BRETON, ASCENDANT CÉSAIRE

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The analysis of the relations between surrealism and Aimé Césaire, one of "those obligatory commonplaces of criticism" of which Dominique Combe speaks[1], has nourished an abundant literature that should dissuade from adding one's drop of ink to the torrent. Yet, since the peremptory annexationist judgments that make the Martinican "without doubt one of the greatest surrealist poets of the 20th century[2]," the idea of Breton's influence on Césaire "seems [...] to have fizzled out," notes D. Combe again[3]. Many works have contributed to giving back to Césaire what belongs to Césaire, and I myself have shown how the connivances woven during the war years gradually change in nature and intensity from Breton's return to Paris in 1946, and Césaire's engagement[4]. A letter from Breton to Péret in August 1946 already suggests some distance: "Césaire: perfect, but too much work[5]." On this point, I can only, to be brief, renew my conclusions: Césaire is indeed the maroon negro of metropolitan literature, resistant to all regimentation and to that "cultural mimicry" of which he accused Ménil and the young Antilleans who put Légitime défense at the service of the surrealists[6].

But one has not completely done justice to Césaire as long as one has not completely overturned the critical understanding concerning him: I mean as long as one has not wondered whether it was not Breton himself who could have been influenced by Césaire after his Martinican stopover. Dominique Combe clearly evokes the possibility of an "emulation" between the two poets, reciprocal emulation that would authorize speaking of a "Césairean" Breton as one has spoken of a surrealist Césaire[7]. To the conventional terminology, I have preferred the polysemantic term "ascendant." In fact, Césaire constituted for Breton, in these years of distress, a sign; he could be the star that rises on the horizon hitherto orphaned of (re)fathers.

It remains to validate the hypothesis. This will be the object of my discourse, which will endeavor to show that the dazzled reading of Césaire's poems encourages Breton to "reverse the poetic steam," as he says in the Ode to Charles Fourier where he engages in a new poetic writing, more "situated' with respect to the events of a tragic current affairs and more subject to formal constraints.

To take the true measure of Césaire's exemplarity, it is appropriate to recall what dilemma closes in on the author of Misère de la poésie from the beginning of the war, a dilemma aggravated by his first steps in Fort-de-France. On the one hand, there is the constant refusal of this "exercise [...] without tomorrow, poetically regressive" that is the "circumstantial poem" devoted to the "external subject," that is to say "to particular accidents[8]." There is this refusal renewed in 1935, which applies especially to engagement: "to put poetry and art at the exclusive service of an idea, however enthusing it may be in itself, would be to condemn them to immobilize themselves in the short term, would amount to engaging them on a siding.[9]" But, on the other hand, the pressure of the event is exerted, I mean the rise of perils, then the war, "the debacle of the spirit," "the eclipse" of surrealist aspirations[10], which engender the necessity of responding to History's summons, of situating one's voice, of breaking with the inconsistency of a poetic vision detached from the real world.

From then on, the ideological dilemma leads to a problematic of forms. Is it possible to find a mode of expression reconciling prosaism and lyricism, didactic affirmation and the free gushing of the sheaf of images? How to write these long poems to which Breton declares, in these war years, to hold particularly because they are "more likely to retain the reader than elliptical brevity" and "more appropriate to the exigency of embracing inner becoming[11]" without sacrificing to supervised elaboration, to the setting up of a rhetoric?

Upon landing in the Antilles, poetically exalting but desperate on the political and social level, the contradiction reactivates: significantly, Breton "caps' all the texts of Martinique charmeuse de serpents with an Avant-dire that emphasizes the impossibility of finding this "common language" that accounts as well for "the exterior, the ephemeral, [the] social" as for "the interior, the eternal, the individual[12]." The work, which he publishes in 1948, is in fact constituted as an assemblage of elements each having their generic identity, poems, prose poems, "dialogue," press article. Breton seems to resign himself to making "use in voluntary opposition" of the "lyrical language" on the one hand and the "language of simple information[13]" on the other, therefore to renounce describing "poetically the Antillean political[14]": "what is harmed and defied by such mores is of too much importance for me to venture to mix poetry with the imprescriptible poetry of the island[15]."

This "divided' eye, it nevertheless does not seem that Breton has always abdicated all hope of remedying it. But until the Ode to Charles Fourier, he has provided approximate, partial solutions to the combination of contrary criteria that are "situation" with regard to the event, lyrical élan and concerted form. Before meeting Césaire, Breton has written "long" poems, Pleine Marge or Fata Morgana; however, the titles of both say enough what distance Breton takes from the world: "Say what is underneath"... With the series of Xénophiles, he also writes "subject" poems, brief texts that describe as much as they evoke primitive statuettes, published on the occasion of an exhibition. He even happens to commit, in 1942, a sort of Voltairean epigram, unrhymed quatrain that mocks the "More than suspect" generals: but the "circumstantial' has taken precedence over lyricism.

However, one of the texts of Martinique charmeuse de serpents represents a more accomplished attempt. In Eaux troubles, Breton paints with a luxury of details the revolting social reality of the Antilles; but, in this journalistic information article, which Marguerite Bonnet judges to be "sober and objective, without any lyricism[16]," he nevertheless introduces poetic signals. While the ship on which Breton has embarked approaches the coasts of Martinique, two "apparitions' at "morning" recall the end of the old world delivered to war (blood, flags to the east) and the promise of the new (rainbow and flying fish, like the one that strangely adorned issue 1 of La Révolution surréaliste, in 1924).

I had been struck by the appearance in enfilade of these three objects conjugating their flame: a skinned ox, still suspended from the day before, the flags at the rear of the ship, the rising sun. Their somewhat hermetic assemblage, in April 1941, nevertheless seemed rich in meaning. But the approach of the goal, the sensitive contouring of the edge of the island suffice to carry away these painful realities, as to make these phantasms drift. One shows each other the flying fish, increasingly small, but always more numerous, shooting forward in the small rainbows of the raised water[17]

Breton, through these symbols, places, as an "avant-dire" to these pages that will paint the "drama of colonization," the poetic gaze. He thus denies the pact of dissociation that he has feigned to erect into necessity at the beginning of his book, he attempts to reconcile the lyrical eye and the social gaze.

Breton's dazzlement at the reading of the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is in the measure of the response that this text brings him, so appropriate to his "lack": "For me its appearance [...] takes the value of a sign of the times[18]." But while Benjamin Péret, in his preface to the Spanish translation of the Cahier in 1942, salutes Césaire's savagery, electively emphasizing the independence of his inspiration ("Aimé Césaire owes nothing to anyone..."; "the first great black poet who has broken his moorings...[19]"), Breton chooses to pose the question of the "subject poem." He congratulates Césaire for having succeeded in reconciling the concrete, the current and the lyrical, for having known how to reconcile "the gift of song, the capacity for refusal, the power of transmutation[20]." In this long poem where movement is constantly sustained, relaunched by anaphoras, by the concerted alternation of flows of exuberance, mad anger, biographical confidences, "the most discredited materials, among which must be counted the uglinesses and servitudes themselves[21]" undergo this "transmutation" thanks to which Césaire, beyond the accidental (the slave trade), addresses all of man. Such is the magical success of the Cahier that Breton emphasizes with an enthusiasm that must lead to questioning his deep motivations. Why does he feel the necessity of justifying Césaire so lengthily on this point of the "subject poem," which he could just as well have passed over in silence, as Péret had done in his own preface to the Martinican's text? It is not only a question of completing Césaire's surrealist dubbing by attesting to his most scrupulous orthodoxy. It is above all for Breton a question of justifying himself, of finishing convincing himself that circumstances require an inflection of his aesthetics. Dominique Combe notes that Un grand poète noir is a "barely diverted exposition of Breton's poetics," and that the Cahier becomes in some way a poem of Breton himself, "perhaps the dreamed poem that he could not or did not know how to write[22]." From the first lines of his preface, the poet exclaims: "what was said there was what needed to be said[23]." Césaire's ascendant is henceforth marked, of a nature to remove all scruple concerning the practice of an engaging poetic discourse: the Antillean "writes the poems we need today[24]," notes Breton again, conscious of the exigencies of this time that is ours.

The Césairean model is inseparable from the lesson of nature, which Breton discovers at the same time as he reads the Antillean poet. The forest, the mountain, the volcano, he deciphers them like a grimoire that would contain the secret of a writing: is it not significant that the text that closes Des épingles tremblantes, entitled "Map of the Island," is exclusively constituted of toponyms, like a perfect example of geo-graphy? The Créole Dialogue that opens Martinique... emphasizes this role of tropical nature in the reflection of artists. Masson, practicing automatic drawing, Breton distrusting everything that could pass for an "arrangement," a constraint, nevertheless agree on the necessity of "regular forms[25]." Rimbaud is invoked ("Find flowers that are chairs! But we almost have them before our eyes[26]"), but the injunction of the Seer runs up against the "imperious need' to give form: "We have fallen in love with vegetable force and yet the imperious need that we have felt to entertain ourselves with regular forms in a place of nature where precisely the formless, I mean the lack of framework, seems to predominate, what could be more significant?[27]" Antillean nature becomes a metaphor of the poem ("I will always see us from very high leaning to lose ourselves on the gulf of Absalom as on the very materialization of the crucible where poetic images are elaborated," Breton says to Césaire[28]). In this magical island, one encounters labyrinths and entanglements, but also regular forms (crystal, the Diamond Rock). There is above all the balisier flower that conjugates the exuberance of its flowering and perfect symmetry, a flower of which Breton makes the "heraldic term of the conciliation that we seek between the graspable and the distraught, life and dream[29]." As Marguerite Bonnet comments, the balisier represents the "point of the sought junction between organized form and form without rules[30]": the stylistic solution to the problem of reconciling élan and constraint.

Breton has therefore doubtless found with Césaire the example or confirmation of the appropriate response to tragic times: a manifesto-text, an ample proclamation in the measure of urgency, where the rights of poetry are compatible with a social speech. If the exile from New York hesitates, in 1942, to publish a third Surrealist Manifesto – he contents himself with "prolegomena" –, he composes his great poems, "veritable beacons in the night of meaning" (as he said in Fata Morgana), such as Les États généraux and the Ode to Charles Fourier.

Césaire's ascendant must not be described in terms of direct influence, nor of source, but must be measured in this: that, in the Ode to Charles Fourier, Breton has voluntarily and spectacularly inflected his poetic principles by giving his text a "subject," the celebration of the utopian's thought; strong relations with the current affairs of 1945; a form marked by the unusually visible pregnance of anaphoras and a dialectical composition, a form doubtless rendered necessary by the length of the poem. There is no direct relation between the Cahier and the Ode, except that Breton would doubtless not have committed this "infraction" of which he speaks in a letter to Jean Gaulmier[31] if he had not felt encouraged to do so. Questioned on the reasons for this double choice (why Fourier, why an "ode"), Breton mentions a "voluntary, elective sacrifice to the memory of Fourier, the most recent in date that [seemed] worthy of it to him," while confessing himself "quite at a loss' to explain how the idea had come to him to celebrate this memory[32]. It seems to me that it is a complex play of connections and associations that leads Breton, in this summer of 1945, to associate the memory of Césaire and his Cahier with the need for Fourier.

The possible junction between the Cahier and the Ode is first observed in what Régis Antoine calls a "contamination of enunciations[33]": "At the end of the small morning" determines a particular temporality, a devastating inaugural taking of consciousness, that one finds under Breton's pen: "And behold that a small morning of 1937...". And in this discovery, the spectacle of the city – whether it be Fort-de-France or Paris – plays a determining role. The powerful anaphoric corset of the first movement of the Cahier (about fifteen laisses that all begin with identical formulas – "At the end of the small morning," "In this inert city") prefigures the sextuple invocation to Fourier, where the stanzas, notably the last four, are constructed on the same syntactic and rhythmic pattern.

Another contamination could have played between "the reforming writers of the first half of the 19th century" and "the primitive artists," to both Breton grants, in Arcane 17, "the benefit of extreme freshness[34]." One must remember that the black artists of his entourage, poet like Césaire, painter like Wifredo Lam (and soon, at the end of 1945, the Haitians who welcome him), have remained for him "closest to the sources[35]." There is a mental kinship between these men unscathed by the West, who have remained apart from rational thought. The Fourier of absolute deviation extends his hand to the Césaire who repudiates en bloc "Europe all convulsed with cries' and who launches "the great challenge[36]." André Masson recounts his memories of walking with Breton in Martinique. During these excursions, they discuss "paradisiacal utopians' and stop "at length at Charles Fourier," whom Masson nicknames "the customs officer Rousseau of socialism[37]." Should one believe him, when Breton claims to have discovered Fourier only in New York? But should one always believe Breton, who sometimes has selective memory, as evidenced by his surprising "forgetting" of the meeting with Césaire in his 1952 Entretiens?

Be that as it may, there are many other points of tangency between Martinique, where Breton receives the direct revelation of the colonial drama, and the southwest of the United States, where he visits the Indian communities with such a tragic destiny. Between the reading of Césaire and that of Fourier, same echoes, identical correspondences: while in the one Breton measures the greatness of lost Africa, the injustice done to the "black race," he discovers in the other the trial of civilization that stifles savage peoples, the denunciation of the slave trade and the extermination of Amerindians. Everything happens as if Césaire's lesson had opened him to that of Fourier; as if the taking of consciousness "of the destiny that has been that of these men[38]" had led him, under the pretext of celebrating Fourier, to denounce in turn the modern slave traders[39]. To finish saluting the great black poet, Breton develops the metaphor of the enslavement of our imagination: "If the slave traders have physically disappeared from the world stage, one can be sure that on the other hand they are raging in the mind where their 'ebony wood' are our dreams, it is more than half of our nature despoiled (...)[40]." Only the "prophets of times to come," the poets and dreamers who have understood that revolt "begins with excess, immoderation, searches struck with interdiction[41]" can deliver us: it is Breton's voice citing Césaire, who himself cites Lautréamont: but how not to admit that Fourier is indeed in the continuity of those who, as Pleine marge said, do not keep to the square?

Shortly after the Fort-de-France meeting, Breton, installed in the United States, makes reverence to his friend Césaire, "magnetic and black[42]."

Césaire "black"? The curious insistence on designating the Antillean by his "color" (six times in the same paragraph of Un grand poète noir: "My first reaction quite elementary to discover him of such pure black..."; "The first new breath [...] is the contribution of a Black" etc.) seems so little pertinent that it had, in its time, led Franz Fanon to disturbing reflections on Breton's motivations. For my part, I prefer to read there an echo to Tristan Tzara"s formula, inciting Europe then at war to resource itself to so-called primitive cultures: "From black let us draw light[43]."

Césaire "magnetic"? The term is doubtless opportune, so much has the poet of the Cahier magnetized and oriented the inspiration of a Breton quite disoriented. But one must also read there the transparent allusion to the founding experience of Les Champs magnétiques. Césaire's work, through which everything could begin again...

Université Montpellier-III

    1 — . Dominique Combe, ""La grande fleur énigmatique du balisier..." : Breton et Césaire", André Breton, Cahier de l'Herne, 1998, p. 365. ↩

    2 — . Jacqueline Leiner, article "Césaire" in Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs, Paris, P.U.F., 1982, p. 82-83. ↩

    3 — . Dominique Combe, ""La grande fleur énigmatique..."", op. cit., p. 365. ↩

    4 — . Jean-Claude Blachere, "Breton et Césaire, flux et reflux d"une amitié", Europe, n° 832-833, août-septembre 1998. ↩

    5 — . Cited by Mark Polizzotti, André Breton, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 809. ↩

    6 — . Mentioned by Georges Desportes in his article "Tel qu"en lui-même et par lui-même", Europe, n° 832-833, op. cit., p. 43. ↩

    7 — . Dominique Combe, ""La grande fleur énigmatique..."", op. cit., p. 367-368. ↩

    8 — . André Breton, Misère de la poésie, ↑, Œuvres complètes, (henceforth: OC), Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, t. II, 1992, p. 20-21. ↩

    9 — . André Breton, Position politique de l'art d'aujourd'hui, OC II, 425. ↩

    10 — . Id., Entretiens XIV (1913-1952), OC III, 554. ↩

    11 — . Philippe Bernier, Etienne-Alain Hubert, Notice aux Poèmes ↑, OC III, 1276. ↩

    12 — . André Breton, Martinique charmeuse de serpents, OC III, 367. ↩

    13 — . Id., ibid.. ↩

    14 — . Régis Antoine, La Littérature franco-antillaise, Haïti, Guadeloupe et Martinique, Paris, Karthala, 1992, p. 267. ↩

    15 — . André Breton, Eaux troubles, in Martinique..., OC III, 398. ↩

    16 — . Marguerite Bonnet, Notice à Martinique charmeuse de serpents, OC III, 1259. ↩

    17 — . André Breton, Eaux troubles, in Martinique..., op. cit., p. 385-386. ↩

    18 — . Id., Un grand poète noir, in Martinique..., op. cit., p. 402. ↩

    19 — . Benjamin Péret, Préface au Cahier d'un retour au pays natal d'Aimé Césaire, in André Breton et le surréalisme international, Opus international, n° 123-124, avril-mai 1991, p. 57. ↩

    20 — . André Breton, Un grand poète noir, in Martinique..., op. cit., p. 405. ↩

    21 — . Id., ibid., p. 405. ↩

    22 — . Dominique Combe, op. cit., p. 369. ↩

    23 — . André Breton, Un grand poète noir, in Martinique...OC III, 401. ↩

    24 — . Id., Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non, OC III, 7. ↩

    25 — . Id., Le Dialogue créole, in Martinique..., OC III, 378. ↩

    26 — . Id., ibid., p. 371-372. ↩

    27 — . Id., ibid., p. 378. ↩

    28 — . Id. ibid., p. 402. ↩

    29 — . Id., ibid., p. 378. ↩

    30 — . Marguerite Bonnet, Notice à Martinique..., OC III, 1259. ↩

    31 — . Jean Gaulmier cites a letter from Breton of 21-1-1958 in his commentary: Ode à Charles Fourier, Paris, Librairie Klincksieck, 1961. See p. 7. ↩

    32 — . André Breton, in Jean Gaulmier, op. cit., p. 9. ↩

    33 — . Régis Antoine, La Littérature franco-antillaise...op. cit., p. 264. ↩

    34 — . André Breton, Arcane 17, OC III, 59. ↩

    35 — . Id., Discours au club Savoy de Port-au-Prince, OC III, 148. ↩

    36 — . Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Paris, Présence africaine, 1971, p. 89 et 85. ↩

    37 — . André Masson, La Mémoire du monde ↑, cited by Marguerite Bonnet, Notice à Martinique..., OC III, 1256. ↩

    38 — . André Breton, letter of 21-1-1958 to Jean Gaulmier, cited by the latter in his commentary of the Ode, op. cit., p. 10 ↩

    39 — . Césaire"s lesson already shows its effects in a passage of Les États généraux which advocates turning "first toward the black race the red race/ Because they have long been the most offended", OC III, 30. ↩

    40 — . André Breton, Un grand poète noir, Martinique..., op. cit., p. 407. ↩

    41 — . Id., ibid., p. 408. ↩

    42 — . Id., Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du Surréalisme ou non, OC III, 7. ↩

    43 — . Tristan Tzara, Note 6 sur l'art nègre, revue SIC, n° 21-22, 1917, re-ed. Paris, J.-M. Place, 1980. ↩