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.