JÉRÔME DUWA, « 1968, ANNÉE SURRÉALISTE. CUBA, PRAGUE, PARIS »

Review par Olivier Penot-Lacassagne

"In a few months, between 1967 and 1968, the Parisian surrealist group somehow fulfilled itself, finding its truth successively in three places," writes Jérôme Duwa in his new work published by IMEC editions. During this period of hopes and then disappointments, surrealism undergoes the exhausting test of its truth. The great revolutionary exaltations -- "brief but sumptuous wedding of poetic and political life" (p. 246) -- are soon followed by the disillusions of normalization.

On October 4, 1969, Jean Schuster, who had withdrawn from the group's activities since January, published in Le Monde a manifesto -- "The Fourth Song" -- allowing him to conclude "historical surrealism" and sketch a necessary sequel. "Cuba, Prague, May 1968, it is history itself that traces a path that surrealism recognizes as its own and where it engages in the present," he observes. "The great collective celebration (which begins in 1967 in Havana, continues in April in Prague to reach its paroxysm, fifteen days later, in the streets of Paris) reveals that a superior requirement of the spirit, the poetic requirement, henceforth conditions political reality."

After this "unprecedented convergence," it is important to imagine "the variable" that will succeed "historical surrealism." But for this, we must return to the three events that lead the surrealist group to dissolve. The files assembled by Jérôme Duwa, composed of archival pieces, various documents and interviews, allow us to measure the collective's engagement and glimpse its enthusiasms, anxieties, doubts, disappointments.

Cuba, first. Since the early sixties, the island has held the attention of the entire world, and the surrealists, like many of their contemporaries, become aware of its strategic importance facing all-powerful America. But for the surrealists, the stakes could not be merely "political," and the declaration of solidarity they publish in the last issue of the review La Brèche, in December 1964, emphasizes the equally "poetic" scope of the Cuban revolution. It is therefore through culture, saluting its artists and writers, that they gain a foothold in Havana. At this date, the Castrist revolution is still "an experience full of promises," and the rebel island, "a dreamed territory" (p. 29). But doubt sets in at the end of 1967, as the Havana Congress is being prepared in Paris, to which the surrealists will not be invited. If, as Jean Schuster writes to Wifredo Lam in a draft letter from this period, Cuba contains "the hope of a revolution that is being accomplished," the fear of seeing "the voices of poorly repentant Stalinists and neophytes of revolutionary engagement" noisily cover the demand for a true "revolutionary culture" leads him to express his concern. Although excluded from the Congress, the Parisian group still hopes that "rare friends who have the chance not to be surrealists" will be more easily "approved" in Cuba. But Castro's justification of the Soviet troops' invasion of Czechoslovakia brutally ends surrealist hopes.

Prague, then. The "thaw," in the East, has allowed Czech surrealism, forced into long clandestinity, to renew ties with Paris. An exhibition, placed under the sign of the Pleasure Principle, is organized by the Parisian collective, in collaboration with the surrealists of Bratislava, Brno and Prague (February-July 1968). After São Paulo, this new manifestation marks "a point of international flowering of surrealism" (p. 97). But the theme chosen by Paris raises the reluctance of the Prague group (unlike that of Bratislava) which fears that the political question might be imprudently and prematurely evacuated. The reference to Freud, contained in the very title of the exhibition, seems to them to be without subversive scope, and the general subject, lacking historical application, is judged both inactual and illusory. "What takes place in Prague, notes Jérôme Duwa with accuracy, apart from 'the exceptional emotional warmth' of the encounters, is in fact the shock of two very different historical contexts, which thereby confers a different meaning to surrealism, when it develops on the banks of the Seine or on the banks of the Vltava" (p. 102).

Despite these differences of view, the exhibition meets great success from its opening in Brno. On April 15, the French and Prague surrealists decide to jointly draft a manifesto, called "Prague platform," which must cover all fields of surrealist activity. Thus reestablishing the "magnetic line" between East and West, surrealism renews with internationalism. But Moscow's aggression and Soviet repression prematurely interrupt these exchanges barely revived between Czechoslovaks and Parisians.

Paris, finally. Certainly, the group led by Schuster does not occupy a preponderant place among the avant-gardes of the moment, and its influence remains modest. Nevertheless, it knows how to give the insurrectional movement of May a particular meaning, hardly reducible to common sense, a meaning that is "the product of the existence of a movement heir to an already long history where anticolonialism, anti-Stalinism and anti-Gaullism have held their place" (p. 10).

A surrealist tract dated May 5, "No pastors for this rage!", salutes the "automatism" of the Parisian revolt, perceived as "the expression of a spontaneity that suddenly bursts all the repressive straitjacket that so efficiently disenchants life" (p. 179). Written two days after the inaugural demonstration of students in the Latin Quarter, this tract constitutes the first reaction of an avant-garde collective against repression. Putting themselves "at the disposal of students for any practical action intended to create a revolutionary situation in this country," the surrealists call for "the simultaneous destruction of bourgeois and pseudo-communist structures perfectly interlocked."

But the month of May, as the documents presented show, brings dissensions that will be fatal to the group. Faced with events, how to react indeed? Should collective action be privileged, participate together in the birth of the Student-Writers Action Committee and engage alongside Dionys Mascolo, Maurice Blanchot, Marguerite Duras and some others, as Schuster, Bounoure, José Pierre, Courtot or Silbermann consider? Or can one abandon the group and act individually, surrealism then being only the dispersed sum of individual choices made?

The recovery of the post-May period does not leave the surrealists time to smooth over their divergences. The malaise will therefore persist, and a few months after "the Prague platform," whose ambitions were "reconstructive and unifying," Jean Schuster gives up pursuing the collective experience. But his withdrawal, on February 8, 1969, does not signify on his part a definitive disengagement; it rather announces the necessity of conducting otherwise, at the cost of a "wide and deep cut" (p. 244), the surrealist adventure.

The last pages of Jérôme Duwa's book therefore evoke the birth, after the cessation of L'Archibras, of the review Coupure which appears in October 1969 and leaves open the possibility of a renewed surrealism. There we discover the deliberately fragmentary discourse of an incisive group, determined to proceed to "a critical analysis" of the situation resulting from the crisis of May 68 and to seek "new means of communication between men."

Three years later, in January 1972, after seven issues, the last number of Coupure comes out. "As the masters of humanity accumulate their forces, the centers of insubordination light up and intensify," writes Jean Schuster there.

Vigilant and combative, this ultimate statement wagered, despite everything, on the future of a spirit of surrealism finally shared. Time has passed, but its relevance, it seems, has never been denied.