"The activity of our surrealist comrades in Belgium
is closely allied with our own activity, and I am happy to be in
their company this evening. Magritte, Mesens, Nougé, Scutenaire
and Souris are among those whose revolutionary will—outside
of all consideration of their agreement or disagreement with us on
particular
points—has been for us in Paris a constant reason for thinking
that the surrealist project, beyond the limitations of space and
time, can contribute to the efficacious reunification of all those
who do
not despair of the transformation of the world and who wish this
transformation to be as radical as possible..."
"I now feel free to turn to the object of this
pamphlet, which is to attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain
immediate
ambiguity
contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading
one to suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental
attitude, while, on the contrary it expresses—and always has
expressed for us—a desire to deepen the foundations of the
real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more
passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses. The
whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the present day,
which I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing
more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to avoid
considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations
with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure
ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable
of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years
past—or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may
term the purely intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25)—at
the limits, I say, we have attempted to present interior reality
and exterior reality as two elements in process of unification, or
finally becoming one. This final unification is the supreme aim of
surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present
form of society, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we see
the very cause of man's unhappiness, but also the source of his movement),
we have assigned to ourselves the task of confronting these two realities
with one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow
the preeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the
one and on the other both at once, for that would be to suppose that
they are less apart from one another than they are (and I believe
that those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously
are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting illusion);
of acting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one
after the other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe their
reciprocal attraction and interpenetration and to give to this interplay
of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of these two
adjoining realities to become one and the same thing..."
"The word "surrealism" having thereupon become descriptive
of the generalizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves,
I thought it indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and
for all:
" SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which
it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means,
the real process
of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised
by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL.
Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence
of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely
to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself
for them in the solution of the principal problems of life. Have
professed absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton,
Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour,
Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.
These
till now appear to be the only ones.... Were one to consider their
output only superficially, a goodly number of poets might well
have passed for surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare
at his best. In the course of many attempts I have made towards
an analysis of what, under false pretences, is called genius, I have
found nothing that could in the end be attributed to any other
process
than this."
