Intellectual movements, like rivers, may attain a gradient steep enough for the critic to be able to build his power station on them. As regards Surrealism, the gradient is created by the difference in level between France and Germany. What emerged in France in 1919 among a small group of writers (here, from the outset, are the main names: André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard) may have been a mere rivulet, fed by the dank boredom of post-war Europe and the seeping lees of French decadence. The smart alecs who still get no farther than the movement’s ‘authentic origins’ and are incapable, even today, of saying any more on the subject than that here we have yet another literary clique pulling the wool over the eyes of the honest public – they are a bit like a gathering of experts who, huddled around a spring, decide on mature reflection that no, that little stream there will never drive turbines.
The German observer is not among those huddled around the spring. Lucky him. He is down in the valley. He can appraise the energies of the movement. For him, who as a German has long been familiar with the crisis of the intelligentsia (to be more precise, of the classical notion of freedom), who is aware how that crisis has sparked a frenzied determination to move on from the stage of interminable discussions and finally, at all costs, reach a decision, who has been forced, personally, to face up to the extremely exposed position of the intelligentsia between anarchist Fronde and revolutionary discipline – for him there is no excuse if, after a casual glance, he should dub the movement ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’. If it had been so to begin with, André Breton had said right from the outset that he wished to break with a practice that places before the public the literary expressions of a specific form of existence while withholding that form of existence itself. More succinctly and dialectically: the realm of literature was here being exploded from within in that a group of close associates was taking the ‘literary life’ to the outer limits of the possible. And they may be taken at their word when they maintain that Rimbaud’s Saison en enfer held no further secrets for them. Because that book really is the first document of the movement. (From recent times, that is; more about earlier predecessors below.) Could there be a more conclusive, more incisive account of what is at issue here than Rimbaud himself gave in his personal copy of the said volume? Where it says ‘on the silk of the sea and the Arctic flowers’, he later wrote in the margin, ‘Aren’t any’ [Elles n’existent pas].
Just how nondescript, how deviant was the substance in which the dialectical seed that grew into Surrealism was originally embedded is something that, at a time (1924) when such germination was as yet unpredictable, Aragon showed in Une vague de rêves. Today it can be deduced. For there is no doubt that the heroic era from which Aragon bequeathed to us his catalogue of heroes is now over. There is always a moment in such movements when the original tension of the secret society must either explode in the objective, mundane struggle for power and dominance or alternatively decay as public manifestation and become transformed. Surrealism is currently undergoing that transformation. Yet at the time when it broke over its founders in the form of an inspiring wave of dreams it seemed the most integral, most conclusive, most absolute phenomenon around. Everything with which it came into contact became part of it. Life seemed worth living only where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as if by the toing and froing of streams of images; language seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, meshed so successfully, with such automatic precision, as to leave no chink through which the least grain of ‘sense’ might escape. Image and language have right of way. Saint Paul Roux, when in the early hours he retired to sleep, used to hang a notice on his door: Le poète travaille [‘Poet at work’]. Breton remarks: ‘Quiet. I wish to pass through where none has yet passed through, be still. – After you, beloved language.’ Language has right of way.
And not only before meaning. Also before the ‘I’. In the fabric of the world, dream loosens individuality like a hollow tooth. Because in fact this relaxing of the ‘I’ by intoxication is at the same time the fruitful, living experience that enabled these people to step outside the magic circle, as it were, thus evading the influence of intoxication. This is not the place to delineate the Surrealist experience in all its certainty. However, anyone who has accepted that the writings of this group are not literature but something else (manifestation, slogan, document, bluff, falsification if you like, just not literature) is also going to be aware that at issue here are quite literally experiences, not theories, and certainly not imaginings. Furthermore, those experiences are by no means confined to the dream arising at the time of eating hashish or smoking opium. In fact, it is a huge mistake to think that the only ‘Surrealist experiences’ we know of are religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drug use. ‘Opium for the people,’ Lenin called religion,1 thus bringing these two things closer than the Surrealists might have liked. There will be occasion later to talk of the bitter, impassioned rebellion against Catholicism in which Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Apollinaire brought Surrealism into the world. However,the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination really does not lie in narcotics. It lies in a secular illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration for which hashish, opium, or whatever it may be can provide the nursery schooling. (A dangerous kind, though. And that of religions is stricter.) This secular illumination did not always find Surrealism up to scratch (so far as it and Surrealism itself were concerned), and the very writings that express it most powerfully (Aragon’s incomparable Paysan de Paris and Breton’s Nadja) exhibit very disturbing deficiency symptoms in this respect. Nadja, for instance, contains an outstanding passage about the ‘splendid days of looting known as the “Sacco-Vanzetti” days’,2 and Breton couples this with the assertion that on those days the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle lived up to the strategic promise of revolt that its name had always held out. But a Madame Sacco also crops up, and she is not the wife of Fuller’s victim3 but a clairvoyant living at 3 rue des Usines and able to tell Paul Éluard that no good would come to him from Nadja. Granted, Surrealism does take some dodgy turns, traversing roofs by way of lightning conductors, gutters, verandas, weathervanes, bits of stucco (all ornamentation must serve the cat burglar well); yes, it also visits the dank back rooms of spiritualism. But we feel really uneasy when we hear of it quietly tapping tables to ask about its future. Surely anyone would wish these adoptive children of the Revolution to be utterly and specifically dissociated from all that goes on in the conventicles of faded nuns, retired majors, and émigré drug dealers?
Actually, Breton’s book is well adapted to explaining certain key features of this ‘secular illumination’ on that basis. He calls Nadja a ‘livre à porte battante’ – a ‘swing-door book’. (In Moscow I stayed in a hotel where nearly all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a conference of all the Buddhist churches. I was struck by how many doors in the corridors of the building always stood ajar. What had initially seemed pure chance began to prey on my mind. Then I discovered: the inmates of such rooms were members of a sect who had vowed never to occupy a room with the door closed. The shock I felt then is one that the person reading Nadja inevitably feels.) Living in a glasshouse is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. That too is a ‘high’, a kind of moral exhibitionism we sorely need. Discretion in the matter of one’s own existence, from being an aristocratic virtue, has increasingly become a concern of the jumped-up petit bourgeois. Nadja achieves the true, creative synthesis between work of fiction and [as English, too, calls it] roman-à-clef.
Incidentally (and this too Nadja implies), one need only take love seriously to find in it, too, a ‘secular illumination’. ‘It so happens,’ the author recalls [in connection with an episode when, sitting in a café with Nadja, he has a page of pictures thrust into his hand by an elderly beggar, images depicting scenes from the reigns of Louis VI and Louis VII], ‘that I have recently been thinking about this period because it was the age of “courtly love” and trying hard to imagine how people saw life in those days.’4 We now know, from a recent author, more about Provençal Minne [the German term for what English calls ‘courtly love’], and this takes us surprisingly close to the Surrealist conception of love. ‘All the poets of the stil nuovo,’ we read in Erich Auerbach’s splendid Dante: Poet of the Secular World, ‘possessed a mystical beloved; all of them had roughly the same fantastic amorous adventures; the gifts which Love bestowed upon them all (or denied them) have more in common with illumination than with sensual pleasure; and all of them belonged to a kind of secret brotherhood which molded their inner lives and perhaps their outward lives as well […].’5 The dialectic of intoxication is indeed a curious thing. Maybe any kind of ecstasy in one world is shameful sobriety in the complementary world – is that possible? What else is courtly love about (and it is courtly love, not sensual love, that binds Breton to the telepathic girl) than that chastity, too, is reverie? A being carried off into a world that lies next not only to Sacred Heart crypts and Lady altars but also to the morning before a battle or after a victory.
The lady, in esoteric love, is what matters least. So it is with Breton, too. He is closer to the things Nadja is close to than to herself. Well, what are the things she is close to? For Surrealism, the canon of those things is utterly revealing. Where is one to start? It can boast an astounding find, that canon. It was the first to uncover the revolutionary energies apparent in the ‘antiquated’, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the things now beginning to die out, the drawing-room grands, the clothes of five years ago, the smart watering holes when the fashionable world begins to desert them. How such things relate to the revolution – of that none can have a more precise idea than these authors. The way poverty – not just social poverty but equally that of architecture, the shabbiness of interiors, the enslaved and enslaving things – the way these flip suddenly into revolutionary nihilism is something that, before these seers and interpreters of signs of the times came along, no one had observed. And leaving aside Aragon’s Passage de l’Opéra, Breton and Nadja are the couple who take everything we have experienced on dismal railway journeys (the railways are starting to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the working-class districts of big cities, in that first gaze through the rain-streaked window of a new apartment – and redeem it in revolutionary experience, if not in action. They cause the mighty forces of ‘atmosphere’ that lie hidden in these things to explode. What form would a life take, do you think, that in a crucial moment allowed itself to be determined by the latest popular song?
The knack for dealing with this material world (it is fitter to speak of a knack here than of a method) consists in exchanging the historical view of what has been for the political view. ‘Open up, tombs, open up, you dead folk in art galleries, cadavers behind folding screens, in castles, in palaces, in priories, here is the fabled keeper of the keys, the man who carries around a bunch of keys to all ages, who knows how to apply pressure to the trickiest locks, and who invites you to step right into today’s world, to mix with the bearers of burdens, the working men whom money ennobles, to sit at ease in their automobiles (which are as lovely as suits of armour in the Age of Chivalry), to climb into international sleeping cars and weld yourselves together with all the people who are nowadays still proud of their privileges. Yet civilization will make short work of them.’ The speech was put into Apollinaire’s mouth by his friend Henri Hertz. It is with Apollinaire that the technique originates. He used it in his volume of novellas L’Hérésiarque with Machiavellian calculation to blow Catholicism (to which he remained inwardly attached) out of the water.
At the centre of this material world stands its most dreamed-of object, the city of Paris itself. But only revolt drives its surrealist face out completely. (Deserted streets in which whistles and shots dictate the decision.) And no face is surrealistic to the same degree as the true face of a city. No painting by de Chirico or Max Ernst can compare with the sharp elevations of its internal forts, which must first be taken and occupied if one would command its fate and, in its fate, in the fate of its masses, one’s own. Nadja is a leading exponent of those masses and of their revolutionary inspiration: ‘La grande inconscience vive et sonore qui m’inspire mes seuls actes probants dans le sens que toujours je veux prouver, qu’elle dispose à tout jamais de tout ce qui est à moi.’6 Here, then, we find the catalogue of those fortifications – from Place Maubert, where the dirt of its whole symbolic might lies preserved as nowhere else, to the ‘Théâtre Moderne’ that I am so sorry not to have known.7 However, in Breton’s description of the bar upstairs (‘it too so dark, with its impenetrable arches, “a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake” ’)8 there is something that reminds me of that most misunderstood room in the old Princess Café. It was the back room on the first floor with its couples in blue light. We used to call it the ‘anatomy school’; it was the latest bar for love. With Breton, at points like this photography cuts in in the most remarkable way. It makes the streets, gateways, and squares of the city into illustrations for a trashy novel, sucking out the trite self-evidence of this age-old architecture to apply it with hyper-original intensity to the action portrayed – to which, exactly as in those old books housemaids read, verbatim extracts complete with page numbers refer. And all the Parisian locations that appear here are places at which what there is between these people turns like a revolving door.9
The Paris of the Surrealists is another ‘world in little’. In other words in the big one, the cosmos, things look no different. There too there are crossroads where spectral signals flash from the traffic, where inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day. This is the realm from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports. And that should be noted, if only to counter the inevitable misunderstanding of l’art pour l’art. The fact is, ‘art for art’s sake’ is scarcely ever meant to be taken literally, has almost always been a flag under which goods sail that cannot be declared, having as yet no name. This would be the moment to undertake a project that would throw more light than any other on the crisis of the arts we are currently witnessing: a history of esoteric literature. Nor is it by any means accidental that we still lack one. For writing it as it demands to be written (not, that is, as a collective work with various ‘experts’ each contributing ‘the latest wisdom’ in his or her field but as a properly argued text by a single individual, someone driven by an inner compulsion to set out not so much a developmental history as a series, repeatedly renewed, of original revivals of esoteric literature) – written like that it would be one of those scholarly confessional texts that appear in every century. Its final page would have to feature an X-ray photograph of Surrealism. In his ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’, Breton suggests how the philosophical realism of the Middle Ages was based on poetic experience. But that realism (belief, that is to say, in a real separate existence of concepts, whether outside things or inside them) always very quickly found the transition from the logical realm of concepts to the magical realm of words. And magical word experiments, not artistic fiddle-faddle, they certainly are – those passionate phonetic and graphic transformation games that for the past fifteen years have run through the entire literature of the avant-garde, be it called Futurism, Dadaism, or Surrealism. How speech, magical spell, and concept intermingle here is shown in the following words written by Apollinaire in his last manifesto, L’Esprit nouveau et les poétes (1918). In it he says, ‘The speed and straightforwardness with which we have all got used to using a single word to describe such complex entities as a crowd, a people, or the universe have no modern equivalent in poetry. Today’s poets, however, are filling the gap; their synthetic compositions are creating fresh essence whose three-dimensionality is as complex as that of the words for collectives.’ Granted, with Apollinaire and Breton both advancing in the same direction with renewed energy, establishing the connection between Surrealism and the world around it with the statement ‘The conquests of science are based much more on surrealist than on logical thinking’ – to put it another way, with them making of ‘mystification’ (the pinnacle of which Breton sees in poetry; and it is a defensible position), the basis of scientific and technological development – well, such integration is going too far, too fast. It is most instructive to compare the precipitate bracketing-together of this movement with the ill-understood miracle of technology (Apollinaire: ‘The old stories have largely found fruition, now it is for the poets to think up new ones that the inventors for their part have then to realize’) – to compare these seductive imaginings with the breathless Utopias of someone like Scheerbart.10
‘Thinking about all human activity makes me laugh.’ The words are Aragon’s, and they indicate very clearly the path Surrealism had to travel from its origins to its politicization. Pierre Naville, originally a member of the group, called that development ‘dialectical’ in his splendid essay ‘La Révolution et les intellectuels’ [1926]. In this transformation of a deeply contemplative attitude into one of revolutionary opposition, the hostility of the bourgeoisie to any expression of radical intellectual freedom played a major role. That hostility pushed Surrealism towards the left. Political events (mainly the Moroccan War) accelerated the process. With the manifesto ‘Intellectuals against the Moroccan War’, published in L’Humanité, a fundamentally different programme was reached than, say, the one suggested by the famous scandal that broke out at the Saint-Paul-Roux banquet.
On that occasion, shortly after the war, when the Surrealists, feeling that a celebration held to honour a poet whom they themselves admired was compromised by the presence of nationalist elements, broke into shouts of ‘Long live Germany’, they remained within the bounds of scandal, in the face of which the bourgeoisie are generally known to be as thick-skinned as they are sensitive to any kind of demonstration. There was a striking unanimity about the way in which, under the influence of this kind of political scent in the air, Apollinaire and Aragon saw the future of the poet. The ‘Persecution’ and ‘Murder’ sections of Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassiné contain the famous description of a poet pogrom. Publishing houses are stormed, poetry books hurled on bonfires, poets struck dead. And identical scenes are played out simultaneously all over the world. With Aragon, in anticipation of some such atrocity, imagination calls out its troops for a last crusade.
To understand such prophecies and strategically assess the line reached by Surrealism one needs to look around a bit and see what kind of thinking is current among ‘sympathetic’ left-leaning bourgeois intellectuals. This comes out pretty clearly in the present pro-Russian stance of such groups. We are not of course talking here about Béraud,11 who paved the way for the lie about Russia, or Fabre-Luce12 who, good donkey, trots behind Béraud along that paved way, laden with every sort of bourgeois antipathy. But how problematical is even the typical go-between book by Duhamel. How the forced sincerity and the forced enthusiasm and heartiness of the Protestant theological language running through it grate on one. How tired it sounds – the method, dictated by embarrassment and ignorance of the language, of shifting things into some kind of symbolic light. What a giveaway is his conclusion: ‘The true, more profound revolution, the one that in a sense might transform the substance of the Russian soul itself, has yet to occur.’ The thing that characterizes this left-wing French intelligentsia (just like its Russian equivalent) is that its positive function proceeds entirely from a sense of commitment not to revolution but to traditional culture, culture as handed down. Its collective achievement, in so far as it is positive, is almost one of conservation. Politically and economically, though, there will be a constant need, so far as the members of such an intelligentsia are concerned, to anticipate the risk of sabotage.
What typifies this whole left-wing bourgeois position is its incorrigible pairing of idealistic morality with political practice. The only way to understand certain key points of Surrealism (the Surrealist tradition, in fact) is by contrasting them with the awkward compromises of ‘opinion’. Not much has happened, so far, to promote that understanding. There was too great a temptation to pigeon-hole the Satanism of poets such as Rimbaud and Lautréamont as the counterpart to l’art pour l’art in an inventory of snobbery. However, deciding to open up this Romantic dummy will reveal something quite useful inside: namely, the cult of evil as a device (however Romantic) for disinfecting politics and isolating it from any kind of moralizing dilettantism. In this conviction, should one come across in Breton the scenario of a Gothic play revolving round child violation, one may well reach back a few decades. In the years 1865–75 a number of major anarchists, unknown to one another, were working on their time bombs. And the amazing thing is, independently of one another they set them to go off at precisely the same time, and forty years later the writings of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont exploded in Western Europe simultaneously. One could, to be more precise, extract from Dostoevsky’s opus the one passage that really was first published in 1915: ‘Stavrogin’s confession’ from [the 1872 novel] Demons.13 This chapter, which touches very closely on the third canto of The Songs of Maldoror,14 contains a justification of evil that gives more forceful expression to certain themes of Surrealism than any of the movement’s present-day spokesmen have contrived to do. For Stavrogin is a Surrealist avant la lettre. No one grasped as he did how naive the petit bourgeois is in thinking that, while good, along with all manly virtue, is inspired in the person practising it by God, evil on the other hand stems entirely from our own spontaneity; here we are autonomous and wholly self-reliant beings. Only he saw inspiration even in the most mundane of actions – indeed, precisely there. He further recognized vileness as something preformed not merely in the way of the world but in ourselves, something suggested if not actually assigned to us, as the idealistic bourgeois views virtue. Dostoevsky’s God created not only the heavens and the earth and man and the animals but also meanness, revenge, cruelty. And here too he refused to let the devil spoil his handiwork. That is why with him they are all entirely original, maybe not ‘magnificent’ but always as fresh ‘as on the first day’ and a million miles from the stereotypes under which the Philistine sees sin.
How great was the tension that enabled the said writers to accomplish their extraordinary distance-working is shown in an almost droll fashion in the letter that Isidore Ducasse15 addressed to his publisher on 23 October 1869 in an attempt to give his writing plausibility in the publisher’s eyes. Placing himself in the line of Minckìewickz,16 Milton, Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire, he says, ‘I have of course adopted a slightly fuller tone in order to introduce something new into this literature that sings of despair only in order to depress the reader, making him yearn the more powerfully for the good as healing balm. Ultimately, one is hymning only the good, except that the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the old school, of which only Victor Hugo and a few others are still living.’ However, if Lautréamont’s erratic book does belong in any kind of context (or rather if it can be placed in one), it is the context of insurrection. So it was a quite understandable and not inherently hopeless attempt that Soupault made in his 1927 edition of the Complete Works when he wrote a political vita of Isidore Ducasse. The pity of it is, this is quite undocumented, and the fact that Soupault did in fact cite documents was based on a mix-up. On the other hand, a corresponding attempt in Rimbaud’s case was fortunately successful, and it is thanks to Marcel Coulon that the poet’s true image was defended against the Catholic usurpation practised by Claudel and Berrichon. Rimbaud is a Catholic, certainly he is, but by his own account he is so in his most wretched part, which he never tires of denouncing, of delivering up to his and everyone’s hatred, his own and every sort of scorn: the part that forces him to confess he does not understand revolt. But that is the confession of a Communard who could not do enough himself and who at the time when he turned his back on poetry had long since, in his earliest poems, said goodbye to religion. ‘Hatred, to you I have entrusted my treasure,’ he writes in Une Saison en enfer. On these words, too, a poetics of Surrealism might spring up, and it would even sink its roots deeper than that theory of ‘surprise’ that derives from Apollinaire, right down into the depths of Poe’s ideas.
In Europe there has not been another radical notion of freedom since Bakunin. The Surrealists have one. They are the first to have finished off the liberal, morally and humanistically calcified ideal of freedom, seeing clearly that ‘freedom, which on this earth is to be purchased only with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, seeks to be enjoyed unrestrictedly, in all its fullness and with no pragmatic calculation of any kind, for as long as it lasts’. And this is their proof ‘that man’s struggle for liberation in its simplest revolutionary form (which certainly is, specifically, liberation in every respect) is the only thing left worth serving’. But will they succeed in welding this experience of freedom to the rest of revolutionary experience, which we must acknowledge because we once had it: to the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution? In a nutshell – will they bind revolt to revolution? How shall we imagine an existence modelled entirely, in every respect, on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in spaces designed by Le Corbusier and Oud?
Harnessing the forces of intoxication for the revolution – that is what Surrealism revolves around in all its books, in its every undertaking. What it might call its specific task means more than simply that, as we know, an ecstatic component inhabits every revolutionary act. Such a component is identical with the anarchic. However, to stress this alone would be to set aside methodical, disciplined preparation of the revolution entirely in favour of a praxis that wavers between rehearsal and celebration in advance. Also, this is to take an all too precipitate, non-dialectical view of the nature of intoxication. The aesthetics of the peintre or poète ‘en état de surprise’, art as the reaction of one surprised, is mired in a number of extremely disastrous Romantic preconceptions. Every serious fathoming of occult, Surrealist, phantasmagorical gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical connection that a Romantic mind will never adopt. The fact is, it gets us no farther, stressing the mysterious side of mystery emotionally or fanatically; rather, we penetrate the secret only to the extent to which we rediscover it in the everyday, thanks to a dialectical way of seeing things that recognizes the everyday as impenetrable and the impenetrable as everyday. The most deeply emotional study of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not tell a person half so much about reading (an eminently telepathic process) as the secular illumination of reading will about telepathic phenomena. To put it another way: the most deeply emotional study of hashish intoxication will not tell a person half so much about thinking (a notable drug) as the secular illumination of thinking will about hashish intoxication. The reader, the thinker, the person who waits for things, the person who takes things easy – these are just as much types of illuminee as the opium-eater, the dreamer, the person intoxicated by drugs. And certainly more secular. Not to mention that most terrible of drugs – ourselves – which we take in solitude.
‘Harnessing the forces of intoxication for the revolution’ – meaning what? Literary politics? ‘Nous en avons soupé [‘Not again!’]. Anything but that!’ Well, you will be all the more interested to hear how much light a digression into literature will throw on things. What is the programme of the bourgeois parties, in fact? A spring song, pure and simple. Full to bursting with similes. The Socialist sees that ‘sunnier future for our children and grandchildren’ in everyone behaving ‘as if they were angels’ and everyone having as much ‘as if he were wealthy’ and everyone living ‘as if he were free’. Of angels, wealth, freedom – not a trace! Nothing but images. And the image bank of Social Democracy’s ‘resident poets’? Their ‘gradus ad Parnassum’? Optimism. What a different air is breathed in the piece by Naville17 that makes ‘Organizing pessimism’ the order of the day. On behalf of his literary friends he lays down an ultimatum, demanding that this conscienceless, dilettantish optimism without fail show its true colours. In what do the prerequisites of the revolution consist? he asks. In changing minds or in external circumstances? This is the key question governing relations between politics and morality, and it allows of no cover-up. Surrealism has come steadily closer to its Communist responsibility. And that means: pessimism all along the line. Yes indeed, very much so. No confidence in the fate of literature, no confidence in the fate of freedom, no confidence in the fate of European humanity, but above all no confidence – in fact, thrice no confidence in any kind of accommodation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And boundless confidence only in I. G. Farben and in the peaceful perfecting of the Luftwaffe. But what now, what indeed?
Here the insight comes into its own that in Traité du style [1928], Aragon’s latest book, calls for a distinction to be drawn between simile and image. A happy insight in matters of style and one that asks to be extended. Extension: nowhere do these two (simile and image) clash as drastically and irreconcilably as in politics. The fact is, organizing pessimism means quite simply expelling moral metaphor from politics and finding in the sphere of political action the image sphere in its entirety. Contemplatively, however, that image sphere cannot be measured up at all. If it is the dual task of the revolutionary intelligentsia to topple the intellectual dominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses, in the second part of that task it has failed almost entirely; the second part of the task can no longer be performed in the mind. Yet that has prevented very few from repeatedly framing it as if it could, calling for proletarian writers, proletarian thinkers, proletarian artists. Trotsky himself, in Literature and Revolution, had to disagree, pointing out that these will emerge only from a victorious revolution. The truth is, it is far less a question of making the artist of middle-class origin into a master of ‘Proletarian art’ than of giving him a function, be it at the cost of his artistic influence, at significant points of that image sphere. Indeed, ought not interrupting his ‘artistic career’ to be an essential part of that function, possibly?
The jokes he tells will be the better for it. So will the way he tells them. For in humour, too, in abuse, in misunderstanding – wherever an action itself bodies forth and is the image, draws in and consumes the image, wherever proximity sees itself through its own eyes, this sought-after image sphere opens up, the world of all-round, integral actuality in which ‘good manners’ are missing – the sphere, in a word, in which political materialism and the physical creature share with one another the inner man, the psyche, the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw at them, in accordance with dialectical justice, such that none of his limbs is left untorn. Nevertheless (in fact, precisely following such dialectical destruction) that sphere will still be an image sphere, and more concretely: a body sphere. Because there is nothing for it, the admission must be made: the kind of metaphysical materialism cultivated by Vogt and Bukharin cannot segue smoothly into the anthropological materialism underlined by the experience of the Surrealists and before them by Hebel, say, or Georg Büchner, or Nietzsche, or Rimbaud. Something is left over. The collective, too, has body. And the physis currently organizing itself for the collective in technology is something that, in accordance with its entire political and material reality, can be generated only in that image sphere in which secular illumination makes us feel at home. Only when, in that physis, body sphere and image sphere interpenetrate so deeply that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation and all bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge will reality have outdone itself to the full extent required by The Communist Manifesto. For the moment, the Surrealists are alone in having grasped its present command. They all, to a man, swap their facial expressions for the dial of an alarm clock that strikes each minute for the duration of sixty seconds.
[1929]