ALAIN JOUBERT, THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT OR THE LAST WORD OF HISTORY

par Stéphanie Caron

Although published less than a year ago, Alain Joubert's work has already caused much talk. It continues — here is the proof — and everything suggests that its fame will not stop there. Nothing to do, however, with the "fabulous destiny" of someone we know: far from winning everyone's support, this book that wants to be polemical is already very controversial, and is likely to give rise, if not to riposte, at least to lively discussion.

The matter appears, however, on the surface, very simple: as the title suggests at first glance, it is about recounting, as the author experienced them from the inside, the last years of surrealism, which are also the most unknown. And for proof: one of the most important volumes devoted to the history of surrealism, under Gérard Durozoi's signature, settles the question in a page and a half — insufficiency which was moreover, according to him, the main reason that pushed Alain Joubert to take up the pen to evoke "this historical moment above all that constitutes the end of the Group."

Far from him, however, the intention to do the work of a historian: if The Surrealist Movement or the Last Word of History can be, in certain respects, considered as an indispensable complement to the History of the Surrealist Movement, its object is not to bring a new stone to the historical knowledge of the movement, but to "illuminate certain aspects of the last years of the group directly issued from Breton's will," in order to "demonstrate that what was said or written" about them deserved precisely "better than the embarrassed silence in which historians willingly enclosed themselves."

Better, that is to say a volume of nearly four hundred pages which, privileging subjective "violence" over "soft objectivity," accusation over neutral observation and narrative present over critical distance — in a word, the partiality of a lived testimony over a distanced analysis of facts — strives to shed light on a section of the surrealist adventure long kept unknown to all to favor the "little affairs" of a few.

Printed on the back cover, the expression is the author's: it summarizes quite faithfully, indeed, the content of his text, whose reading suddenly plunges the purchaser into an atmosphere of business dealings that is not without evoking certain political current events. So much so that it is principally about politics that we are dealing here, in all senses of the term, beginning with the least noble.

The first part of the work, devoted to the reconstitution of events that, from January to October 1969, precipitated the explosion of the Parisian surrealist group, indeed describes a fierce quest for power, which, with great reinforcement of threatening circulars, media campaigns and intimidation maneuvers, aims to establish a single man at the head of the surrealist movement after the death of its founder. This dictator, whose only legitimacy would be based on a misunderstood testamentary note from Breton, is none other than Jean Schuster, assisted in his "coup d'état" by various accomplices, in the first rank of which José Pierre, Philippe Audouin, Gérard Legrand, Claude Courtot and Jean-Claude Silbermann — all founding members of the magazine Coupure, in which the author denounces a fraudulent maneuver aimed at seizing, without saying so, a surrealist movement previously subjected to purge.

In a second time, it is to the origins of the evil that Alain Joubert goes back, returning to the beginning of the sixties to detect there the fracture line that should lead, nine years later, to the dissolution we know. Political fracture line, which, opened by the publication of the Manifesto of 121, and its media recovery by Sartre, soon separates the surrealists into two camps: those who, led by Schuster, are favorable to a massive engagement of the group on the left, alongside the intellectuals this one sought to approach, and the others who, initially gathered around the magazine Sédition to denounce the abusive use that the author of Dirty Hands had made of said Manifesto, refuse the interference of surrealism on the terrain of contemporary revolutions, whether they be Stalinist, Algerian or Cuban. During Breton's lifetime, the disagreements are more or less contained; but as soon as the latter disappeared, his supposed heir will not cease to work for the political engagement of the group, with an obstinacy or blindness that Joubert attributes to bad faith (see the chapter devoted to the declaration "For Cuba"), and a tenacious resentment against those who had made (or tried to make) obstruction to his project.

From then on, the loop is closed: while the support for revolutionary movements that Schuster extorts from the signatories of "For a playful tomorrow" is about to precipitate surrealism into the Castroist error, his resentment towards his former opponents, as it is expressed implicitly in a letter from May 1969, leads to their exclusion and, by ricochet, to the split. The relative enthusiasm of these "diversely motivated" people who according to Philippe Audouin constituted the post-war surrealist group would therefore not be in question: the main reason for its explosion is the ambition of a man ready to do anything to attract it into political nets. And for proof: returning in a third time to various manifestations organized during the sixties, including the 1965 exhibition that was held at the Galerie de l'Œil under the title "L'Écart absolu," Alain Joubert sees there a manifest sign of the movement's vitality, and of the will for renewal that then characterized it. It is therefore indeed for lack of having known how to oppose Schuster's political velleities that surrealism finally died out, even if it only left the domain of History to better access that of myth, as a last chapter tries to demonstrate quite laboriously where, putting Breton and Bataille in parallel for the occasion, the author imagines as conclusion the constitution of "a metaphilosophy of which Surrealism would be both the inventor and the principal vector."

If the text thus closes on a positive note, exhorting those who today define themselves as surrealists to finally give birth to the "great surrealism" that Bataille prophesied, the overall impression nonetheless remains that it celebrates a mythical past more than a glorious future, if we at least admit with the author that myth consists in giving "a new form to essential emptiness." For by devoting entire pages to the evocation of unorganized meetings (chapter I) or to aborted action attempts (such as this "Black Pavilion" of which chapter VII reveals to us that it "could have constituted a real turning point in the life of surrealism, if the cards had been otherwise distributed"), Alain Joubert succeeds quite well in letting us imagine what post-1968 surrealism could have been — this unreal of the past to which a capital S confers throughout the text a sacred character, but which never managed to exist due to the embezzlements of a few.

What could have been the History of the third surrealist convoy was diluted in little stories: such would therefore be, in substance, the "last word of history" — or, to take up the formula that Maurice Nadeau, publisher of the present work, used in 1963 about Jean-Louis Bédouin: "In spite of himself, [...], the author shows that when a history survives itself, it inevitably degrades into anecdotes." Indeed, despite the faith that Alain Joubert retrospectively displays in his contemporaries' capacity to overcome their own dissensions, and to renew their activities in a decisive manner, his detailed account of backstage manipulations, intestine quarrels and other struggles of interest not only concurs in offering of the last surrealists only the "ridiculous spectacle of their divisions," the very one that Vincent Bounoure condemned in "Nothing or what?", but brings back to memory a question that Philippe Audouin posed: "what to think of a movement whose survival or death are at the mercy of a single man?"

For such is, it will be understood, the thesis that this work defends — without succeeding, however, in really carrying conviction. Not that the version of facts here proposed, based on the highlighting of contradictory declarations or the very precise analysis of situations and documents often little known (and sometimes very funny, like the savory interview of José Pierre, André Parinaud and Jean-Claude Silbermann reproduced page 35) does not effectively succeed in making the reader admit that at this moment of the surrealist adventure, some attempted to take, more or less democratically, the head of the movement — the more measured declarations of Bounoure, in his interview "Before Stefan Baciu" notably, went moreover in this direction. But the profound motivations of the individuals here called into question being, more or less, reduced to simple personal considerations in which intellectual choices enter only very little, the affair is reduced to a very Manichean story to which the reader has difficulty adhering. Thus we arrive at a caricatural distribution of forces present which, opposing on one side individuals for whom surrealism has become a space of power serving to compensate for their creative impotence or to favor their social promotion, and on the other a handful of irreducibles who obstinately see in it a place of creation and revolt, is not without evoking that of "good guys" and "bad guys," in the cartoons of which the author seems fond. As an example, let us cite this passage where, reporting remarks of confounding cynicism by José Pierre ("if I joined the Surrealist Movement, it is quite simply because at the time I considered that it was there that I had the most chance of meeting the best writers and the best artists, that's all!"), the author accompanies it with this comment of no less confounding angelism: "we who naively thought that if one wanted to be surrealist it was to 'change life,' 'transform the world' and 'remake human understanding,' things like that, you know!" (p. 144). Quite irritating is moreover, in this context, the tendency of the same author to constantly pose, he and his companion Nicole Espagnol, as victims of the "hatred" of the future Coupurists, hatred whose motive one will have to wait more than two hundred pages to know, but whose alleged manifestations still leave the impression that he places himself "a little too at the center of certain events," according to the terms of the reproach he anticipates in his Warning.

Doubtless temporal distance contributes, equally with the concern for clarity, to this excessive simplification of the situation and the "psychology" of the incriminated characters, whose portrait that is painted for us in chapter X could be reduced, in Ducasse's vein, to "Schuster the General without victory," "José Pierre The Ambitious ready for anything," "Courtot the Industrious Academic," "Legrand the Coward," "Audouin the Follower," "Silbermann the Traitor despite himself." But it nonetheless remains that, while claiming to replace us "at the heart of the event, in full combat," the author never objectively resituates Schuster and his companions' choices in the extremely politicized context that was that of the time: evoking this past at thirty years' distance, he has an easy game of condemning the errors committed, and of attributing them, for lack of other explanation, to ambition alone. Sign, however, that these times were, for surrealists as for others, politically more troubled than Alain Joubert wants to admit. He himself has some difficulty justifying the silence of his friends Jorge and Margarita Camacho on their return from Cuba, and especially the presence of his own signature at the bottom of the declaration "For Cuba"...

If the author only intended to deliver us his version of the facts, one could not hold it against him to give only a partial and biased lighting; but by subtitling his book "the last word of history," he poses neither more nor less as holder of the Truth. However, perceived as it is from a point of view if not unique, at least unilateral, read through the prism of passions that time does not seem to have appeased, it is more than probable that this "truth" leaves itself open to discussion, even to contradiction. And this is where the shoe pinches: by affirming to give "the last word of history," Alain Joubert seems not only to declare in a peremptory manner the debate closed, but even to oppose, in advance, a dismissal to those who would hazard another version of the facts. So much so that they are no longer very numerous: as he himself remarks in his Warning, the main personalities he calls into question disappeared before the publication of his book. Certainly, he explains himself about it, but one cannot help noting what the situation has, for him, of advantageous.

Contestable, partisan, and sometimes in bad faith? Yes, Alain Joubert's work is therefore indeed all that. Let us even wager that it did not want to be anything else.

But it also wanted to be funny, and it often is; written with an alert pen, and it is throughout; rich in unpublished information and, to date, one can hardly find better on the subject. Thus specialists will be able to glean, here and there, precious information on a poorly known period of surrealist history, accompanied by numerous documents (extracts from unpublished correspondence or internal publications, interviews not taken up in volumes, photographs...) whose communication considerably enriches knowledge of the group's functioning (or what remained of it) at this time, whether in its interior exchanges or in its contacts with the outside, and particularly with Czech surrealists. However brief it may be, the review of activities conducted after 1969 (from BLS to SURR, passing through the ephemeral Surréalisme) opens numerous research perspectives, and may perhaps incite some researcher to investigate these occluded moments of surrealism which, from the seventies to our days, have seen the collective adventure continue, against all odds, under the aegis of former group members. Stimulating, also, the passages devoted to the complex relations that certain avant-garde movements, such as the Situationists, maintained with their "fathers" in revolution, which could invite a questioning on the surrealist heritage, and the mixture of appropriation and rejection on which it has been perpetuated. Finally, on a more monographic level, the homage that the author pays to certain poets or artists of this third convoy may perhaps give the impulse to works on works largely ignored by the general public, like those of Robert Lagarde and Guy Cabanel.

As for those who will only want to see in Alain Joubert's work a complacent testimony on one of the least glorious epochs of surrealist history, at least they will be able to recognize this merit that at the time when one exhibits a relatively harmless surrealism, and largely defused of its power of aggression, it is not unpleasant to hear a voice rise whose angry accents, and willingly insulting, remind us of its virulence of yesteryear.