THE LINGUISTIC IMAGINARY OF SURREALISM

par Raphaëlle Hérout

December 17, 2016

It is customary to present surrealism as a cultural movement that was created around an important reflection on language: this is what appears in this well-known quote from Breton which traces the imperative to which the creation of this movement responded:

[i]t is today of common knowledge that surrealism, as an organized movement, was born in a large-scale operation concerning language [...] What was it about then? Nothing less than rediscovering the secret of a language whose elements would cease to behave like wrecks on the surface of a dead sea. It was important for this to subtract them from their increasingly strictly utilitarian usage, which was the only means of emancipating them and restoring all their power to them. 1

The aim of this communication will be to draw some threads from these assertions to see how the surrealists put to the test intuitions and thoughts on language, which have not necessarily been theorized, but which have been experienced poetically, intuitions and thoughts which are the very foundation of what is called, since Foucault, "the order of discourse". According to Foucault's hypothesis, we are in a society of discourse and this society produces procedures of subjection aimed at monitoring the discourses produced. In his famous inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he explains that:

in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures which have the role of conjuring away its powers and dangers, of mastering its aleatory event, of evading its heavy, formidable materiality. 2

What I would like to show is that it is this same political conception of the strong potential of all speech that informs surrealist poetics: it is indeed, through poetic creation, to escape the procedures of control of discourses.

More particularly, if order interests us, it is indeed for the disorder that it makes possible, we will therefore try to apprehend the ins and outs of this "large-scale operation concerning language" in its relationship to order and disorder; language being understood both as a social institution (language is a space of sharing) but also as the place of crystallization of all the representations that inform thought. We will see how the surrealists played with the transgression of linguistic norms to confer on language the function of main operator of an upheaval of the social order.

What is this secret of language? How to breathe life into a language in distress? How is the link to emancipation affirmed and finally, what is the nature of this "power" of words? These questions, fundamental for the study of surrealism, constitute its "linguistic imaginary" which is understood, thanks to the work of A.M. Houdebine, as the

relationship of the subject to language, his own and that of the community which integrates him as a speaking subject-social subject or in which he desires to be integrated, by which he desires to be identified by and in his speech; relationship expressible in terms of images, participating in social and subjective representations, in other words on the one hand ideologies (social side) and on the other hand imaginaries (more subjective side). 3

And the imaginary, in Houdebine, refers to the imaginary according to Castoriadis, for whom the imaginary is the original structuring element, without which no society could exist. Starting from the poetic and emancipatory aspirations of the surrealists, and with the theoretical tools of the political thoughts of Castoriadis and Foucault mainly, it will be a question, today, of sketching a cartography of their linguistic imaginary and studying its repercussions on their poetic practice and on the way in which this poetic practice is thought of as being in direct contact with the desired transformation of society.

To begin this panorama of the linguistic imaginary of surrealism, we will first evoke what is at the base of any language activity: namely words, in their way of signifying and in their relationship to things. Words which are not, for the surrealists, contrary to Leiris's title, "without memory"; they carry with them all the tradition that has used them, all a past that has worn them out, all a morality that has denatured them: "[d]uty, and again and always: duty. Very quickly, the word seems suspect to him, very quickly hateful." 4

This suspicion is found in all surrealists, and it is what makes the meaning and function of words be questioned:

Yes, we were in the aftermath of a horrible war. It hardly seemed possible to us to use the words we heard in the mouths of Tartuffes, whether they belonged to heavy industry or to that abject political police of provocation and snitching which took with Daudet and Maurras that philosophical and literary mask, more hideous still than the studded sock and the big mustaches of the harmless nag. 5

Not only are words perverted by this past, but they are presented as being the raw material of thought: we think with the words we have at our disposal, and the problem quickly arises when we realize that words, if they were good for thinking the past era, are no longer sufficient to truly think and live the current era. This is the grain of sand in the otherwise well-oiled machinery of discourse reproduction that appears from the first surrealist texts: the idea that emerges in these texts is that the words available to these poets do not satisfy them:

I lived in the shadow of a great white building adorned with flags and clamors. I was not allowed to escape from this castle, Society, and those who climbed the steps made a terrible cloud of dust on the doormat. Homeland, honor, religion, goodness, it was difficult to recognize oneself in the midst of these countless words that they throw haphazardly to the echoes. 6

The reference to the environment that saw the birth of surrealism is obvious, what is interesting here is that the denunciation passes through words, the "countless words". This feeling is found in Breton:

The said and the repeated today encounter a solid barrier. It is they who riveted us to this common universe. It is in them that we had taken this taste for money, these limiting fears, this feeling of "homeland", this horror of our destiny. 7

The critique is indeed on vocabulary and more precisely on the way in which vocabulary will constitute a part of reality, draw reality, constitute a state of fact. But the state of fact of the surrealists' daily life does not suit them, to homeland, to money, honor, religion, they want to substitute their values of choice: love, freedom, dream, desire...

We find an example among many others in Leiris:

It was an enormous rose that opened like an explosion of words, when gestures are no longer enough to demonstrate love and that consequently their physical framework must necessarily extend into an imaginary framework of thoughts and words. 8

Against "the common universe", there is the imaginary universe, the verbal universe of the surrealists who choose to reorient the use of words towards something more joyful. Faced with these aspirations, inherited values contribute to a real restriction of possibilities, they bridle man and favor not only a kind of self-censorship (one can only say or think what it is possible, in the current state, to say or think), but also a kind of self-mutilation since it is the being in his flesh who will be restricted, bridled. This appears in Breton, in his interviews with André Parinaud:

it had only been a question, during the preceding years [before 1914], of breaking all fixed frameworks, of promoting the greatest freedom of expression: what would become of it in this time of gags on all mouths, if not blindfolds on all eyes? (Breton A, and Parinaud A, 1952, 1996: p.30)

To these images is added that of Péret, for whom the language of utilitarian communication is an "emasculated" language:

For these men, poetry fatally loses all meaning. They hardly have anything left but language. Their masters have not taken it away from them, they need them to keep it too much. At least they have emasculated it to deprive it of any poetic evocation whim, reducing it to the degenerate language of "must" and "have". 9

The fact that language, by its vocabulary precisely, is perceived as a force of blindness and silence is one of the surrealist clichés, and it is what gives body to the desire to emancipate oneself from these linguistic units which will hinder thought. For Crevel for example, words "are at once electoral programs, standards of moral values, currencies of exchange," 10.

All the critique of vocabulary is present in this short proposition, with both ideological manipulation, the representation of the bourgeois well-thinking society with its morality, and the theme of language as currency, but of course which is a false currency, a demonetized currency since words have undergone a "verbal inflation" which has denatured by reducing their expressive capacities. This theme of false currency is very present in Crevel, we also find it in his novel Les pieds dans le plat:

If profiteers don't like to touch the wool stash, to start the stash, (do you know the country where avarice flourishes) they are, on the other hand, prodigal of fine words (do you know the country where eloquence flourishes?). Words, always words, words that have lost all value. We are in full verbal inflation. This false currency barely manufactured, its promising effigy, already, gets dirty. Its features fade. With what remains, one could not reconstitute a face. In bourgeois speak, nothing has meaning anymore, wants to say anything anymore, or rather has meaning, wants to say only by grimacing, odious antiphrase. 11

It is precisely in reaction to this that the surrealists will want to reconnect with an authentic, expressive language, a language that is not a cover-up, but on the contrary, which can really apprehend the real intensely.

So words, we have seen, are not enough to say the world: they are also not enough to say the subject, the being. This is a topos in Artaud: "I lack a concordance of words with the minute of my states" he writes, among other phrases that experience the gap of the subject in his impossibility to feel himself existing in language.

This is also something of which we can read the trace in L'immaculée conception, in the last text of the "Man" section: "death": Breton and Eluard write, not without irony:

I'm going terribly better. The vain words that had been put in my mouth are beginning to take effect. My fellows are leaving me. Hand in the lions' mane, I see the deceptive horizon that will lie to me one last time. I take advantage of everything and of its lies in the form of peelings and of this little turn it makes always passing by my place. Nothing serves me so well as when it meets me. 12

This "I'm getting better" is absolutely disturbing. If the subject "is getting better", it's because he's no longer in conflict. So we put words in the mouth like we prescribe antidepressants, or like we used to do electroshock sessions at the time, like we silence a symptom that translates a socially unacceptable singularity. It is precisely this function that will be refused: that of words which are like a medication given to get better, to fall into line, that of words which will be what will smooth, flatten everything that can supposedly come out of the framework.

In this, words are alienating, if we accept the definition that Castoriadis gives, from Lacan:

The essential of heteronomy – or of alienation, in the general sense of the term – at the individual level, is domination by an autonomized imaginary which has arrogated to itself the function of defining for the subject both reality and his desire. [...] 13

What therefore corresponds here to the imposed "vain words", words that make the subject affirm that he is getting better. But the continuation of the quote from L'immaculée conception shows well that the mission of these "vain words" is not quite fulfilled. And this is where language can be emancipatory, when it allows us to distance ourselves from the discourse that has infiltrated:

Autonomy then becomes: my discourse must take the place of the Other's discourse, of a foreign discourse that is in me and dominates me: speaks through me. 14

There is therefore a great awareness of this alienation by language, and at the same time, since the surrealists are poets, there is also a confidence in the possibilities of changing the situation; we see it in Tzara for example, in whom we find the "vain words":

But, when in the soul of vain words burns a new meaning, through the idleness of a nature of feathers emerge some short birds that immobilize themselves with insistence at the very edges of the human precipice. 15

We perceive in this quote from Tzara, both the creative momentum that can give rise to a renewal, to a regeneration of language and through language, but also the danger there is in manipulating words thus, in playing with new meanings which, changing the usual link of words to their things, can make us glimpse a certain precipice. But there is no action without risk-taking, and this risk, the surrealists take it and call for it:

At this point in any case begins thought; which is by no means this game of mirrors where several excel, without danger. If one has experienced even once this vertigo, it seems impossible to still accept the mechanical ideas to which almost every human enterprise is reduced today. And all his tranquility. 16

Tranquility and impunity can no longer, in surrealist thought, camouflage themselves behind reassuring language, on the contrary: "words have finished playing". Their poetic enterprise will be to give meaning back to words: either, give "more meaning", intensively, or extensively: have more meaning to say the world and therefore to live it.

Giving meaning back to words is also making sure that they are truly meaningful and that they are not just the bones of fossilized thought, unlike the "apathetic words" that Char invokes: "O words too apathetic, or so cowardly linked! Little bones that rush into the hand of the well-behaved cheater, I denounce you." 17 Char denounces them precisely because, apathetic, they cannot account for the real, the "great real" which is the only one worth living. These apathetic words, we find them in Artaud in one of his famous diatribes:

Yes here now is the only use to which language can henceforth serve, a means of madness, of elimination of thought, of rupture, the labyrinth of unreasons, and not a DICTIONARY where such pedants from the vicinity of the Seine channel their spiritual narrowings. 18

The problem is therefore that the "Great Real" and the "spiritual narrowings" are constituted of the same words. So as not to narrow the great real, there are therefore two options, either invent new words, "[offer] a word that is not found in the Larousse" 19, which is relatively little done in the surrealist corpus, or change the use we make of language. This is where I think one of the originalities of surrealism lies: all these linguistic deviations that we know, the detours towards the impossible of language are created and given to read with the aim of operating a renewal of linguistic uses to liberate not words, Breton defends himself well (ref. Futurism) nor language, but the speaking subject, which appears explicitly in André Breton's remarks:

We exposed ourselves by this to the usual persecutions, in a domain where the good (speaking well) consists in taking into account above all the etymology of the word, that is to say its most dead weight, in conforming the sentence to a mediocrely utilitarian syntax, all things in agreement with the paltry human conservatism and with this horror of the infinite which does not miss an opportunity to manifest itself among my fellows. 20

We know the critique of etymology, that of Crevel:

To the psychoanalysis of the universe, what help could linguistics be, if this science, whether it be dead languages, knew, to remain or rather to become alive, to put back to the point of time that was theirs, these families of words, of which, in truth, it is content to open the sepulchers, for the sole purpose of giving to ecstasize over corpses nothing but corpses. That there enters the slightest bit of dialectic in the study of dialects (and let no one accuse me of playing on words, when, on the contrary, I play words on the table), and the classic garden of Greek and Latin roots, instead of making one think of a depository of awful stumps, will be repopulated with these living members that go into the earth to seek the nourishment of trees and plants, and thus allow, their maturity to fruits, to these grains of barley of which Engels, in the Anti-Dühring, notes that thousands are crushed, boiled, put into fermentation and finally consumed. 21

Criticism in which we find, another surrealist cliché, the vitalist metaphor of vocabulary that germinates in opposition therefore to the word-wrecks that Breton deplores. This critique of etymology, we also find it in the more documented study of Paulhan, "The illusion of etymology". 22

On this critique of etymology, I will not insist further, I will move on to the second part of my presentation, more centered this time on syntax. Breton therefore speaks of a "utilitarian syntax". What is a utilitarian syntax? It is the one that responds to the utilitarian needs of dominant thought.

Little by little decompose
The recited alphabets
Of history and morals
And the submitted syntax
Of taught memories 23

The submitted syntax specifies the image of debased language, it is the order that allows all thought to be channeled, to enter into a proposition, to be commonly admitted and understood. It is a normative framework that makes all thoughts become sentences, according to a learned model. It is precisely against this syntax that the surrealists will deploy efforts of ingenuity, to divert it, to show that it is only one possible among others, to try to undermine the foundations not of language as such, but rather those of the institutions that hold the power to say what is good or bad in matters of discourse, therefore those who dictate the norms, who define good speaking of which the obvious corollary is: good thinking. We must therefore confront grammatical reason and seek other possible orders.

This syntax that Breton mentions corresponds itself to an instituted order, that is to say that contrary to what we may have led to believe, syntax is by no means a natural order that would correspond to the movement of thought, and in this sense Breton's declarations perfectly join analyses like those that Françoise Gadet will later make:

The order of language? Nothing other than the political order in language. An incessant surveillance of everything that – otherness or internal difference – risks calling into question the artificial construction of its unity and overturning the network of its obligations. On this, various political positions have been able to find a place to settle: in a paranoid defense of language, or in a fascination with the "good savage", supposed to hold as a privilege the power to break the order of language. 24

And we know to what extent savage thought has fascinated the surrealists, and has provided a model of liberation of expression. In this quote from F. Gadet, we notice that what Foucault explains for the order of discourse is found at the level of the sentence: the order of the sentence has a regulatory function, to circumscribe it, to prevent any overflow, to prevent any intrusion of affects. It is therefore a very framed accompaniment of thought.

This idea of a "political" order, we find it explicitly under Breton's pen in 1935, in "Political position of art today":

It was a question of foiling, of foiling forever the coalition of forces that ensure that the unconscious is incapable of any violent eruption: a society that feels threatened on all sides like bourgeois society thinks, indeed, rightly, that such an eruption can be fatal to it. 25

The metaphor of eruption, linked both to telluric forces, and to the gushing of an interiority, is recurrent in surrealist aesthetics; here it shows well this idea of a jugulated unconscious which must absolutely not appear under penalty of bringing with it all the constructions that ensure to stem the manifestations of any singularity.

We therefore see that the normative framework of language prevents any gushing, any eruption of the unconscious in the verbal chain and in society. Which is interesting because this image of the unconscious as inner boiling, as magma, also refers to "lalangue", from Lacan, lalangue in one word. This magma, we also find it in Castoriadis: he describes language as a magma that a speaking subject will organize to create meanings. A magma is not chaos, it is what can be extracted from organizations in indefinite, and even infinite number; which explains that the production of meaning is not reducible to a simple logical combinatorics:

And it is because the magma is such, that man can move and create in and through discourse, that he is not pinned forever by univocal and fixed signifieds of the words he uses – in other words that language is language. [...] A meaning is nothing "in itself", it is only a gigantic borrowing. 26

It is therefore possible to "borrow" other ways of producing meanings, to explore the side paths of sign-meaning relations, and this to free oneself from inherited thought, to leave the too well-marked paths of the already-said, already-thought and to engage for the emergence of a new thought, proper to envisage new objects of thought, relieved of the dead weights of tradition.

This question of meaning therefore becomes central from the moment when is felt, and expressed, the idea that the normal order of the sentence, of discourse is an organizing center which has the vocation to neutralize the potentially dangerous, and even disturbing scope of speech. Faced with this, with this feeling of being held in an alienating discipline, the force of riposte will be the imaginary and poetry. Through these two means, it is a question of reappropriating language, of making it come out of its normative framework, of exploring the possibles that it contains in power. So it is a question of staying in language, but of making side steps to get out of pre-established paths, to try new syntactic structurations, sometimes even by "trampling syntax" as Aragon says, without really doing it, to try new semantic associations, to dissociate what is always associated and try to provoke encounters in language, to make sparks emerge. "What prevents me from confusing the order of words, from attempting in this way the entirely apparent existence of things!" asks Breton, while specifying that he perfectly masters syntax. But to master perfectly is not to obey blindly, it is also to know that one can not let oneself be locked up in a way of expression, and to be able to envisage other expressive possibles.

The affirmation of the link of incidence of words on things is at the heart of the surrealists' linguistic imaginary: words are the interface between the world and thought, since our perceptions are dependent on words. What is at stake, in the relationship between what is said and what could be said, with another order, is therefore the apprehension of the real – which must enter into the linguistic categories we have at our disposal, if these categories are too narrow, it is life itself that will be impacted. There is therefore an order of sentences that can prove more fruitful than the classical order:

We pretend not to notice too much that the logical mechanism of the sentence shows itself alone increasingly powerless, in man, to trigger the emotional shock that really gives some value to his life.

We are therefore at the heart of the relationship to language: we must rethink the mechanics of sentences so that it is no longer a neutral mechanics that structures and objectifies thought rationally, but that the sentence is the fruit of an act of thought. Poetic expression will then seek other structurations of discourse than what common language offers, it will seek to reveal the inflection point that allows the passage from a language of general communication to a singular language.

We find some examples of disturbed word order in Desnos, notably two examples that resemble each other:

The blotter tired of bleeding in the poems of two generations of imbeciles, the inkwell, the window, isn't everything logical and enslaved to limited ends. However I have conquered weariness. I have lost none of my illusions or rather I have lost none of these precious realities necessary for life. I, I and I live and desire and love. 27

Rattle, what good are the cries, the drool and the saltpeter A sleep of gluttony and purple to be reborn You, you, the others, we, clamor, clamor, clamor, 28

The process consists in putting distance between the subject and the predicate, and potentially creating uncertainty about the attribution of one to the other. Which has, as an effect, as we read in Leiris, of "entraining conjugations in its hidden folds of tendril"

As soon as he had reached a full and uniform speed, he began to oscillate on his base then, suddenly, he completely tipped over and sank into the ground, entraining jailers, condemned men and conjugations in its hidden folds of tendril. 29

And in this, conjugation can also come out of its "logical mechanism", as we see in Desnos, Prévert, or Luca for example