DOMINIQUE BERTHET, ANDRÉ BRETON, IN PRAISE OF THE ENCOUNTER: ANTILLES, AMERICA, OCEANIA

Review par Nadia Ghanem

Rare are the works devoted to the surrealist encounter. Dominique Berthet, philosopher and art critic, director of the journal Recherches en esthétique, devotes a stimulating essay to the encounter with the Elsewhere, so fundamental for Surrealism.

The surrealist encounter is inscribed in spaces, "the high places" (p. 13), likely to inspire any writer or artist. The first chapter, "The Encounter, an Art of Living," deals with the encounter that occurs in a nearby environment, conducive to strolling. The second chapter, "The Passion for Distant Places," focuses on the encounter that occurs through travel or exile; the encounter with the Elsewhere is all the stronger as it is shared by the beloved: the Canaries with Jacqueline Lamba, Gaspésie with Elisa Claro. This interest in elsewhere is accompanied by a desire for knowledge. Initially, artists turn to ethnological, sociological and psychoanalytic studies, only to finally denounce the methods and prejudices of ethnologists who offer, according to them, a truncated vision and analysis of the peoples studied. The author nevertheless questions the surrealists' capacity to "escape all exoticism" (p. 42).

Whatever its context—the streets and cafés of Paris or the islands and territories of North America—the encounter requires, according to Breton, availability and movement proper to the "new spirit," "capable of watching for and capturing the singular signals of existence, as suddenly interrupted as emitted," according to the formula borrowed from Marguerite Bonnet (p. 20). Singular signals of existence that animate places, men and objects alike. The chance that presides over these encounters is not total; it is an objective chance likely to respond, although partially, to an unconscious desire.

In the four following chapters (III to VI), Dominique Berthet relates the encounters made by Breton in the 1940s, during his exile in the United States.

Chapter III, entitled "Martinique, from Internment to Dazzlement," reveals the conditions of Breton's detention during his stopover in Martinique. The reception was most cold but his journey would nevertheless be placed under the sign of discovery and encounters, such as that of Aimé Césaire around the journal Tropiques. Founded in April 1941, Tropiques is financed and distributed by its authors, among whom Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Aristide Maugée and Georges Gratiant. Thus, it is in a haberdashery in Fort-de-France, run by René Ménil's sister, that Breton finds the journal, a fact that is to say the least unusual.

Berthet devotes his chapter IV, "Tropiques and Surrealism," to the privileged relations maintained by the authors of the journal and the surrealist group. The poets compose "action-poems" (p. 77) in the lineage of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Apollinaire. Their interest turns toward surrealism which makes the link between poetry and revolution. The quest for self becomes a collective quest.

Chapter V, entitled "From the Antilles to Indian Reservations," traces the journey made by Breton in the Antilles—in Santo Domingo where he is interviewed by the Spanish surrealist painter and writer, Eugenio Granell, for the daily La Nacion—then in New York, until his discovery of the Indian populations of North America and his enthusiasm for the Hopi and Zuñi tribes.

In chapter VI, "Haiti, the Unpredictable Result of the Encounter," Berthet returns to the role actually played by Breton in the insurrection of Haiti at the beginning of 1946. Officially mandated to give lectures on the island, before an audience of leaders and intellectuals, Breton praises the spirituality of the Haitians while deploring their misery. Based on this observation, he calls for "world revolution." This call will be understood by the Haitians as an encouragement to national insurrection. The government overthrown, power will be taken by the military with the help of the United States. Breton's eleven lectures, initially planned, will be cancelled and the poet will return to New York at the end of March 1946, after a stopover in Santo Domingo then in Martinique where he will give three lectures. And Berthet concludes, rightly, that surrealism entered into resonance with Antillean and Caribbean cultures because of a shared system of references that includes the marvelous and the oneiric.

In the seventh and last chapter, entitled "Emotion and Knowledge," the author focuses on surrealist exhibitions organized in the 1960s. Like the surrealist exhibitions of the interwar period, they are the privileged place of confrontation between surrealist works and primitive objects: they welcome "primitive" fetishes that coexist with the group's works, inaugurating other space-times. E. RO. S, realized jointly by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and José Pierre, and The Mask are thus inaugurated in December 1959. Breton will give priority to the "sensitive" and to "emotion": the spectator must not attach himself to the plastic qualities of the fetish, conceived for ritual, but let himself be penetrated by its presence. The question of the loss of aura of these decontextualized objects will however arise for Breton, who recognizes, as early as 1955, that the long-awaited dialogue with indigenous peoples had remained very partial due to the difficulty of building bridges between such distant cultures. The poet nevertheless considers the appropriation of cult objects as a rescue from unscrupulous merchants and missionaries.

For Breton, the encounter of fetishes and surrealist works within the same exhibition space favors the shock effect on the spectator by giving new meaning to the whole. The last surrealist exhibition, in December 1965, entitled The Absolute Gap (in reference to Charles Fourier's method), is inscribed in this will to take the opposite of habits of thinking and doing. As Dominique Berthet so rightly says about Breton: "Just as he never wanted to be a professional writer, he did not seek to look at works by calling upon the different analytical tools provided by the human sciences, preferring to make emotion the determining element of his appreciation. He wanted to stick to enthusiasm alone" (p. 132).