TOTALITARIAN OR TIGHTROPE WALKERS?
On a recent polemic:
Jean Clair. Du Surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarisme et aux tables tournantes : Contribution à une histoire de l'insensé. Paris : Mille et une nuits, 2003. 215 p. Black and white illustrations. Index of personal names.
Régis Debray. L'Honneur des funambules : Réponse à Jean Clair sur le surréalisme. Paris : L'échoppe, 2003. 47 p.
The thesis of Jean Clair's work – the title indicates it very clearly – is the following: surrealist ideology is founded on a sectarianism that likens it both to occultism and totalitarianism.
Jean Clair performs a work of undermining the foundations that surrealism claimed and that, even today, are generally attributed to it. Thus, according to him, surrealism is not avant-garde, it is on the contrary nostalgic and regressive, it is a neo-romantic "revival' (p. 29). Its filiation with Freudianism and Marxism would fall under "ideological bricolage" (p. 47): indeed, the taste for occultism would be incompatible with scientific or materialist thought. And Jean Clair affirms: "Breton is neither a revolutionary communist, nor a disciple of Freud. He is an authoritarian and confused mind, [...] the prototype of these gang leaders in whom the taste for domination prevails over knowledge and rigor" (p. 45).
Having shown that surrealism is not what it wanted to make believe and what one believed it was (an avant-garde claiming "Freud + revolution[1]"), Jean Clair then reveals what he considers its true nature: surrealism is a totalitarianism. The rapprochements between surrealism and Nazism punctuate the text, without always being explicitly the main object. Thus, for example, Jean Clair establishes the rapprochement between expressionism and Nazism – both born in Munich – then, in the next chapter, the rapprochement between expressionism and surrealism[2]. The argumentation, we observe, progresses toward the explication of the surrealism/Nazism analogy. Jean Clair then shows the importance of violence in the ideology of avant-gardes in general, and surrealism in particular; various episodes of its history testify to this, he affirms, such as the Anatole France trial (which allows the author to make the rapprochement surrealists/Stalinist communists) or the Contre-attaque adventure (which allows him to make the rapprochement surrealists/fascists). Artaud's theater of cruelty, whose anti-Semitism Jean Clair does not forget to emphasize, is likened to the National Socialist Thing Theater[3].
From chapter 7, Jean Clair moves to a second moment of his "genealogy of violence": he no longer questions the links that surrealism maintains with a history that was contemporary to it but its posterity, whose destructive apogee would be September 11. The author enumerates the representatives of these "three generations that have been nourished on surrealist milk" (p. 180): Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, situationism and the May 68 rioters, American Happening and the European Fluxus movement, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard. And finally, Jean Clair concludes, September 11 would only be the delayed realization in time of a surrealist dream. The author does not explicitly affirm the responsibility of surrealists in these attacks, but the entire work is constructed so that the reader makes this hypothesis himself: from the second chapter, the author had emphasized the futurist predilection for the motifs of airplane and skyscraper; chapter 5 reproduced the surrealist world map published in 1929 in Variétés, on which the United States are non-existent and Afghanistan disproportionately large. Commenting on Aragon's remarks[4], Jean Clair writes: "On September 11, 2001, Aragon's reverie left surrealism to take form in reality. The 'white buildings' of the Twin Towers collapsed in flames, while the incredulous West discovered on the world map a somewhat forgotten country, Afghanistan." (p. 119).
The last pages of the work pose the question of the artist's responsibility, of the autonomy of the literary sphere with respect to the political sphere. The author's position is unequivocal: "From the moment when fiction – the poem, the narrative – gives itself as an action in the real world, – manu festus, – it loses the privilege of being an activity escaping sanction, therefore unpunishable, to become an act justiciable before authority, and susceptible to being repressed." (p. 196). Totalitarianism is not always on the side one thinks...
Du surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarisme et aux tables tournantes is not a work of literary history, it is a pamphlet. The author himself designates it as such, belatedly, to be sure, a few pages before the end (p. 192). The remarks made in the "warning" are quite different. Jean Clair's project presents itself from the outset as a polemical enterprise – it will shock, it will be criticized, he knows it –, but the author nevertheless defends himself from making the trial of surrealism: "Formerly object of passion, it should henceforth be an object of study" (p. 9). A purely rhetorical denial that this declaration of principle, since in this book, surrealism is not an object of study but indeed an object of passion – perhaps even of rage. Like every self-respecting pamphleteer, Jean Clair sets himself up as the sole defender (or almost) of a truth confiscated by the representatives of institutional knowledge, the "academics' and "devotees' who have made surrealist historiography "almost unassailable" (p. 17). As in every pamphlet, the representation of reality proposed is a fundamentally binary representation, opposing a positive and a negative: the Freudian unconscious vs the romantic unconscious, romanticism vs the Enlightenment, passion vs reason, the "admirable" vs the "detestable" (p.47), etc. Jean Clair develops a binary, evaluative, and Manichean thought, in terms finally very little distanced, very little devoid of the passion that the author nevertheless claims to have abandoned.
The distortion of historical reality, which has been repeatedly emphasized[5], is ultimately only one argumentative strategy among others. Jean Clair mixes eras, taking no account of chronology; he multiplies striking shortcuts, inaccuracies, omissions and makes questionable use of citations. In order to operate the rapprochement between totalitarian ideologies and surrealism, he puts end to end, without analyzing them or putting them in perspective, citations and episodes that have as their sole function to serve the argumentation, setting aside everything that could contradict his thesis. Thus, he devotes long pages to Bataille and his super-fascism to which, for the space of a few months, Breton adhered. Contre-attaque is, it is true, an episode that embarrasses many historians and critics and Jean Clair is right to say that it is necessary to question this moment in surrealism's history. But how can one not be struck by the bad faith there is in highlighting this brief episode without even mentioning all the surrealist initiatives, anterior and posterior, that had as their goal to fight against terror, whether fascist or Stalinist? Jean Clair prides himself on "taking surrealism at its word' (p. 21), of not neutralizing the violence of its political positions by presenting them from an aesthetic angle. Surrealism could not, it is true, be considered as an "intellectual pastime like any other[6]". But taking surrealism at its word does not mean manipulating some citations so short (they rarely exceed the sentence) that one can make them say what one wants, nor making a vague paraphrase, without precise references, that authorizes all adaptations of the cited discourse to the needs of the argumentation. Taking surrealism at its word, taking it seriously, studying its foundations and, why not, its place in a genealogy of violence, would have required a minimum of intellectual honesty.
Among the argumentative strategies used, one of the most effective is in our eyes the bias of considering surrealism only from the point of view of the "ideological foundations of an intellectual current that also presented itself as a political movement" (p. 7), setting aside aesthetic questioning. We will not discuss here the viability of such a project, the possibility of treating separately these two facets of a movement that never ceased to claim the link between aesthetics and politics and whose works, Jean Clair himself emphasizes, were "tools," "instruments' (p. 66) aiming to transform reality. The aesthetic question is evacuated with the greatest naturalness by the author: there is no surrealist art. In the first chapter, he thus shows that neither De Chirico, nor Marcel Duchamp, nor Picasso, nor Miró, nor Delvaux, nor Alberto Savinio were surrealists and he denies the existence of any common denominator between artists such as Magritte, Dalí, Picabia, or Masson. The fate reserved for poetry is somewhat different. The author feigns to be an admirer of certain surrealist poems and, to prove it, he cites among the "most beautiful poems that surrealism has inspired' texts that fall within the "tradition of a popular song" and are signed by the resistant Aragon ("Un temps de chien" and "Je vous salue ma France") or the very young Eluard ("Pour vivre ici," 1918). In other words, texts that one can hardly consider as surrealist. In the name of refusing an excessive aestheticization of surrealist political positions, Jean Clair denies the existence of surrealist art – explicitly for painting, by omission for poetry. He goes even further, and this is doubtless his most formidable weapon: he cuts from their aesthetic prolongations a certain number of surrealist centers of interest. This is notably the case of occultism, astrology, hysteria, automatic writing, or even myth. The group's research on dream, the unconscious, chance were undeniably productive in terms of aesthetic innovation. But by refusing any consideration of surrealist art, Jean Clair makes the group of artists a band of charlatans interested in outdated and discredited theories, spending their time trying to converse with the dead. One understands the full scope of the work's subtitle, "Contribution to a history of the insane": Jean Clair's enterprise is to cut surrealist positions from their meaning, both political and aesthetic.
But in reality, who is the target of this pamphlet? The surrealists themselves? Their defenders – the "academics' and "devotees'? Their readers? The answer comes from Jean Clair himself: they are "the rioters of May 1968, heirs, for the most cultivated among them, of surrealist vulgate, and even more the children of whom they will have become the preceptors." The latter, who take Breton at his word, are, according to him, worshippers of violence or, at best, "apostles of free love, faithful of those great orgies à la Fourier that will be Woodstock, Raves, and Love Parades' (p. 19). Terrorism, moral decadence, rock'n roll, drugs, sex, techno – society is going badly. It would be necessary to put some order in all this.
*
Régis Debray's response to Jean Clair's pamphlet is brief, but it hits the mark. It begins by questioning the effectiveness of a text that would want, in these times of auction sales and commemoration, to make a revision trial of surrealism. For to attack Breton thus is to take him out of the formaldehyde of official celebration and literary history manuals, it is ultimately to revive the corpse – it is the "slap to mummies' (p.7): it would have been better to attack the organizers of consecration and treat "of surrealism considered in its relations with success stories and profit-making..." (p. 9).
The author denounces Jean Clair's approach, reductive, made of commonplaces, "hasty compressions," inaccuracies, and "logical sorceries' (p. 12), and responds to his main arguments. Breton would have "remained apart from the science of his time"? But the poet is an artist and not an agrégé, an enchanter and not a pedant: "Your 'no serious people need apply,' or the subjugation of gold seekers to Earth sciences would make their lyre certainly didactic but about as creative as University theses' (p. 17). Surrealism would have been a heterogeneous, incoherent, "cacophonic" movement, between progress and regression, reason and unreason? Régis Debray cites Breton: "Until further notice, everything that can delay the classification of beings, ideas, in a word maintain ambiguity has my approval' (p. 23). Does one attack Breton's historical positions? The author emphasizes "the strange discernment of his historical choices and refusals' (p. 24), his political courage and his clairvoyance and he recalls that "had little reason to engage in patriotic and working-class Resistance someone for whom the words party and homeland had only unfortunate resonance" (p. 25). The strong point of Régis Debray's argumentation is to show, each time, that Jean Clair judges surrealism with criteria that are not relevant: one does not measure the value of an artistic movement by the yardstick of scientific accuracy, ideological coherence, or political effectiveness. It is ultimately the gaze that Jean Clair casts on surrealism that is called into question and, beyond that, his conception of the modern world: he is one of those who "set their compass and watch on Harvard, London, and Berlin," live in "a planet shrunk to the dull face-to-face Europe/United States," "globe shrunk by brainwashing, hemiplegic hemisphere" (p. 32-33).
On the chapter of violence and sectarianism, Régis Debray makes concessions to Jean Clair: "Our jewel also has its shadow, violence. It's your strong point, the only one on which I would willingly surrender arms: the style of invective, the punch in the face" (p. 35). The only defense that Régis Debray finds is to affirm that the surrealists' intellectual terrorism is also a matter of context and era. The crux of the problem, he affirms, is "of a mediological nature": one cannot remain impervious to the milieu in which one evolves, "the surrealist chameleon proceeded by contagion and osmosis, and in the moral air of the time figured immoral intimidation techniques like all sorts of symptomatic commonplaces' (p. 39). This position is perhaps the weak point of Régis Debray's argumentation: the interest he pays to the modalities of communication is justified, but one cannot, it seems to us, make surrealist violence an epiphenomenon, an accidental attribute. Verbal violence, aggression, is an integral part of surrealism, whether one envisages the latter from a political or aesthetic point of view. The end of the work, which advances the idea of a "surrealist religiosity" to account for a poetry that is "a style of existence, a rule of life, the equivalent of a solemn vow" (p. 42), seems very contestable to us. Surrealist violence demands that the world change immediately, the marvelous is not an escape toward the "country where one never arrives' (p.44) but indeed a rape of reality. And in these times of relativism and compromise, in these times when political and economic realism has dethroned all utopias, this violence, intransigent and integral, gives us air.
These few reservations aside, we remain indebted to Régis Debray for taking, through Breton, the defense of the "side step" (p. 13): "in a civilization that ultimately recognizes only two values, having fun to death and killing oneself at work, those who have given to imaginary creation another goal than the boredom of leisure or the quest for profit, [...] have a right to a little more than respect." (p. 46-47).
UNIVERSITY OF PARIS III SORBONNE NOUVELLE
Some press articles published around Jean Clair's thesis: Jean CLAIR. "Le surréalisme et la démoralisation de l'Occident". Le Monde, November 22, 2001. Alain JOUFFROY. "Venimeuse attaque". Le Monde, December 8, 2001. Annie LE BRUN. "Clarté de Breton, noirceur de Clair". Le Monde, December 8, 2001. Marc JIMENEZ, "Un néoconservateur ²tendance²". L'Humanité, January 9, 2002. "Entretien avec Jean Clair : Pour en finir avec la religion surréaliste". Le Point, May 30, 2003. Roger-Pol DROIT. "Recette pour rater un pamphlet". Le Monde, June 13, 2003. Régis DEBRAY. "L'honneur des funambules'. Le Monde diplomatique, September 2003. Arnaud LAPORTE. "Tout arrive ! Débat Jean Clair / Régis Debray". France culture, October 8, 2003.
1 — . Jean Clair cites the subtitle chosen by Denoël, in 1972, for a reissue of the Position politique du surréalisme (Paris : Denoël / Gonthier, 1972). He comments on it in these terms: "when, in 1972, a pocket edition republishes the Position politique du surréalisme, its publisher will not resist the temptation to follow the title with a catchy subtitle: ²Freud + la révolution². It was the magic formula. But it does not apply to Breton." (p.45) ↩ 2 — . These two movements have in common, according to Jean Clair, a certain relationship to time (regressive), a mode of expression (automatic writing, irresponsible) and a way of being in the world (violence). ↩ 3 — . Both, by abolishing the stage/audience frontier, would correspond to a "totalitarian temptation" (p.150). ↩ 4 — . Jean Clair cites two texts by Aragon: "We will be right about everything. And first, we will ruin this civilization that is dear to you, where you are molded like fossils in shale. Western world, you are condemned to death. We are the defeatists of Europe... May the Orient, your terror, finally respond to our voice. We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and malaise. All barricades are good, all obstacles to your cursed happiness..." (Louis Aragon, Fragments d"une conférence prononcée à Madrid, à la "Residencia des Estudiantes", April 18, 1925, cited by Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, Paris, Le Seuil, 1945, p.115) "And may the drug traffickers throw themselves on our terrified countries. May America afar crumble from its white buildings..." (La Révolution surréaliste, n° 4). ↩ 5 — . Notably by Alain Jouffroy, Annie Le Brun, Marc Jimenez, Roger-Pol Droit, and Régis Debray. ↩ 6 — . Jean Clair cites this expression used by Breton himself in the Second manifeste du surréalisme (p.21). ↩