Opposing logic and rationality, considered as obstacles to creativity, the surrealist movement, nourished by the disenchantment following the Great War and the Freudian unconscious, intends to give free rein to works that push the boundaries of imagination.
The poetry of madness
Behind surrealism lies the figure of André Breton (1896-1966), one of the founding fathers of the movement. Emmanuel Rubio, lecturer in French literature at Paris-Nanterre University, explains to us how the stories of the current and the character are intimately linked. It all began with the din of the Great War. “ André Breton was mobilized in 1917 and, studying psychiatry, he was sent to the Saint-Dizier asylum where he found himself in contact with those he called “crazy”. To carry out his diagnosis, a single interview should have been enough, but Breton took the time to make them talk. He loves provoking their confessions and hears in their language, he says, a form of poetry superior to that of his time to which he is already accustomed. Breton’s great gesture, in the middle of war, is to have put himself in their place and to seek a flow of words which escapes all control, all rationality. » It is this language, ultimately less absurd than the world torn apart by violence, which inspires the poet and writer to develop automatic writing.
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Invent together
From this founding impulse, the movement will gradually grow and become more theorized in the interwar period. Several artists joined it, like Eluard and Aragon, sharing a powerful desire to create but the inability to produce within the canons established after the ordeals they suffered at the front. Olivier Wagner, curator in the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and co-author of The invention of surrealism – Magnetic fields in Nadja (Editions de la BNF, 2020), reminds us that the movement is first and foremost a common adventure. Beyond individual enterprises, surrealism remains a space where artists inspire each other in a collective synergy. A ” rapture » according to their words, which “ reflects the moments of upheaval among these artists who had the impression of discovering something that no one had seen before. »
Outside of reality, outside of society
François Angelier, producer of the show Mauvais Genre and literary critic at Le Monde des Livres, sees a form of contradiction in commemorating a movement which was precisely built in opposition to the established and to traditions. According to him, we must therefore look for the heritage of the movement not in a particular art form but in the way in which it is produced despite the conventions of its time. “ What matters above all is the spirit of surrealism, that is to say this particular kind of mood that we must manage to maintain independently of supports and disciplines. Surrealism remains the movement of youth, of ferment, of impulsiveness, of violence. People who are psychologically devastated, physically injured, who demand accountability and present the bill to civilization. » As André Breton writes in the Manifesto of surrealism from 1924, “ it is not the fear of madness that will force us to lower the flag of imagination to half-mast “.
