as much to those of his body as to those of his imagination..." he writes in 1932 (Éluard, OC II, 638). And again: "The development of imagination is linked to social transformation: they command each other reciprocally." (Éluard, OC II, 873)

This is to say here how much, unlike the previous poets and thinkers, the surrealists have understood that they could not liberate imagination without attacking social constraints, conscious as they were that the transformation of society must be accompanied by a transformation of the imaginary. Grains and Bran, this directed waking dream, developed by Tristan Tzara in 1935, perfectly illustrates this thesis, action thus becoming the sister of dream.

At the forefront of the grandeurs of establishment that the surrealists will combat in the name of the liberty to imagine, there is religion, to the point that atheism will become one of its most sure discriminants. The praise of Sade was a first pivot for Éluard who cites him explicitly: "Christian morality is only derision and, against it, rise all the appetites of the body and of imagination." (RS, n° 8, December 1926). But the struggle was much more general, he adds, by making the divine marquis a revolutionary writer before the letter: "For having wanted to give back to civilized man the force of his primitive instincts, for having wanted to deliver amorous imagination and for having fought desperately for absolute justice and equality, the marquis de Sade was locked up almost all his life in the Bastille, in Vincennes and in Charenton." (Éluard, "D. A. F. de Sade, fantastic and revolutionary writer", RS, n° 8, Dec. 1928).

The paradox will not have escaped you: if the surrealists felt the need to enter politics, to take their card to the Communist Party and to militate in its cultural organs such as the AEAR (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), it is less out of concern for social justice than to defend the rights of the imaginary, in the company of workers. In this perspective, the misadventures of these poets with the said Party are reduced to the level of anecdote.

III. The delicious fields (Tzara)

It is now a question of exploring the "delicious fields" of imagination advocated by the surrealists, the "Table of imagination" (as one says the multiplication table) according to Éluard's words (Poems, RS, n° 9-10, October 1927, p. 19). I prefer the rural space, more in conformity with the idea I have of the surrealist poets' investigations. It is a theatrical character created by Breton and Soupault who exclaims: "The regions of imagination are vast!" ("If you please", Literature, n° 15). The task is all the more difficult as they take up for their own account the formula of Jean-Paul (Richter) for whom the forms of imagination are never stable, and always in becoming (RS, n° 8, 1926, p. 7). Moreover, and by reference to presocratic philosophy, one must agree with Paul Eluard that "imagination has not the instinct of imitation. It is the source that one does not go back up" (Éluard, To Give to See).

A. Extension

In fact, I would be tempted to say that imagination, in the eyes of the surrealists, is like Pascal's god: its center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere, or else, in Eluardian terms: "In nature at once simple and monstrously complicated, we exist, we, of whatever appearance and yet bearers of an imagination without limits." (Éluard, OC II, 252)

The exploration of limits, this is well what automatic writing tends towards, which, under Aragon's pen, signifies itself thus: "Architecture also rests on volutes grown in the imagination of sages in the shadow of the very tree that extends its branches over the childhood of great cities and the first steps of youth in the arduous science of mathematics." ("Automatic Writings", OP I, 157)

The surrealist techniques, past or future, obviously had no importance in the eyes of the adepts, one wants to agree. However, it is certain that alongside automatic writing, association of ideas, dream narrative, textual or iconic manipulations have allowed to extend the domains of the imaginary in an unexpected way. Such is the case, for example, of collage, as Aragon concedes in 1930, when he challenges Painting: "All human imagination took refuge in this legendary country, where nothing of daily life could have access, where virtues were strange and witches were so horrible only to become very beautiful at the conscious threshold of prayer-sayers." (Aragon, Painting at Defiance, p. 65)

B. Depth

Having seen the extension that takes, on the surface, the imaginary according to our poets, it would be appropriate to know if it happens to them to pose bounds on the vertical axis, towards the sky or, even more, the depths. The question is, apparently, so preposterous in their eyes that they do not even envisage it. Perhaps it is even totally foreign to their mental structures, so much poetry wants to be in perpetual expansion. Thus The Peasant of Paris gives itself as a "march towards the depths of imagination", bumping into the last traces of the Dada movement (Aragon, OP III, 184), but I admit not having gathered other marks of this investigation, if not in a comment of the author of A Beautiful Dark One about the Hugolian imaginary, which reproduces well the circles of hell, but by widening them as he descends "until letting imagination loose in a maelstrom, a vertigo, a misty and giant dissolution in the black." (Gracq, Dark, p. 57)

I have sought spatial coordinates, as for classical imagination, when it is a question of inventorying an individual chronotope, informed by the science of the time, essentially psychoanalysis. It is in time that one must find this ideal point, which gives birth to the whole, and consequently in childhood.

Keeping to the sole expression of the surrealists themselves, and refusing, in the present intervention, any personal opinion, I will refer on this point to a unique example. It is that of Robert Desnos, who, in a contribution to The Surrealist Revolution estimates that the imaginary of the adult he has become owes everything to his childhood for erotic representations, and singularly to Victor Hugo: "Just as I have never been able to make love without reconstituting the innocent dramas of my youth, I have not been able to experience poetic emotion of another quality than that which I experienced at the reading of The Legend of the Centuries and Les Misérables./I lived thus from six to nine years." (RS, n° 6, March 1926)

This Confession of a Child of the Century will surprise no one. If I cite it, it is only because it clearly bears witness to a formation of the imaginary, valid for more than one generation, and because it invites us, beyond cultural sources, to question ourselves on this erotic dimension put forward by the group.

Drawing up the balance sheet of mental activity in the twentieth century, René Char concludes: "This century has decided the existence of our two immemorial spaces: the first, the intimate space where our imagination and our feelings played; the second, the circular space, that of the concrete world. The two were inseparable. To subvert one was to upset the other." (Hunter Aromas, 1975, OC, p. 509-511)

C. The one in the other, towards alchemy

The first Manifesto defined surrealism as a "pure psychic automatism"; the Second opened on this point of the mind, not so imaginary since Breton named it afterwards, where the antinomies "cease to be perceived contradictorily". The surrealists therefore worked for a resolution of imagination and reason, by referring to modalities of the mind well known to occult sciences. Breton explicates it in the same text: "the philosopher's stone is nothing other than what was to allow man's imagination to take on all things a brilliant revenge and here we are again, after centuries of domestication of the spirit and mad resignation, to attempt to definitively emancipate this imagination by the long, immense, reasoned derangement of all the senses and the rest." ("Second Manifesto of Surrealism", RS, n° 12, Dec. 1929, p. 13)

For his part, keeping to collective thought alone, and without resorting to Tradition, Éluard expresses very well this search for the uniquat (to which the Victor of Vitrac was dramatically devoting himself): "They all pursue the same effort to liberate vision, to join imagination to nature, to consider everything that is possible as real, to show us that there is no dualism between imagination and reality, that everything that man's spirit can conceive and create comes from the same vein, is of the same matter as his flesh..." (Éluard, Poetic Evidence, OC I, 516)

To determine very exactly this point of the mind that Breton postulated, I could not do better than to yield the floor to Julien Gracq: "The surreal is the projection forward by unconscious and motor desire, of the sublime point where the formal contradictions that set the Hegelian system in motion (like Breton's imagination) must be resolved and that Freudism dramatizes by incarnating them, by mobilizing at their command (struggle between conscious and unconscious, struggle between Eros and death instinct) the desperate magnetic whirlwind of our flesh and our blood, of our thoughts and our dreams." (Gracq, Breton)

Do not believe that this point in the mountain is a view of the mind of Breton alone. Tristan Tzara expresses it in his way by poetically evoking this place "from which will be absent good and evil, beautiful and ugly, life and death. The chain of facts will no longer have the cretinizing gait that paternal testicles give to imagination, but tenderness will impregnate the collective events by which spatial phenomena will exteriorize themselves." (Grains and Bran, 1935, p. 12-13)

Certain surrealists, few in number it must be conceded, have been able to find the reduction of antinomies in so-called traditional thought, in alchemy to say everything. "Numerous are, in the Second Manifesto, the references to astrology, alchemy, magic; they show enough that, contrary to what the current detractors of surrealism maintain, preoccupations of this order are not new and that it is quite abusive to claim that they mark a recent turning point of my thought" declares Breton in his Interviews (OC III 525). Still it must be admitted that, for him, it was less a question of discovering the philosopher's gold than of acting on oneself. This quest took a new turn with the game called "the one in the other" of which he indicates the birth from a metaphor, the flame of a match containing the image of a lion. Taking up the principle of universal analogy, the game is then a way of resolving the enigma of the universe.

Conclusion

Let us return to the very principle of this work. The method used, which, I am certain, will soon generalize, allows, with the support of the computer, to note what, statistically, is found most frequently in the vicinity of the considered pivot form. It is interesting to note that in Breton, for example, imagination is surrounded by the words research, things, men, alchemical, love, analogy, so many essential words in the author's discourse. However, the frequencies are not numerous enough for one to draw significant conclusions from them. It would be necessary to merge all the texts figuring in our corpus for the operation to be mathematically relevant. Such is therefore the limit of my textual exploration.

This one, however, is not negligible. It will have allowed us to show how this concept of imagination makes system in surrealist discourse, and how it imposes itself as a nodal point.

Thus, according to the surrealists, imagination would be the thing of the world best shared, and it would have power of elucidation, see of concrete transformation: "Imagination changes the world. There are no more poets without imagination than explorers, inventors or even statesmen." (Éluard, OC II, 873)

Henri BÉHAR

[i]. See: "Hubert de Phalèse's Method", Literary & Linguistic Computing, Vol. 10, n° 2, 1995, pp. 129-134, taken up in French in Literature and its Golem, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1996, 254 p.