“Surrealism in the Streets“
An Excerpt From
Why Surrealism Matters
On May 2, 1968, disputes between students and officials at the University of Paris, in the northwest suburb Nanterre, led the administration to shut down the campus, an action that was met with energetic protests. The following week, a march in Paris involving twenty thousand students and their supporters escalated into violent confrontations between demonstrators and police that led to hundreds of arrests, and by midmonth, more than a million people were marching through the streets of the city. The period of unrest and general strikes that began in early May eventually lasted nearly two months, involving some eleven million students, teachers, workers, trade unionists, and sympathizers of all kinds, and virtually paralyzing the nation. Its historical, institutional, cultural, and emotional repercussions echo to this day.
Among the graffitied slogans that sprouted on the façades of office buildings and seats of higher learning during the events of May ’68, many of which have since become legendary—“All power to the imagination,” “Beneath the paving stones, the beach”—a number turned out to be Surrealist or pro-Surrealist statements: “Choose life instead,” “Long live the Surrealist Revolution,” “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be” (the concluding sentence of Breton’s Nadja), while the “Letter to the Rectors of European Universities” from 1925 was posted on the walls of the Sorbonne. And, just as Rimbaud was said to have mounted the barricades of the Paris Commune almost a century earlier, so a number of Surrealists went down into the streets—the streets that Breton had once designated as his “true element [where he] could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility”—to lend a hand. A hastily issued tract put the Surrealist movement “at the students’ disposal for any practical action aimed at creating a revolutionary situation.”
But as the group was soon forced to recognize, May ’68, in many ways the greatest public explosion of Surrealism since its inception, also signaled the movement’s decline as an organized entity. “The events of May 1968,” said late generation Surrealist Claude Courtot, “which one could see as Surrealism in the streets, by the same token meant that it no longer remained within the confines of the group. We were almost ejected from it. We felt we had been ‘passed on the left,’ so to speak.”
Moreover, once the general euphoria had died down, the Surrealists were forced to contend with tensions that had been rising since Breton’s death a year and a half earlier, in September 1966. It soon became clear that only he had had the personal prestige and intellectual breadth to hold together the various, at times antagonistic, factions within the movement. “Once there was no more Breton,” said Courtot, “it all came apart. No one had the necessary authority to chart a course for the ship.”
In February 1969, after several more months of schisms and internal dissent, Jean Schuster, Breton’s literary executor and designated successor, officially disbanded the French Surrealist group.
In an article published in the French newspaper of record Le Monde, Schuster admitted that “the absence of any internal cohesion” made it impossible to pursue the Surrealist adventure as it had been for the past decades. “For all that, is Surrealism dead? No . . . [Surrealism] designates both an ontological component of the human mind . . . and the historically determined movement, which has recognized [this component] and taken it upon itself to exalt, enrich, and arm it in preparation for triumph.” While “historical” Surrealism might be coming to an end, Schuster asserted, “eternal” Surrealism, the impulses and energies that had driven it since the beginning, lived on. Moreover, Schuster was really speaking only of the canonical Paris group when he posited the end of “historical” Surrealism: other groups, in Latin America, North America, Scandinavia, and even France, remained active.
What Schuster and Courtot were experiencing was a phenomenon to which, sooner or later, all disruptive movements fall prey: the moment when its programs and precepts take on independent life and no longer need their progenitors to push them forward. The more successful the disruption, the more it becomes assimilated, accepted, and provokes its own end—something Breton had already foreseen in 1942 from his wartime exile in New York, when he wrote: “Any idea that prevails is hastening its own downfall.” And in that tumultuous month of May 1968, John Ashbery expressed a similar judgment in his review of the legendary, and legendarily decried, exhibition “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art: “Revolutions happen only once. The Surrealist Revolution cannot happen again because it is no longer necessary. We all ‘grew up Surrealist’ without even being aware of it. . . . Surrealism, as its originators hoped it would, immediately spread to all levels of life.”
Not everyone took so benign a view of Surrealism’s purported demise. Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International, one of several movements that had sprung up after the war in direct descendance from Surrealism, was already burying the father in the late 1950s as “thoroughly boring and reactionary. Surrealist dreams are mere bourgeois impotence, artistic nostalgia, and a refusal to envisage the liberating use of our era’s technological means.” But what Debord and others like him failed to recognize was that, while Surrealism in its late manifestations did rail against such modern technological developments as atomic energy and the space race (and what would the Surrealists have made of artificial intelligence?), what it really condemned were the deadening effects of consumer society, which technology served and facilitated. “The revolution which will end the capitalist regime and the society which will take over from it will be neither proletarian nor socialist [but] technocratic,” the Surrealist Philippe Audoin predicted in 1965, nearly twenty years before this “silent revolution” became fully evident:
“Consumer societies” can be predicted gradually to abandon traditional forms of coercion so as to place their faith exclusively on the intimate complicity of their slaves. . . . The artificial creation of needs (which in the course of production have to be satisfied before they have even been felt) by means of advertising drivel, the delirious promotion of the everyday object, the hypnotic effect of “audio-visual” media, is no doubt the most striking example of this. . . . All of this contributes to diverting Desire from its own ends towards substitutive satisfactions which claim to bring happiness.
In their rejection of the trappings of modern life, especially the religion of technology whose adherents cross over nations and classes, the Surrealists were not promoting “nostalgia,” as Debord charged, but rather sounding a prescient warning that the “technological means” he championed as “liberating” could also be used to dominate and control—a warning that today needs no further comment.
To return to our initial questions, then: Why should Surrealism matter today, and what lessons can be drawn from it? Has the movement ended, or does it continue? In either case, why does it still exert such a hold on our imaginations? How has it (and has it) paved the way for a greater acceptance of so-called marginal currents in art, literature, and society?
As a “historical” movement, to use Schuster’s term, and despite pockets of activity still ongoing in parts of the world, it would be hard to maintain that Surrealism continues to manifest itself as it had in the interwar years, or even in the decades following World War II. But that’s not the point. By resolutely refusing conformity and absorption, in its spirit if not always in its expressions, Surrealism acts as a prototype for historic and aesthetic upheavals in its wake, including those of the current moment. As one recent article put it, “Surrealism bequeaths to us a playful—yet penetrating—set of tools that may as well have been invented for today’s world.” And while Surrealism can claim few successes in terms of concrete public policy, the “higher lucidity” I have spoken of stands as a model for rebellions wishing to avoid the frequent trap of partisanship and sectarianism, with all the fatal compromises they inevitably entail.
In the realm of aesthetics, the Surrealists constantly sought out new forms in their attempts to preserve and transmit the emotional charge of disruption, which kept the movement from becoming a mere school or style—though, again, the very power of those forms also made them prone to imitation, repetition, and eventually to sterility. But then, the constant need to seek out new means of expression—and, more important, to break down the walls that had long cloistered those means (something that we now take for granted)—is itself an innovative and self-regenerating source of creative energy. Moreover, in highlighting artistic forms that were collective and anonymous, the Surrealists, as Helena Lewis notes, “succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning.”
More generally, Surrealism’s embrace and intermingling of a wide range of concerns formerly considered disparate reframes our notion of what those expressive means could do. Breton might have been overreaching when he told an interviewer, “If we refer back to the title of a magazine like La Révolution surréaliste, which at the time seemed hyperbolic, it’s no exaggeration to say that such a revolution did take place in men’s minds.” But as Michel Foucault points out, he helped redefine how such a revolution might be effected. Breton’s contribution, says Foucault, was to discover “a space that is not that of philosophy, nor of literature, nor of art, but that of experience. We are now in a time when experience—and the thought that is inseparable from it—are developing with an extraordinary richness, in both a unity and a dispersion that wipe out boundaries of provinces that were once well established.”
While on some levels that experience might seem scarcely changed from the Surrealists’ heyday—the racial and economic disparities they decried still exist, wars still rage, gender inequal- ity remains, fundamentalist religions and their abuses still hold sway over large populations in both East and West—our ability to view these ills with a more jaundiced eye, to radically interrogate the irrationalities of our so-called “rational” world and (however gradually) to remedy them, owes much to Surrealism’s heady and creative synthesis of Marxist analysis, Freudian excavation, and Rimbaldian irreverence. Though it was unable to “transform the world” and “change life”—indeed, says the novelist Julien Gracq, though the world has worsened still further as market interests increasingly dominate human activity—it has nonetheless managed “to infuse [life] with fresh air.”
Mark Polizzotti. Why Surrealism Matters. New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-0-300257-09-0. Available direct from Yale University Press.