SURREALISM IN THE LEFT-WING PRESS

par Guy Bordes

Based on an "exhaustive" corpus of articles published in the left-wing press of the thirties, by surrealists and about surrealism, Henri Béhar plunges us into an era of noise and polemics, where culture has its say about society. The surrealist movement left no one indifferent.

Be amazed, reader, by this curious phenomenon, this vertiginous mise en abyme, L'OURS, a left-wing journal (there are some left!) reviewing Surrealism in the Left-Wing Press! More than half a century has passed but these accumulated decades take nothing away from the luster of the polemics of that time, when one knew how to literarily invective and politically assassinate each other, when intellectual combats concerned the essential: the freedom of the spirit and the emancipation of the people, war and peace and, ultimately, freedom or death. One is far, in leafing through this collection of articles, from the television platform beaters who nowadays strive to make us take the bladders of their ego for the lanterns of engagement.

The work, in all likelihood exhaustive, groups together articles published in left-wing newspapers and periodicals from 1924, the date of Breton's Manifesto and the founding of the surrealist revolution, to 1939, the fatal year. It presents the tableau of radical, socialist, communist, Trotskyist, anarchist publications, and related nebulae, those which more or less independently attach themselves to one of these currents.

The relationships of surrealism with the left-wing press are posed on two levels: there are on one hand articles written by surrealists in these newspapers, essentially Péret in L'Humanité and Eluard for Marianne, quite conventional, and, especially, the critics of the cultural pages who, from the beginning, were interested in this movement whose novelty and originality did not escape contemporaries. One can classify these reactions, throughout this period, into three categories: those for; those against, and the embarrassed.

THE DEFENSE OF THE PROLETARIAT

For: La Flèche by Gaston Bergery, organ of the Frontist Party, and Les Humbles, journal of the Primaries directed by Maurice Wullens, who, vituperating Aragon, places Breton on equal footing with Marcel Martinet, men whose rectitude is saluted, sole defenders of the proletariat, which "obliges them to fight on two fronts and to provide alone for the defense of the true chosen cause." Toward the end of the thirties, one figure stands out, that of Aragon, and it is often around the Stalinist engagement of the surrealism renegade that the debate is organized. Also favorable to the surrealists is L'Europe nouvelle (where Pierre Brossolette wrote) with a very laudatory article by Léon-Pierre Quint on Nadja. And in Marianne, Edmond Jaloux signs an article of great lucidity and very sympathetic to André Breton's theses. He shows there that one of the origins of surrealism is in a movement of reaction against the "scientific and pedantic horror" of war. Skillful in showing the novelty character of the surrealist movement, Edmond Jaloux has of course seen one of its characteristics rarely raised, that of filiation with German romanticism.

Let us pass quickly over the adversaries. These are essentially L'Humanité, which does not forgive the extreme brevity of Breton's companionship with Stalinism, and La Critique sociale, by Boris Souvarine and Georges Bataille who, conversely, do not forgive that it took place. The arguments are not based on considerations of literature, but of politics; marked by rancor and sectarianism, they in no way illuminate the problematic of the complex relationships of fascination/repulsion that the surrealists had with the Communist Party due to the supposedly common revolutionary aim.

Among the major cultural periodicals, the cleavage also operates. Guéhenno's Europe is generally favorable, the critiques aim to be constructive; Barbusse's Monde is hostile, always polemical. It should be noted that renowned writers quite distant from the attitudes and engagements of Breton and his friends, such as Guéhenno and Cassou (the latter author of a beautiful article on Crevel) were able to analyze this new form of poetry in terms that honor their literary perspicacity.

Let us finally come to the embarrassed, among whom our dear old Populaire. Little sensitive, it seems, to the terrorizing rhetoric of the group's poets, Léon Blum's organ — who probably could not forget his beginnings as a literary dandy, considerably anarchizing at La Revue blanche — does not risk too much textual criticism, Jean-Baptiste Séverac even going so far as to, "at the risk of appearing foolish," admit to "understanding nothing" of Eluard's poetry. The convergence of socialists with surrealists manifests itself on another level: that of freedom of expression, Le Populaire supporting Georges Sadoul in a matter of insult to a military officer and vigorously taking sides for the defense of Buñuel's film L'Age d'or, to whose distribution the extreme right leagues had opposed themselves with their customary violence.

THE BREAK WITH COMMUNISM

One cannot review all the publications gathered in this volume, at most draw the lessons from this confrontation of politics and literature (and art). And first of all the vigor of the polemics. It is true that we were still in a period where neither political correctness nor the wooden language of media banalization were rampant. All this vigor is probably due first to the fact that the surrealists themselves admirably wielded the violence of language, but especially that with them literature enters as such into the political field. The literary text, poetic or otherwise, becomes subversive by its very nature, and no longer by its ideological content. Form makes meaning and the subversion of language becomes that of social reality. Hence the illusion of companionship with the political "revolution" that the communism of that time was supposed to represent, and the rapid and inevitable break of authentic surrealists with this mode of thought and action. From its beginnings, the intellectual adventure of the surrealists left no one indifferent. But, another lesson from this volume, one can observe that, if surrealism disturbs greatly at the beginning of its career, over the years, its productions are less and less discussed, they are part of the cultural landscape, of the current events that are talked about, notably regarding painting (Ernst, Tanguy, Dalí, especially). And it should be noted that toward the end of the decade, from the years 1935-1936, Breton's figure is increasingly valorized by the non-communist left-wing press.

If, as Henri Béhar rightly says in his introduction, "surrealism has often been perceived by the left-wing press through its own glasses, I mean an ideological prism," one can affirm that the panoramic ensemble proposed to us, through the contradictory diversity of expressed opinions, constitutes a rich contribution to the study of the mentalities of an era when literature counted in the formation of opinion and to the historical perspective of a major literary movement that durably marked its century.

GUY BORDES
L'Ours, n° 320, July-August 2002, p. 6.