It will soon be exactly a year since Jean-Louis Meunier asked me to participate in these Mediterranean meetings on Albert Camus, hoping to see me address "midnight thought according to Breton, in relation to noon thought according to Camus."

I must tell you that the phrase "midnight thought" was never used, to my knowledge (and that of the golem attached to my person) by André Breton or his friends. In other words, it makes no sense among the surrealists. I verify that it is not even used by Albert Camus by consulting the Frantext textual database, which contains virtually all the works of our Nobel Prize winner, including his adaptations.

I would have been inclined to respond negatively to our friend's kind request, if a few days earlier (September 13, 2012, exactly) a brief article by Raphaël Denys had not been put online: "Surrealism and Midnight Thought", through the care of the magazine La Règle du jeu.

This appearance taught me that for at least one reader of surrealism, this movement would have practiced such thought, obviously opposed to that which Albert Camus summarized in the phrase "noon thought", which he himself used only twice, in all and for all, only in The Rebel.

This brief article situated surrealism from 1939 until the publication of The Rebel in 1951. The historical overview was not flattering to the revolutionary movement. The following assertion made me prick up my ears: "Now, except for a few polemical traits, nothing excessive in what Camus has just written." A few lines later, the statement: "In the surrealist night, the real, the social, the political are only secondary" made me question the author's competence. Excluding quotation marks and carried to free indirect style, his discourse does not allow us to know who is speaking. The conclusion was beyond doubt: "That, in sum, is what the surrealist experience was, an ontological experience of the negative, a midnight thought in the night of the 20th century. DOWN WITH EVERYTHING! Dada screamed. Nothing to save." Thus, the critic substituted himself for the original thinker, to make him say what he wanted to hear! Besides, he did not hide his bias by admitting: "I think back to my adolescence and can only give Camus reason." Why must ideological criticism always be conducted from one side only? I wonder.

I had to go and see for myself. I therefore accepted the invitation, if only to verify with you the real content of Albert Camus's remarks.

I. Noon Thought According to Camus

To situate the supposed "midnight thought" in relation to the "noon thought" formulated by Camus, I must, in good method, begin by defining it, even though your conclusions on the subject are not yet drawn.

I will do this as briefly as possible, first recalling the two occurrences where the novelist-philosopher uses this expression:

— it is both the title of a section and the penultimate chapter of The Rebel (p. 367), the latter immediately referring to revolutionary syndicalism, taken as an example of conquering realism; — it is then a lyrical exclamation: "Once again, the philosophy of darkness will dissipate above the dazzling sea. O noon thought, the Trojan War is fought far from the battlefields" (Summer, 1954, p. 140, Helen's Exile)

If we refer to the context, we can see that the phrase "noon thought" postulates a notion of balance, of measure, in full light, which Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi summarizes thus: "Art, however, attests that 'man is not reduced to history', and 'noon thought', tension between 'yes' and 'no', gives human measure its creative value." (Camus notice in Universalis).

This tension does not eliminate revolt, but integrates it into the evolution of humanity, in the direction of life: "Far from being a romanticism, revolt, on the contrary, takes the side of true realism. If it wants a revolution, it wants it in favor of life, not against it." (HR, 369)

If it had only been a matter of this conclusion, I dare say there would have been no quarrel with André Breton, who himself always pleaded in favor of life, despite Mr. Denys. From his first collection of poems, Clair de terre, he affirmed "Rather life than these prisms without thickness even if the colors are purer..." in an unrelenting repetend. But Camus wanted to attack Lautréamont as the surrealists' master thinker, and that's where the shoe pinches. His chapter "Lautréamont and Banality", published as a preview in Les Cahiers du Sud, provoked the stupefaction and indignation of Breton who immediately replied in Arts, on October 12, 1951, under the sign of "Yellow Sugar" (OC III, 911).

Let's not spoil our pleasure: this title borrowed from Isidore Ducasse's Poésies programmed an entire hygiene of letters: "Yes, good people, it is I who order you to burn, on a shovel, reddened by fire, with a little yellow sugar, the duck of doubt, with vermouth lips, who, spreading, in a melancholy struggle between good and evil, tears that do not come from the heart, without pneumatic machine, makes, everywhere, the universal void." (Poésies I)

Breton feels challenged. Camus's reflection on poetry "testifies on his part, for the first time, to an indefensible moral and intellectual position." Morally, Camus a priori suspects all insurgents. Intellectually, he shows a total ignorance of the analyzed work, particularly Poésies. More seriously, his fundamental thesis, according to which absolute revolt can only engender a taste for intellectual servitude, besides not being founded, shows an intolerable pessimism.

Angry at what he thinks is only a misunderstanding, Camus asks him to wait for the complete publication of his essay to judge it globally. Aimé Patri and Breton discuss the work the following month, text in hand (OC III, 1048). Breton denounces the sophism by which Camus opposes "a revolt without measure" to a supposed measured revolt. "Once revolt is emptied of its passionate content, what do you want to remain of it? Can revolt be at once itself and mastery, perfect domination of itself? Come on! A revolt thus castrated could only be the 'wisdom of the poor' that Camus defends." The latter takes up Breton's criticisms point by point and reproaches him, in sum, for sanctifying poetry and revolt instead of attaching himself to studying the drama of the era[1].

In a final response, Breton, who is careful not to question Camus's person, considers that he is extending the hand to reaction and advocating "the scuttling of all vessels flying the flag of revolt" (OC III, 1 057). He appeals to the arbitration of the section editor, Louis Pauwels, which the latter refuses to pronounce.

The debate remained open, and the publication of the work was not to bring an answer, which led to various positions on which I will pass, since it has already been discussed during your previous meetings. In summary, I will say that beyond the explicit attacks against the surrealists, these "salon nihilists", how can we not see in this assimilation of Lautréamont to banality the path all traced for the thesis of the illustrious Faurisson, who was to identify him with Mr. Prudhomme!

Implicitly, Breton saw reproduced the approach adopted by Charles Chassé against Ubu roi: if the public admits that it is a hoax, then all symbolism is affected. If Les Chants de Maldoror are only banality, then all surrealism is reduced to nothing.

We are very far from the solar thought claimed by Camus, from this tension between measure and excess. Let's resume the examination from the beginning.

II. Midnight Thought in Breton

Let us admit for a moment that Albert Camus took surrealism as the perfect example of the ideology opposed to what he called "noon thought". "Midnight thought" would be characterized by recourse to automatism and dream, the call to the marvelous, and, finally, by a poetry of revolt or revolution, the very one to which he addressed the sharpest arrows.

A. Automatism and Dream

In the beginning, there was the discovery of collaborative writing and almost continuous flow by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les Champs magnétiques. To such an extent that Breton went around declaring: "If that's genius, it's easy." Automatism was then the exact synonym of "surrealism", to such an extent that criticism used one word for the other indifferently.

Hence the definition of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924): "pure psychic automatism by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the real functioning of thought."

A note from the same manifesto designates the goal of automatism: "If the depths of our mind conceal strange forces capable of augmenting those of the surface, or of victoriously fighting against them, there is every interest in capturing them, in capturing them first, to submit them then, if necessary, to the control of our reason." One could not be more positivist, but this objective, inscribed in a footnote, escaped Camus.

Just as much as the poets, the painters of the group indulged in automatism, with more visible success.

It remains that at the time when Camus draws up his indictment, surrealism, seeing in it the story of a continuous misfortune, has renounced automatism for about ten years. There would therefore only be the dream as a discriminant of the movement.

However, everyone knows that the dream does not exist. There are only dream narratives. Whatever the specialists' views on the question, they have never been able to base themselves on the word of dreamers, and not on a concrete matter, the matter of the dream. Today, neurophysiologists consider that, more elaborate during the so-called paradoxical sleep phase, the dream can be continuous and they all admit that it serves to reprogram neurons. If we admit with Lacan that "the unconscious is structured like a language", we must deduce that the dream narrative depends on the language and culture of the dreamer as well as on the narrative structures at his disposal.

For Breton, philosophers have never written anything worthwhile on the subject: "We get off with... the fear of being content to think, with Kant, that the dream has 'doubtless' the function of discovering our secret dispositions to us and of revealing to us, not what we are, but what we would have become, if we had received another education (?) – with Hegel, that the dream presents no intelligible coherence, etc." (Vases, OC II, 106). Fervent about Marxism, he adds that "social writers" are even less explicit, certainly because "literati" have every interest in exploiting the vein of dream narrative, by nature conservative, and without consequence on society (Vases, OC II, 107). As for the theorists he examines, he observes that each reveals more about himself than about the dream (ibid.).

He opposes to them his own practice, which he explained as early as 1922 in the article "Entrance of Mediums", saying how he wanted pure narratives of any slag, resorting to shorthand to note them, calling into question the failures of memory, alone "subject to caution" (OC I, 275)...

The Second Manifesto, in 1929, gave him the opportunity to draw up a negative assessment: "Despite the insistence we have put into introducing texts of this character into surrealist publications and the remarkable place they occupy in certain works, it must be admitted that their interest sometimes has difficulty sustaining itself there or that they make a little too much the effect of 'bravura pieces'." (OC I, 806)

Moreover, the complete corpus of dream narratives in Breton's work does not reach ten. Still, he feels the need to use the dreams of his companions!

Breton's wish is inscribed in a gnomic formula that summarizes all his thought: "The poet to come will overcome the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce of action and dream" (Vases, OC II, 208).

B. The Marvelous

"Let's cut it short: the marvelous is always beautiful, any marvelous is beautiful, there is even only the marvelous that is beautiful." (OC I, 319) In the Surrealist Manifesto, this declaration comes immediately after a reflection on surreality, which amounts to making it a component of surrealism.

He then approaches a new aspect of the concept, its transitory character, as much as modernity in Baudelaire, by analyzing the forms under which it appears in the arts: "The marvelous is not the same at all times; it participates obscurely in a sort of general revelation of which only the detail reaches us: these are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin or any other symbol proper to move human sensitivity for a time." (ibid. p. 321).

This will be followed by the project of elaborating a dictionary of the marvelous. The marvelous is found wherever there is surrealism: in cinema, in the art of the mad-the key to the fields, in popular tales and legends as in texts coming from automatism. Breton explains the interest that Oceanian art provides him by the marvelous it contains and which opens onto an unknown mental landscape: "There is also that the marvelous, with all that it supposes of surprise, pomp and fulgurant view on something other than what we can know, has never in plastic art, known the triumphs it marks with such high-class Oceanian objects." (OC III, 838).

But it is in the article "The Marvelous Against Mystery" that he specifies how, starting from Rimbaud and Lautréamont, a will for total emancipation of man is affirmed, founded on language and reversible on life. Declaring his refusal of mystery in favor of the marvelous, he does not hide the role of passion: "Symbolism only survives to the extent that, breaking with the mediocrity of such calculations, it has happened to make a law of pure and simple abandonment to the marvelous, in this abandonment residing the only source of eternal communication between men." (OC III, 658)

C. Revolt/Revolution

Before placing itself "at the service of the revolution", surrealism postulated the surrealist revolution, title of two successive magazines, making a piece, in a way, to Dada which had no objective and passed for pure nihilism (I have shown elsewhere that this was not the case).

At the start, there is revolt, a blind and aimless revolt, which Breton reformulates in the Second Manifesto, "one conceives that surrealism has not feared to make a dogma of absolute revolt, of total insubmission, and of sabotage in rule, and that it still expects nothing but violence. The simplest surrealist act consists, revolvers in hand, of going down into the street and shooting at random, as much as possible, into the crowd." A sentence that the humanist Camus takes to task, judging it as an irremediable stain.

It is true that thus formulated, and whatever the motives (Breton had in mind the gesture of the anarchist Émile Henry, guillotined at 21), it remains unacceptable for any social being. But Breton was looking at himself in the black mirror of anarchism. Retrospectively, he explains: "At this moment, the surrealist refusal is total, absolutely incapable of letting itself be channeled on the political plane. All the institutions on which the modern world rests [...] are held by us to be aberrant and scandalous. To begin with, it is to the entire apparatus of society's defense that we attack [...]" (The Key to the Fields, OC III, 935).

In fact, at the time when Breton was writing these lines of anarchist tone, the surrealists had rallied to the very young Communist Party, born from the 1920 split, militant for the advent of a classless society. They claimed to put their talents as intellectuals and men of the pen at the service of the working class. We know what became of it!

As early as 1935, which Camus could not ignore, Breton was calling into question Stalin and Stalinism ("From the time when the surrealists were right", 1935). If he did not renounce in anything the idea of revolution, he distanced himself from any party. Coming out of the war, he reaffirmed in the Rupture inaugurale tract the "specific destiny" of surrealism, which was to "claim innumerable reforms in the domain of the spirit."

Was this rallying to reformism a mark of wisdom, the renunciation of all violence, the recourse to silence in the face of the two blocs that divided the world?

If his voice and that of his companions has not been as perceptible as before, Breton has never ceased to express himself against colonial wars, and to rise against the unacceptable human condition.

Thus, "midnight thought" is not the enemy of "noon thought". Regarding the Camus/Breton opposition, as represented by commentators, I would willingly take up Engels' formula: "What these gentlemen lack is dialectics." Movement of the spirit perfectly realized by the resolution of contraries that the Second Manifesto of Surrealism postulated.

III. Resolution of Contraries

A. Mutual Esteem

The opposition of the two thinkers is all the less admissible as they esteemed each other mutually. I want no proof but the terms used by Breton towards his junior, while the latter forgot to note in his travel journal to the Americas the lunch taken in common.

The journalist's voice appeared to Breton as "the best-timbred and clearest that had risen dominating this period of ruin" (OC III, 983). Both consulted on the best way to preserve the testimony of certain free men from ideological distortions. They dreamed of a sort of pact by which people of their caliber would commit themselves not to affiliate with any political party, to fight against the death penalty, never to claim honors, whatever they may be.

On the philosophical level, Breton could not subscribe to the morality of existentialism which, under the pretext of an "engagement" of the artist, puts itself in the wake of the Communist Party. He appeals to intellectuals to address remonstrances to the "great irresponsible of the hour", and to proceed to a total overhaul of ideas, to put an end to all the clichés of universal morality. He recalls the terms of the Mexico manifesto on the absolute independence of art and rejects the Jesuit precept, taken up by the Stalinists, according to which "the end justifies the means". Criticizing Camus's pessimism, he affirms: "the rock of Sisyphus will crack one day". If man has lost the original keys to nature, he can find them by questioning myths, with the help of desire, this "great bearer of keys" (OC III, 588-599).

Breton and Camus campaigned together in favor of Garry Davis, the "little man" who advocated world disarmament. Together, they participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Democratic Rally (RDR), an organization escaping the monolithism of traditional parties. At the Pleyel Hall meeting on the theme "The Internationalism of the Spirit", on December 13, 1948, Breton spoke to describe the parties as zombies surviving themselves (OC III, 982-988). He called for the constitution of a formation capable of translating collective aspirations, opposing both the Stalinists who were falling into police dictatorship and the Gaullists who, by reaction, only aimed to strengthen National Defense. According to him, surrealism, faithful to its initial aspirations, has never ceased to provide weapons for the international combat of the spirit, whether with automatism, its positions against the Moscow trials or the Mexico declaration. He was vigorously applauded when he denounced racial discrimination as well as French policy in Indochina and Madagascar and even when, refusing the notion of collective responsibility, he called for the reintegration of the German people into the human community.

Leaving the plane of ideas, I will take as witness these fragments of intimate discourse that are the dedications addressed by Camus to his elder, from 1947 until after the crisis:

"To André Breton, irreplaceable, with the admiration and friendship of Albert Camus." (The Plague);

"To André Breton, with the admiration and fidelity of Albert Camus" (State of Siege);

"To André Breton, these little stages on a common path. Amicably Albert Camus." (Current, Chronicles 1944-1948);

and, finally, this tribute following the polemic: "To André Breton, for documentary purposes and despite everything, Albert Camus" (The Rebel)

Let us meditate on this "despite everything"!

B. The Same Morality

The divergences between these two intellectuals are all the less comprehensible as they had the same opinion about the Jesuit principle, brought back into fashion by the Stalinists, according to which "the end justifies the means". "This precept," says Breton, "I immediately agreed with Camus in New York, is indeed the one to which the last free intellectuals must today oppose the most categorical and most active refusal." (Radio Interviews, OC III, 596)

The common agreement does not mean that Breton now subscribes to Camus's pessimism. He concludes: "They [the surrealists] do not hold as incurable the 'fracture' observed by Camus between the world and the human spirit." (ibid., p. 597)

We see, nothing irreconcilable between them, all the more so as Breton has always advocated a moral conception of existence. Not common morality, but that which he was able to derive from the existence of certain beings above the lot, such as Jacques Vaché, who taught him detachment from all things, Sade, who made a "breach in the moral night" (OC II, 399), Baudelaire in transcending reality, Rimbaud and Lautréamont of course. Against religions of passivity, all these poets ensure a "more or less sure flight of the spirit towards a world finally habitable" (OC I, 782).

C. Universal Analogy

I affirm that a good use of dialectics would have allowed them to understand each other better than they did. They would then have shared the same conception of universal analogy.

When, during a conversation between surrealists, Breton seeks to make understood what analogy is, he uses this image: "I came to say that the lion could be easily described from the match I was about to strike." (P.C., IV, 885)

Breton compares poetic analogy to mystical analogy, in that both transgress the laws of deduction, and show the relationship of one object to another while logic sees no connection. Except that poetic analogy presupposes no invisible world, and makes visible the true life "absent".

"Only the analogical click excites us, it is only through it that we can act on the engine of the world. The most exalting word we have at our disposal is the word like, whether this word is pronounced or silent." (OC III, 166)

Beyond aesthetic and philosophical theory, the "demon of analogy" (Nadja I, 714, the formula is borrowed from Mallarmé), is also a way of life and a way of thinking.

I understand well that in evoking this aspect of Bretonian thought, Camus does not seem to approve of it. But he does not condemn it for all that: "Finally, as Nietzsche's experience was crowned in the acceptance of noon, that of surrealism culminates in the exaltation of midnight, the obstinate and anguished cult of the storm. Breton, according to his own words, understood that, despite everything, life was given." (HR, 127)

What does this mean, if not that noon implies midnight, and reciprocally? This "demon of analogy" is quite natural: "this process responds to an organic requirement and [...] it asks not to be held in suspicion nor restrained but, on the contrary, stimulated" (OC IV, 838).

Today, no one ignores this postulate of the Second Manifesto: "Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the spirit from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived contradictorily." But we forget the sequel, which explicitly envisages the surpassing, the fusion of antinomies.

D. Love

In the same way, I wonder well in what the conception that Breton made of love, the morality he derived from it, would oppose that of Camus.

In 1929, the surrealists launched a "Survey on Love". They consider that "the idea of love, [is] alone capable of reconciling every man, temporarily or not, with the idea of life". They recognize that the love to which they aspire could not develop without a profound upheaval of society. Liberty or Love! declares Desnos, while their principal theorist claims to substitute elective love and recognition for social alienation. This liberation movement is accompanied by a return to Nature, which excludes nothing of lucidity: "Love, only love that you are, carnal love, I adore, I have never ceased to adore your venomous shadow, your mortal shadow." (A. Breton, Mad Love).

Unique love becomes a specific trait of André Breton, who appeals to the double testimony of Engels and Freud to defend this conception, source of "moral as well as cultural progress" (OC II, 745). And to deduce: "Every time a man loves, nothing can prevent him from engaging with him the sensitivity of all men. So as not to be unworthy of them, he must engage it fully." (OC II, 747)

In truth, it is indeed Camus who paid the most beautiful tribute to this idea of love: "After all, failing to be able to give themselves the morality and values whose necessity they clearly felt, we know enough that Breton chose love. In the doggishness of his time, and this cannot be forgotten, he is the only one to have spoken profoundly of love."

Conclusion

At the end of this analysis, you will agree with me to consider that the Breton/Camus confrontation was the object of a misunderstanding, in the Camusian sense of the word, if I may say so.

The fundamental reason for the debate seems to me to lie in Camus's hostility not towards Breton, we have seen, but rather towards the German ideology that the poet seemed to take up. Admirers of Novalis, Achim von Arnim as well as Fichte and Hegel, the surrealists were, in Camus's eyes, the heirs of this "midnight thought" in France. Besides, Breton was not long in claiming it: "At every opportunity they [the surrealists] have made known what they owed to German thought as well as to German-language poetry." (OC IV, 852) Moreover, the Second Manifesto claimed, just as much as historical materialism, to start from "the colossal abortion" of the Hegelian system. Now, the whole purpose of The Rebel is constructed on the opposition of noon thought to German ideology, with, notably, the example of Marx's triumph against Mediterranean libertarians.

Is it the effect of time elapsed since this polemic? I have a little feeling of having treated a subject without real existence. To the question of what is most important, the moon or the sun, "noon thought" or "midnight thought", I cannot help thinking of the irrefutable response of the Sages of Chelm: "The moon, for it lights the night. During the day, we don't need it." This was before their extermination by the Nazis.

Henri BÉHAR

Appendix

To fix ideas, here is the list of the 19 works of Camus treated by Frantext: 1936, Revolt in the Asturias: essay in collective creation 8,945 words, theater 1942, The Stranger 39,692 words, novel 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus 44,222 words, essay 1944, Caligula, 24,647 words, theater 1944, The Misunderstanding, 18,220 words, theater, tragedy, 1947, The Plague, 102,379 words, novel 1948, State of Siege, 29,888 words, theater 1950, The Just, 20,302 words, theater 1951, The Rebel, 126,985 words, essay 1953, LARIVEY (Pierre de), CAMUS (Albert), The Spirits [adaptation], 14,604 words, theater, comedy