THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION IN 1928: JACQUES BARON AND THE CAREFREE PROJECTION

par Yves Thomas

Published in the March 15, 1928 issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Jacques Baron's "Programme ↑" is neither a manifesto, nor a pamphlet, nor even a prospectus; this "programme" is barely a declaration of intentions. This text seems rather to be a page from a diary containing hastily sketched notes. The temporal marks of December 11 and 12 of the previous year confirm this particular orientation of the text. One could see in it confessions acting as a clarification or a sort of examination of conscience ↑. It is indeed in all cases a questioning of paths to follow. This form of questioning can be studied in terms of the appearance of a programme, that is, within the relationship: projects – encounter and retrospection – transparency and reversal. It is not appropriate to confer priority to one or the other of these elements. It suffices to see that they go together in a free tension. Thus "Programme" carries a gap, a difference, a rupture that are not signs of insufficiency, but the conditions of a search and questioning to be pursued in the vicinity of the surrealist movement. In 1928, Baron questions himself, and in questioning himself he finds himself placed before an insoluble contradiction: that of wanting to leave while being held back. It is a matter in this study of understanding the effects of such a contradiction.

Projects

The issue of La Révolution surréaliste ↑ in which this text is inserted is the last of the group's journal before the Second Manifesto ↑ which appears in issue twelve of the journal. Issue eleven notably welcomes the participation of Max Morise, Louis Aragon, Raymond Queneau, Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, and Antonin Artaud ↑. André Breton, who directs the editorial staff, contributes with an excerpt from Nadja which harmonizes with the excerpt from the Traité du style given by Louis Aragon. Breton is also a co-signatory with Aragon of an article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of hysteria. The issue also includes an investigation on sexuality, an exquisite corpse bearing the title "Dialogue in 1928," a letter from the defrocked Jesuit Jean Genbach ↑ addressed to André Breton, and a letter from Antonin Artaud to Jean Paulhan. It is not without interest to note that on the cover page of the issue, one can see two workers, on a construction site, plunging their gaze into the mouth of a sewer ↑. Under this photo appears the legend: "the next chamber." The superposition of the inscription and the image tends, by association, to cast ridicule on the sessions of the Chamber of Deputies, by making the Palais Bourbon comparable to a sewer.

This cover is all the more remarkable as it allows us to put into perspective Benjamin Péret's tale entitled "Maladie N° 9" which follows "Programme" closely in this issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Let us recall that "maladie N° 9" is this infectious disease attributed to Jewish immigration in 1920. It is the product of an anti-Semitic machination that has its origin in the Luxembourg Palace ↑. The title that Péret thus gives to his tale refers to the filiation proposed by the cover.

In this particular context, between fragments of works like Nadja and the Traité du style which support and orient the movement, and the satirical writings of Benjamin Péret and Raymond Queneau ↑, as well as the high-speed traversal of history proposed by Max Morise, not to mention the investigation on sexuality, how to understand "Programme"?

Placed between Aragon and Breton's commemorative essay on the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria and an aphorism by Xavier Forneret on passing love, "Programme" has neither the polemical tone of the one nor the heuristic tone of the other; it is in this sense more intimate. Baron expresses an immediate torment there. Curiously, the title could even be considered as a point of disappointment. The reader expects a series of resolutions, firm designs. What does he find there? He can see emerging confusion ("rout at the tip of the little finger"), anxiety ("my hand trembles'), contradiction ("[forgotten date] I forget nothing"), but also resentment ("I have alternately lost and lost") and discouragement ("I am alone in judging the non-upheaval within myself"). This is why one would not be entirely wrong to think that the title "Programme" acts as an antiphrase, but devoid of irony. While the announcement orients the reader, the text leads him onto a siding. It will be objected, however and not without reason, that "Programme" does, in fact, contain traces of projects. And does the text not present them in cascade?

• Travel project.
• Travel project.
• Travel project.
• Travel project to the countryside
  (See Masson) ↑

The travel project is doubtless thus signified to accentuate the importance of the will to leave. But one will also understand that, through uncertainty, Baron could not escape the temptation to submit his ideas to a test of excess, hence this repetition which can alternately signal a fixed idea and a manner of play as if it were a nursery rhyme. Although this idea of travel appears first in the text, in the plural, the reference to André Masson at the end of the enumeration leads one to believe that the origin and even the realization of the project in question stems from his friendship with the painter ↑. Rather than a concerted composition of actions to be accomplished, "Programme" seems to paralyze reading by enclosing it in a labyrinth of situations. How, indeed, to reconcile radically opposed propositions? How to read, at the same time, without distinguishing or juxtaposing them, the call for precision and the slide into dream? "- One must write clearly, without declamations, without outbursts of voice, with great lucidity. Take an interest in a precise event. Take notes." Having presented this resolution, he writes at the very end of the text, a few lines further on: "- Why would the best jokes not be the longest? Dream. ↑" But preceded by a call for precision which is heard as a word on propriety and order in the art of writing, how to understand the proposition of dream? If, at first glance, it seems to be a call for the opening of new paths for the author of Allure poétique, it appears in detail as an attempt to expose the contradictions that haunt him.

In 1928, as we see in "Programme," Baron's impatience seems at its peak. A resistance even forms to poetry. He seeks to tend, in a multiplicity of directions as if they were access routes or messages launched adrift. The previous year, he takes the Communist Party card ↑, and he signs the tract in favor of Charlie Chaplin, Hands Off Love ↑. That same year, his father's death has affected him. In an as yet unpublished text from 1927, preserved at the Morisset library of the University of Ottawa, he writes: "Eight days in the long wait for the last breath, eight days watching a man die; painful, unbearable because stupidly one had nothing to do, nothing but wait for the last spasm (...) ↑" The slow agony of the father is comparable to that which he attributes to poetry in "Programme." "Poetry is dead ↑" he proclaims. This death, however, he did not wait for it. It was realized without much effort on his part: "We did not kill it." Moreover, it can always serve him to open a new field, he declares: "A poem to open the prose of my eyes ↑." In this context, what becomes of the meaning of this programme that he draws? Through the transposition of what assails him daily, between poetry and prose, what can he seek? Given the uncertainty that animates his thoughts in 1928, one can understand that Baron has reached a point of saturation.

The process that this text triggers allows us to consider that everything that can be done and imagined here, in the field of this introspection, transforms the thrust forward into a sort of marking time. The work of unmooring, cutting, disengagement, and setting thus appears better, which makes of this furtive arrangement an accumulation of details, of interior moments that float. In proclaiming the death of poetry and showing himself in search of "a poem to open the prose of (his) eyes or Facilities for economizing the sun with the moon," is Baron not exchanging projection for retrospection? One can indeed wonder if he is not already in 1925 at this point of opening the prose of his eyes, at the moment when he publishes in issues three and five of La Révolution surréaliste the first two parts of "Décadence de la vie." This evocative narrative which stages the streets haunted by desire at night reveals a waltz-hesitation between mystery and the marvelous.

In the 1924 Manifesto, André Breton writes: "Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for luxury, are springs to which one will never appeal in vain. There are tales to be written for grown-ups, tales still almost blue ↑." One recognizes in these remarks the conditions that lead to a definition of the marvelous. If to inscribe oneself in the radiance of these conditions "Décadence de la vie" aspires to fairy tales, its dominant quality remains its radical refusal of familiar thoughts. The poet manifests himself there as wandering, seeking, exploring, without precise domain except that of the city which opens to him and solicits him. It is a question of the obstructed view "of the threads of the night" whose broken monocles present "unacceptable problems ↑" because precisely the monocle is supposed to reflect the image of a destiny. These are germs that could not fully bloom, but whose richness nevertheless constitutes a constant source of his poetics.

Encounter and Retrospection

Having joined the ranks of the Communist Party in 1927, Baron returns to "Décadence de la vie." He writes a third part which distinguishes itself from the first two. As it would have taken much more effort to continue in the vein of the 1925 narrative, it is not surprising that the change operated, in this third part, brings poetic exploration back to rather precise data ↑. Numerous indisputable indices show that the retrospective transformation of the three parts into a novel is subject to another order of reflection. This is not difficult to explain: in complete doubt, a general synthesis of the three which prejudices an appreciation of the city and its exploration reveals the forgetting of certain questions, and notably that of the marvelous.

But, let us note that in the two published parts, daily life belongs more to the marvelous. Moreover, the reference to an end, to a deliquescence, neither loses its meaning nor its function since in this conjuncture of beginnings more than in others, perhaps, it remains linked to the way in which the existence or non-existence of a problematization of childhood can be expressed. The manuscript of "Décadence de la vie" preserved at the University of Ottawa reveals, in this regard, an interesting point. In his effort to transform "Décadence de la vie" into a novel, Jacques Baron inserts the subtitle "the problem of childhood." In this sense, "Décadence de la vie" is not the simple revelation of the passage from a world of rational identity to a world whose identity is only more nebulous, nocturnal, oneiric, but the manifestation of the overflowing work of a passion, of a pitiless weighing gradually inverting decadence into exploration of a becoming under the aspect of the character of Mme de Librétoile.

This remark applies particularly to the first part constructed around this character or, if one prefers, around the activity of investment in mystery as the main engine of the adventure. But it also applies where it is possible to discover, in the street itself, the accumulation of contradictions that characterize the movement of oscillation toward the imaginary during urban wandering. Thus in the case of the second part, the conditions of dream depend alternately on flux and reflux, on setting in motion and suspension of moments of crisis. These two aspects of the complementarity of the game between wandering and dream manifest themselves through a veritable entanglement of composite elements which correspond to conjunctural tensions as well as interior disturbances. Also Baron takes care not to separate the imaginary world from the sacred, the marvelous from mystery: "There were indeed other adventures that tortured my mind. Always oh imaginary world how I brandished your sacred emblem! ↑" It is a veritable vision of an illuminated one which places daily life under the sign of the "marvelous' in the sense that André Breton could understand it in the 1924 Manifesto. One detects there a curiosity, and a taste for fairy tales. "Paris was a fairy. The narrow streets traversed by multiple stars flew toward the sky. ↑" These images make us see a space that they confirm and to which they give relief, movement, perspective, an emotional and fantastic content. While this dream of an ascension manifests itself here in a rather vague manner, the city is animated by this captivating form of mobilization.

This space shelters a sort of staging where the game of glances and bodies is made visible and where the understanding or struggle of passions is plotted as if the disintegration of a previous life by the dream of the moment were defined there. This is what one has the impression of when reading further in the text: "I bequeath you to chance, you others, specters, swim in your cold rivers without thinking that there are also those very ones that you have condemned: the dreamers of the moment ↑." If one must not minimize the lure of struggle in these considerations, it is only an aspect of a broader orientation which includes the attraction for chance, the instant, and dream. Obviously, this implies that the street is not only a powerful testing ground for poets wandering in changing and contradictory circumstances, but also the place where these various aspects act independently although it is undeniable that they are also linked. One cannot indeed neglect the idea that the object of this urban research is immediate, accidental, disordered. But, recursively, once the sign to be found of the "forest of dreams ↑" emerges, it becomes possible to understand that the risk of a dissymmetry reveals itself greater than the opportunity of a reciprocity insofar as friendship, even in its most daily contours, can suffer from a conflict of a material as well as speculative order.

I thus think of my friends. It has been a few years since I first saw them in the midst of the troubles of savage humanity. And since then I have learned many things with them, I have fixed many dreams that my weak conceptions only glimpsed.
Thus, through the dark roads I have not learned to fall before the sky. With them we go in the empty streets where passes the sign of the times to be found, we go with phantoms to stigmatize bitter passions. Oh vanity, these words! (ibid.)

The starting point of these urban excursions is never rigorously the same. It is often enigmatic. This is to say that it is each time its own introduction, beyond conventions. Here the encounter of friends is determining. From the point of view of the process of exploration and search for the marvelous, it constitutes the best of departures. But what should one think of this moment of departure? Several remarks allow us to answer this question.

1. The idea of encounter is considered here as a condition.
2. This idea, insofar as one can describe it without endowing it with any secret, has no need for justifications: it says nothing more than what its existence contains. It is immediately given. It is indeed in this capacity that it offers a framework for the experience of roads and streets, that of journeying. But the idea in question is also a stage. It is profoundly transitory. It is a matter of a passage to something else which recalls a link with the past (the phantoms) without however remaining there.
3. This given starting point highlights the difficult and fragile path that can make the obstacle of rationality, of "the realistic attitude ↑" emerge.
4. The role of encounter can be understood through the investment of contradictions. Indeed, "Décadence de la vie" makes the contradiction explicit. In exhibiting it as through a form of critique, the text reveals that it is possible to consider the actualization of a return to order or of a desperate return to a hopeless life which contradicts the encounter by chance of journeying. "Oh vanity, these words! ↑" Consequently, if there is an order or a despair, it is not definitive. It is on the contrary always provisional and aleatory.
5. And there is also what one could see if not as a relaunching of hope, at least as a carefree projection of the poet into the indetermination of a drift. "Have the Buttes-Chaumont met solid ground? I do not hope so. ↑"

This is to say that the encounter supposes a contradiction that is not given as such, at the start. It is expressed at the moment of wandering. It seems instructive to us to take this last phrase literally. One cannot then minimize the undesirable part of this encounter with solid ground. It is to be distinguished from the other type of encounter in the rolling of the street which does not engage permanence. This question which indicates well the meaning of the points developed above is essential. The particular sensitivity of the poet adapted to doubly marginal phenomena, that is, not very spectacular on the one hand, and not specifically negative on the other, is due to the manner in which the urban wandering of the surrealists incorporates these phenomena to make them elements of an individual development.

A glance at the stake of such an opening at the end of the text shows us that what is in question is the becoming of the urban landscape that welcomes wandering. The Buttes-Chaumont are thus constituted as the horizon of wandering and, metaphorically, as a cruise ship.

Transparency and Reversal

But one can wonder if the question on which this second part of "Décadence de la vie" ends is not the result of the appearance of conditions that make propitious the emergence of doubt through momentum. Hence this timid will that expresses itself through negation: "I do not hope so." The litotes reduces here hope to a negation of solid ground. This is due to the fact that drift is desirable in the internal movement that carries the poet on "this interior sea that passes under Paris' ↑. In "Programme," it is possible to distinguish two movements: a deep movement which is that of desired change, a movement that conceals itself in the repetition of the travel project ("It is that we are prisoners of this famous earth") and an apparent movement of programming accredited by daily experience within the avant-garde and which presents the inverse of the deep movement ("rout at the tip of the little finger"). It is a matter of understanding, ultimately, to what point the movement by which the determination of the programme manifests itself is the inverse of that which carries Baron toward clear writing. One can thus note that between "Décadence de la vie" and "Programme," between 1925 and 1928, the denied encounter of solid ground has been inverted into a statement of imprisonment. This means that in this new arrested universe, what characterizes the poet"s intervention is the enhancement of transparency. "One must write clearly, he declares, without declamations, without outbursts of voice, with great lucidity. Take an interest in a precise event. ↑"

We cannot in fact understand this transparency or this new aspiration to precision unless we think it in the continuity of what we have said about the importance of the idea of encounter and its consequences in "Décadence de la vie." We have seen that, as urban wandering develops, the contradiction that commands engagement in the field of possible encounters can at the same time make the obstacle of "the realistic attitude" emerge. This attitude buried in "Décadence de la vie" is constitutive of the appearance of this element in "Programme." Now in this slide, in this aspiration and despite all of Baron"s good intentions, there manifests itself an inversion of exploration conditioned by the possibilities of mystery, miracle, and revelation into a condemnation of urban space. This inversion can explain the black bitterness that characterizes the unpublished third part of "Décadence de la vie" written in 1927. "Programme" confirms the gap that appears between this addition and the two parts of 1925. "I do not like Paris, he explains in this unpublished third part. Everything there comes back to saying the eternal thing in question, more than daily life, the streets are not tender to me there." ↑ In this refusal of Paris, one can see a justification of the desire to travel, but also doubtless of the desire to be elsewhere than in the movement of surrealism. This idea is clarified in a passage from "Programme." "A woman the color of nothingness. Baudelaire comes to Cyrano and tells how he met Jacques Vaché, at four in the morning, in a café near the Halle aux vins. ↑"

This parenthesis that opens in the middle of "Programme" includes a chain of facts that coincides with the elaboration of a surrealist exploration. Or if one prefers, it expresses its translation. We find there a reminiscence of "the lady without shadow," "the traveler who crossed the Halles' from André Breton's poem "Tournesol." It is not indifferent to note there also the evocation of this exemplary place of surrealist encounters located at Place Blanche, the Café Cyrano ↑. The mention of Jacques Vaché refers us, moreover, to the archetype of encounters, that which, from 1917 in Nantes, will draw the birth of the surrealist movement ↑. Yet, in the report of these three elements: the woman, the café, the dandy poet, we see sketched the mobile incidents of a reversal that aims to put forward Baudelaire and not Breton. This translation of surrealist experience that Baron sketches in passing expresses at the same time a loss, even a distance in adoption and the attempt at recovery. It is not the motives of surrealism that surge here, but indeed those of tendencies proper to their reversal into a formula of compensation. From there, does the reference to Baudelaire not confirm, for Baron, the grip of a tomorrow that would be "the eve of the eve ↑," the force of a memory or a regret that would have condemned him to remain on the threshold.

Trent University — Canada

    1 — Jacques Baron, "Programme," La Révolution surréaliste, n° 11, March 15, 1928, p. 22-23. ↩     2 — This text resembles at times an examination of conscience such as had been produced by Les Cahiers du mois n° 21-22 of 1926. It is not without interest to note that René Crevel and Philippe Soupault collaborated there. ↩     3 — Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, Paris, Seuil, 1996, writes about this issue: "La Révolution surréaliste, in which Breton and Aragon celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, experiences financial difficulties." Article "André Breton," p. 110. ↩     4 — Breton there gives free rein to the expression of his specific disenchantment regarding Pierre Naville, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Baron. He declares that: "Some, in the manner of M. Baron, author of poems rather skillfully copied from Apollinaire, but moreover a devil-may-care enjoyer and, absolute lack of general ideas, in the immense forest of surrealism poor little sunset on a stagnant pond, bring to the 'revolutionary' world the tribute of a college exaltation, of a 'crass' ignorance garnished with visions of July fourteenth." "Second Manifesto of Surrealism," La Révolution surréaliste, n° 12, December 15, 1929, p. 7. ↩     5 — The rupture with Artaud and Vitrac takes place even before the creation of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in September 1926. In Au grand jour, Artaud is qualified as carrion. A note from the Editorial Board on page 12 of the issue evokes the possible astonishment of the reader. But it brings the following precision: "we believe in the absolute power of contradiction." ↩     6 — Pseudonym of Ernest Gengenbach. In conjunction with the investigation on suicide published in the second issue of La Révolution surréaliste "Is suicide a solution?," issue 5 publishes the letter in which the defrocked priest describes the difficult circumstances that led him to neurasthenia and suicide. ↩     7 — Another point to consider: in his text "L'Osselet toxique," Antonin Artaud speaks of "the sewer of the smallest possible mental confraternity, of the smallest conscious common denominator." But here "sewer" becomes a sort of paronym of "disgust" that Artaud addresses to medicine and psychiatry. "L'Osselet toxique" refers to the "Letter to the Chief Physicians of the Asylums for the Insane," published in La Révolution surréaliste, n° 3, April 1925, directed by Artaud. ↩     8 — Between 1917 and 1920, 50 to 100 cases of bubonic plague are treated at Pavilion n° 9 of the Claude Bernard Hospital in Aubervilliers. The disease does not spread, but these declared cases of plague in 1920 are seen by a group of senators from the Bloc national as an opportunity to sow panic regarding Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. See on this subject Michaël Prazan and Tristan Mendès-France: La Maladie No 9, published in 2001 by Berg international editions. ↩     9 — Raymond Queneau's contribution is a surrealist text, a short story where he stages, in the image of Les Chants de Maldoror, a sort of bestiary of the neighborhoods of Paris in conjunction with a lively interrogation of the procedures of writing. ↩     10 — "Programme," p. 23. ↩     11 — In this regard, it is not indifferent to note that "Programme" is accompanied by a reproduction of a painting by Masson Une Métamorphose. One could see there the index of a continuity with the first part of "Décadence de la vie" published in the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste illustrated by André Masson's painting entitled Homme. ↩     12 — Ibid. ↩     13 — He is secretary of a cell, deputy to the rayon of Puteaux. ↩     14 — Révolution surréaliste, n° 9-10. ↩     15 — The Ottawa collection was constituted from the poet's bequest of the eleven notebooks of his Journal in 1972 and purchases made by the Department of French Letters. The history of this very rich collection remains to be done. This narrative is preserved in the archives of the Morisset Library of the University of Ottawa. It is part of the collection of 20th century manuscripts of the Department of French Letters. Box 1339. The year is not indicated there. ↩     16 — "Programme," p. 23. ↩     17 — "Programme," p. 22. ↩     18 — André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme ↑, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1988, p. 321. ↩     19 — "Décadence de la vie," La Révolution surréaliste, n° 3, April 15, 1925, p. 15. ↩     20 — The manuscript of "Décadence de la vie," with the exception of an earlier state of the first part deposited at the Jacques Doucet Literary Library in Paris, is preserved at the special collections service in the archives of the University of Ottawa library, in the 20th century manuscripts collection belonging to the Department of French Letters. The reference to this manuscript will be given as follows: Ms Ottawa Box 1339.11. It consists of 43 pages including handwritten pages on Rives RDK sheets, typed and printed pages. This composite ensemble well indicates the 1927 retrospective intention to constitute "Décadence de la vie" as a novel. "Madame de Librétoile has changed a lot, he writes, she serves beer mugs in a well-washed Flemish tavern like a ship's bridge, she smiles at fat cloth merchants from the region and complains of rheumatism." Madame de Librétoile is not the only one to have changed: it is also the tone of the text become rather bitter and its perspective, rather novelistic and realistic, aiming at social fresco. ↩     21 — "Décadence de la vie (Suite)," in La Révolution surréaliste, n° 5, October 15, 1925, p. 16. ↩     22 — Ibid. ↩     23 — Ibid. ↩     24 — The expression is from Jean-Paul Clébert. In his article on Jacques Baron, he writes: "In Décadence de la vie, he wanders in the city, forest of dreams, in search of the encounter." Dictionnaire du surréalisme, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1996, p. 78. ↩     25 — Manifeste du surréalisme, p. 313. ↩     26 — "Décadence de la vie," p. 17. ↩     27 — Ibid. In 1926 in Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon makes the Buttes-Chaumont an elected place for nocturnal walks. Indeed, in the second part of this narrative Aragon writes: "The Buttes-Chaumont raised in us a mirage (...) Finally we were going to destroy boredom, before us opened a miraculous hunt, a terrain of experiments, where it was not possible that we would not have a thousand surprises, and who knows? a great revelation that would transform life and destiny." This intervention of "in us' which prepares a "before us' signals, in the image of "Décadence de la vie," all the opportunity of the walk conditioned by mirage, miracle, and revelation. ↩     28 — These words are from the preface (José Corti, 1961) by Julien Gracq to André Breton's Poisson soluble. This preface is reprinted in the Poésie/Gallimard edition, Paris 1996, p. 15. ↩     29 — "Programme" p. 23. ↩     30 — Décadence de la vie ↑, Mss Ottawa Box 1339.11. ↩     31 — "Programme," p. 23. ↩     32 — "All the true surrealists passed through there, explains Jean-Claude Clébert," Op. cit., article "Cafés' p. 124. ↩     33 — It is not indifferent to take into account what Breton writes about Jacques Vaché: "One is poorly fixed on the value of presentiments if these sky stock market blows, the storms of which Baudelaire speaks, from time to time make an angel appear at the peephole," Les Pas perdus, Œuvres complètes, t. I, Paris, Gallimard, "Pléiade," 1988, p. 227. On the subject of Vaché, read La Nouvelle Revue Nantaise, n° 4, 2004, Jean Sarment correspondances at the dawn of surrealism. Patrice Allain's article sheds new light on the encounter with Jacques Vaché in Nantes. "Jean Sarment, a posthumous autofiction," p. 13-27. ↩     34 — "Programme," p. 22. ↩