THE LOST CHILDREN, ESSAY ON THE AVANT-GARDE

par Catherine Dufour

It is by referring to Littré's definition designating the first assailants exposed to combat and to a poem by Villon (1) addressed to his companions in great roguery (2) that H. Béhar chose the term lost children (3) to qualify the free-shooters and adventurous poets of Dada and surrealism. The sixteen chapters of the work, fifteen of which take up articles or communications referenced in the bibliography, are grouped into three parts according to a thematic coherence that, not respecting the order of publication of the articles, puts into perspective research conducted from 1983 to 2000.

The first part concerns the Outposts, from Tzara, founder of Dadaism (1916), to Prévert, surrealist of the street (6) (4) who, publishing nothing in the period when he frequented Breton's friends (from 1927), nevertheless participated actively in their state of mind and their way of life. We note that Tzara occupies a place of honor in this first part, just revenge for too frequent an oversight... Who remembers indeed that he was a beacon of the Romanian avant-garde (2), as testified by large excerpts from his correspondence with his friends from Bucharest (1916-1937)? We generally know better his quarrels with Breton, envisaged here according to the dynamics of the chassé-croisé (1) in three emblematic moments: the Dada moment, the surrealist moment and the post-war period. Through the quarrels (1923), reconciliations (1929) and a decisive break (1935), it appears that these two men shared the same conception of an Absolute that could not dissociate existence and writing.

Torn by the war of 1914, this generation converted hatred of borders into a metaphor for decompartmentalization between the arts, and between art and life. While the French poet Eluard, friend of the German painter Ernst (At the Rendezvous of Friends, 3), was fomenting a revolution of language, the Alsatian Arp, at the crossroads of three languages, invented a poetry woven from the spirit of childhood, wordplay, arbitrary cuts, expansions, typos, slips, literality, babbling, lallation, Alsatian Latin, etc. Father Castel's ribbon (5)—ancient ocular harpsichord whose harmony rested on visual combinations—illustrates this unitary conception of art that Arp shared with all the Dadaists and surrealists.

All these artists learned to write and paint in dreams. And while the motifs of the world upside down, the universal wheel and the confusion of realms united Arp and Ernst, Breton invented convulsive beauty (5) (4). This young seer of things wanted to reveal to the world the powers of the eye in its wild state and the interior model updated by psychoanalysis, induced sleep or Nadja's wanderings. Perpetuation of an esoteric tradition, magic art abolished the "dualism of perception and representation" (Breton), of figuration and abstraction.

Why then were some of these artists those Lost Ones described in the second part? Why was Picasso, painter with the ink mirror (1), underestimated as a poet, when his instinctive practice of automatism was a model for the surrealists, whether it took the form of Dada collage, verbal flow in the manner of The Magnetic Fields or "experimental dream" in Tzara's style? Picasso's poetic writings (1935-1959), read with the psychoanalyst's floating attention, allow us to verify their surrealist nature, inspired by the archetypal figures of the mother (Spanish), the father (painter), a particular relationship to time, space and words, and a political sensitivity at the origin of a poetry that, to quote Tzara again, was not "circumstantial" but "[arising] from circumstance."

Why was Yvan Goll (2), great cosmopolitan poet and "ferryman" of ideas, who rubbed shoulders with Dada in Zurich and proclaimed himself surrealist in Paris before 1924, relegated to the purgatory of his generation? The author answers this controversial question with a finding of incompatibility between his poetic modernism, ecumenical and sentimental, and the radical break instituted by Dada. For having underestimated three major contributions—psychoanalysis, automatism, systematic "demoralization"—Goll missed the true revolutions of his era, despite a theatrical work whose authentically... surrealist traits H. Béhar analyzes.

Conversely, the misunderstanding between Roussel and the surrealists was a happy mistake (3). Besides his particular affinities with Desnos, Soupault or Vitrac, Roussel practiced a form of writing automatism recognized by Breton himself, and indulged in the magic of dreams, the mythologies of childhood and the marvelous of tales. Severe toward his theater, the surrealists appreciated its subversive aspect. All admired his language, for its mathematical dimension, its new grammar or its pre-Babel primitivism. Breton even believed he recognized in it an occult message reproducing in cryptic manner the process of the Great Work.

At the antipodes of the enigma represented by Roussel, Caillois's rationalism, ephemeral adherent to surrealism (1932-1934), could have earned him definitive ostracism. His "automatic thought" and his "lyrical ideograms"—pessimism, the femme fatale, the cruel sovereign, etc.—were in resonance with the poetry of Breton, Tzara or Eluard. But his theory of "overdeterminations," which mistrusted the blind confidence accorded to the unconscious, his conception of dreams, the imaginary, versification, the relationships between art and magic separated him from it. Caillois wanted to thwart what he considered a triple imposture: automatic writing, watched by subjective drift, the arbitrariness of the image and the idea of inspiration. In 1934 however, Breton qualified him as "mental compass of surrealism" (4). No doubt he thought that the polemics maintained by interposed works, while allowing Caillois to develop a general poetics of matter and a mythology of collective representations, had enriched from a distance certain essential themes of surrealism: the imaginary, the poetic, the universals of knowledge.

The third part of The Lost Children focuses on some Elements of Surrealist Strategy, and first of all on titles (1). The lexical, grammatical and poetic-semiotic study of 280 titles of works by the first generation (1919-1965) allowed the author to interpret them as a single long poem, fragments escaped from the work, open to all possibilities, highlighting their function of remotivation by means of gaps (diversions, collages or antiphrases) and their role as text shifters which, contrary to their usual use of anticipation or publicity, solicited an active practice of the imagination.

From the study of the term surreal (2), it emerges that Aragon was the first to use it (1924), superimposing the reality-surreality couple on the real-unreal-surreal network. At the same date, no occurrence was found in Breton, who preferred surreality, its exact doublet. But, in conformity with the Hegelian and unitary orientation of the second Manifesto, surreality gradually found itself "contained in reality itself" (Breton). For Desnos, the surreal was only a meta-discourse inadequate to true surrealism, which sufficed to enlarge, to deepen the signified of the word real. Become obsolete with the writers' engagement in an increasingly ambitious practice (Breton, Tzara, Crevel), the surreal was indeed absorbed by surrealism, which knew only the real, but an unlimited real. Parallel to this study, H. Béhar conducted an investigation into the common usage of the term surreal in a dozen publications from the period 1928/1987, revealing an anachronistic use of the word, close to that of the founders of surrealism. Is this gap due, as he thinks, to the rational necessity, ignored by the second Manifesto, to distinguish the philosophical object from the Movement itself and its works?

Two chapters are devoted to Freudo-Marxism, essential strategic vector, detectable in 1935 in the Freudist and Marxian vocabulary of Tzara in Grains and Issues (3), work constellated with lexical borrowings from Freud, Jung and Rank. In the post-capitalist society imagined by Tzara, the new man would fully assume his polymorphous affects (Freud) and recognize the primacy of metaphor, substitute for psychoanalytic transference. Poetry would reconcile the two poles of thought, "directed" and "non-directed" (Jung). Surpassing the trauma of birth (Rank) that underlay human anxiety, the individual would reconnect with intra-uterine happiness, whose repressed memory was at the origin of primitive myths. Tzara strove in the same movement to articulate this poetics of "systematized delirium" to three essential axes of Marxism—law of qualitative transformation, superstructure and negation of negation according to Engels—according to complex modalities whose details we will not give here.

This synthesis, undoubtedly the most elaborate of all those that flourished on the terrain of the surrealists' Freudo-Marxism (4), had been announced in Germany as early as 1929 by Reich, concerned with inscribing psychoanalysis in a historical dimension and wresting it from pan-subjectivist idealism. It is impossible to summarize in a few words the polemics that resulted among Marxists (Sapir) and psychoanalysts (Fromm), hostile to theses that encroached on their respective dogmatisms. In the 1930s, the surrealists seized upon the debate, which became an essential stake in the struggle against fascism. But divergences grafted themselves onto their initial desire to reconcile Rimbaud, Marx and Freud. Thus, at the moment when Breton was distancing himself from the Communist Party, Tzara and Crevel were drawing closer to it and accused the surrealists of considering poetry "as an end in itself" (Tzara). The meeting, very promising, between the three materialist monisms (surrealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis) had been hindered by the reality principle conveyed by French fascism, German Nazism and Stalinist perversion.

In the same concern for fidelity to the superior demands of the spirit, the surrealists adopted the strategy of utopia (5), named here utopian tension to signify its anchoring in present reality and not only in a golden age (6). It is in this perspective that the author successively explored the forms of social criticism in Artaud, Tzara or Breton and the figures of the surrealists' utopian geography, according to its imaginary places—distant Pacific lands, fortunate islands of Mad Love, city of evil in Grains and Issues, etc.—and its real places like Parisian cafés, the grand boulevards or Tzara's house, projection of a dream of "intra-uterine architecture." In automatic writing, utopian tension is flagrant. This collective practice of a de-alienated language, inscribed at the heart of the Love-Freedom-Poetry triptych, transformed a group of writers into an initiatory society, counter-institution and the very place of Utopia.

Crowning the whole, the last chapter is devoted to the marvelous (6), from the first occurrences of the term which, although paradoxically few in number as proven by the FRANTEXT database, suggest that Breton, from the first Manifesto, identified it with beauty itself. In The Peasant of Paris, the marvelous is not confined to literature, it is a modern feeling of existence, it is the real itself. Cinema in this regard has not always lived up to its potential, contrary to the enchanted domain of children, madmen (Eluard), primitives (Péret), Little Romantics and the "bric-a-brac of marvels" listed in the "Essay on the Situation of Poetry" (Tzara). Drawing on Gracq, Mabille or Péret, H. Béhar invites us to follow the path by which, already present among the symbolists, inexhaustible object of glossaries and inventories, the marvelous gradually became synonymous with total exploration of the universe.

Lost children, yes perhaps... partially held in check, despite their efforts, by the destructive schizophrenia of the century, but who bequeathed us some irreplaceable keys to decipher the "cryptogram" (Breton) of the world.

    1 — "Beautiful lesson to lost children." ↩

    2 — Expressions in italics are borrowed from the author. ↩

    3 — Expressions in bold characters figure in the titles (book, parts, chapters). ↩

    4 — Chapter numbers appear in parentheses. ↩

    5 — This chapter, in which we find the list of the 23 Galleries and exhibitions organized by Breton from 1921 to 1965, is a meditation based on the exhibition "André Breton Convulsive Beauty," which took place from April 25 to August 26, 1991 at the Centre G. Pompidou. ↩

    6 — See the title of the article from which this chapter is taken: "From the golden age to the age of man: surrealist utopia." ↩