Break of Day

by Breton, Andre; Polizzotti, Mark; Caws, Mary Ann

• ISBN13: 9780803212596
• ISBN10: 0803212593
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Originally published in France in 1934,Break of Dayis Andre Breton's second collection of critical and polemical essays, followingThe Lost Steps(Nebraska 1996). In fewer than two hundred pages, it captures the first full decade of the surrealist movement. The collection opens with an essay composed in 1924 that examines key elements of surrealism and concludes with Breton's harsh revaluation in 1933 of automatic writing. Among the other essays in the volume are "Burial Denied" and "In Self-Defense," two pieces that, in translator Mark Polizzotti's words, "mark surrealism's conscious break from the mainstream and the beginning of its attempts to work alongside the French Communist Party." Also included are "Psychiatry Standing before Surrealism," which addresses Breton's complex, ambivalent views on mental illness and the emerging psychiatric establishment; "Introduction to Achim von Arnim'sStrange Tales," which reveals surrealism's debt to such precursors as the German romantics and delineates a surrealistic aesthetic of the macabre; and "Picasso in His Element," in which Breton demonstrates his formidable talents as a critic of the visual arts.

Author Biography

Mark Polizzotti is the editorial director of David R. Godine, Inc. He is the translator of numerous works and the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton.



Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and the author or editor of some forty-one books, most recently The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Mary Ann Caws
Preface: In the Harsh Light of Dawn	ix
Mark Polizzotti
Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality	3	(18)
Burial Denied	21	(1)
In Self-Defense	22	(18)
Paul Eluard's Capital of Pain	40	(2)
The X..., Y...Exhibit	42	(3)
Notice to the Reader of The Hundred Headless Woman	45	(6)
The First Dali Exhibit	51	(3)
Lyubovanaya lodka razbilas 0 byt	54	(10)
On the Relations between Intellectual Labor and Capital	64	(3)
Psychiatry Standing before Surrealism	67	(5)
Letter to Andre Rolland de Reneville	72	(6)
On the Proletarian Literature Contest Sponsored	78	(10)
L'Humanite
Introduction to Achim von Arnim's Strange Tales	88	(23)
Picasso in is Element	111	(12)
The Faces of Women	123	(2)
The Automatic Message	125	(19)
Sources and Acknowledgments	144

Excerpts

Chapter One

Introduction

to the Discourse on

the Paucity of Reality

Wireless": there's a word that has all too recently entered our vocabulary, a locution whose rise has been too rapid for it not to contain many of the dreams of our epoch, for it not to reveal to me one of the very few specifically new determinations of our minds. Feeble reference points such as these are what sometimes give me the illusion of attempting a great adventure, of looking to some small degree like a gold prospector: I seek the gold of time. So what do they evoke, these words I chose? Barely the coastal sands, a few field spiders intertwined in the hollow of a willow tree -- a willow or the sky, for no doubt it's a wide-range antenna, then islands, nothing but islands ... Crete, where I must be Theseus, but Theseus forever caught in his crystal labyrinth.

    Wireless telegraph, wireless telephone, wireless imagination, as they say. The induction is easy, but I also believe it's legitimate. Invention, human discovery, the faculty we are so parsimoniously granted, over time, to know and possess things no one had any inkling of before us, is bound to throw us into great confusion. On the side of truth, this modesty would alarm us less if it did not occasionally pretend to yield up, abandon to us the tiniest of its secrets, only to revert quickly to its hesitations. The ill humor of most men who ultimately stopped falling for these paltry revelations, who contented themselves once and for all with only invariable data, the way one looks at mountains or the sea -- classical minds, in short -- is what nonetheless keeps them from taking full advantage of a life that, granted, does not essentially differ from all past lives but that on the other hand must not be so vain as to set itself such limits: André Breton (1896-19..).

    I am in the hall of a castle, my dark lantern in hand, and one by one I illuminate the sparkling suits of armor. Don't go thinking it's some evildoer's trick. One of these suits of armor seems almost my size; if only I could put it on and find in it a little of the consciousness of a fourteenth-century man. O eternal theater, you demand that not only to play another's role, but even to dictate that role, we should take on his disguise; that the mirror before which we pose should reflect back a foreign image of ourselves. Imagination can do anything, except make us look, despite our natural appearance, like someone other than ourselves. Literary speculation is illicit as soon as it sets before an author characters that he deems right or wrong, after having created them from whole cloth. "Speak for yourself," I would tell him. "Speak about yourself; you'll tell me so much more. I do not recognize your power of life or death over these pseudo-human beings who spring armed and disarmed from your fancy. Just leave me your memoirs and have done with it. Give me real names; prove to me that you've never held sway over your protagonists." I don't like it when people shilly-shally, nor when they hide. I am in the hall of a castle, my dark lantern in hand, and one by one I illuminate the sparkling suits of armor. Later, in this same hall -- who knows? -- someone will casually put on my suit. From pedestal to pedestal, the great silent colloquy will continue:

THE ARMOR'S COLLOQUY

"I understand, do you hear? How can one still suffer the galloping of horses in the countryside? Even for them, the sun of the dead might well shine; the living always rush hell for leather to help what is beyond help. They make it an affair of State."

    "They ended up convincing themselves that the life they were living was neither their first nor their last. Doing something once, they said, doesn't prove anything. As for us, let's knock on green wood."

    A WOMAN'S VOICE: "Here are a few who are lingering in couples. Pity on them alone! Suits of armor, more sparkle to you; lovers, more pleasure to you."

    "Can one being be present for another being?"

    ANOTHER WOMAN'S VOICE: "I existed only for twenty hawthorn bushes. It's from them, alas, that this charming corselet is made. But I've also known pure light: the love of love."

    I: "The fearless soul plunges into a land with no escape, where one's eyes open without weeping. One wanders there to no purpose; one obeys without anger. One can see behind oneself without turning around. Finally I ponder beauty without veils, the earth without stains, the medal without a reverse. No longer do I beg forgiveness for nothing, without belief. No one can shut the door with no hinges. What good is it setting these harmless traps in the woods of the heart? No doubt a day without bread would not be so long."

* * *

None of this settles anything. Just let me lift my head from my hands and the din of futile things begins to deafen me once again. I am in the world, quite in the world, and even darkened right now by daylight's end. I know that in Paris, on the boulevards, the beautiful lighted signs are beginning to appear. These signs occupy a large place in my daily walks, and yet the truth is that they convey only things that annoy me. At my window, I am thinking, too, of the roughly equal distribution of human beings in private or public places, from one day to the next. How can one explain, for instance, why a normally full auditorium should never be nearly empty even for one evening, simply because everyone had other things to do? (I'm talking about theaters where the seats are very cheap or free.) Why do trains, in a given time of year, always carry more or less the same number of passengers? What is striking in such cases is the absence of coincidence. I indulge in remarks like this all the time, which might seem ludicrous but which give an accurate picture of the obstacles that anyone's thought might have to overcome. There is also the importance I'm forced to attach to heat and cold -- in short, the entire process of continual distraction that makes me abandon one idea per friend, one friend per idea; that forces me to move around when I'm writing, to interrupt myself in the middle of a sentence, as if I needed reassurance that a given object was in its correct place in the room, that one or another of my articulations was working right. The existence (duly noted in advance) of this bouquet I'm about to smell or this catalog I'm leafing through should be enough for me: but no. I have to assure myself of its reality, as they say, to make contact with it. The mistake would be to see this mimic as merely expressive. Despite its multiple accidents, my thought makes its own way and doesn't seem to suffer overly from betrayal, if betrayal it is. "Take it easy," she tells me. "I won't keep you here." And so I allow myself to read the newspapers (and, I admit, very few books), to talk to strangers, to play, sometimes even to laugh, to caress a woman, to be bored, to enter a public square: in short, to take outside of this thought my few pleasures where I find them. As she is harder to subjugate than I; she likes it when I tell her of the strange, daily fascination that these places, actions, things, this lowest common denominator of men exert on me. What independence she enjoys! She is strong, too, like everything that will remain of me. She is darker than night, and in vain do I try to occupy her with things that seem to occur very far away, in her absence; with what I tell her is a succession of wonders, so that I'll be sure she's listening to me, like the sad and beautiful queen she is:

THE SUCCESSION OF WONDERS

"Wonders, Madam -- but first let me describe this shipwreck for you. Our vessel was carrying everything you can imagine as most ours, most precious. There was a plaster Virgin whose halo, to perfect the resemblance, was made of gossamer, so that it shone with the dew. There was a completely white artificial fly that I had stolen from a dead fisherman in a dream, yes, in a dream, and that I spent hours watching float on the water I'd poured into a blue bowl: it was the bait I was saving for the unknown. There was what might come from the bowels of the earth, what might fall from the sky. Healing bushes, the scent of great hyacinths indifferent to the climate reached all the way to the bridge. We had opened the heavy crates so as to see everything. We had also distributed moral guises. The collar of grace was composed only of two pearls called breasts. There was genius, which wasn't only a guise but also a dazzling promise. A couple of birds, by far the rarest, which changed shape with the winds, left the musical instruments far behind -- even in this regard.

    "By what latitude did it seem to us that the land we were rushing toward retreated the more we approached it, and that instead of reaching it, we had broken the sea of glass? This, Madam, is what I could not tell you. The birds with their cursed song! At that point they flew away sadly, giving no solace. The antagonism of genius and grace, though it lasted but an instant, had been enough to make the flowers virtual. The bridge was made of fallow earth and all that remained, on both sides of the vessel, in the transparency of the waves, was the inverted image of the great hyacinths indifferent to the climate. The Virgin had lost her halo in the storm and the solitary white fly, extraordinarily phosphorescent, rocked in its night-blue bowl.

    "You will thank me, Madam, for sparing you the relation of our cries of despair when we felt that we would miss everything, that at every step what might exist destroys what does exist, that absolute solitude gradually vaporizes what we touch. It is you, isn't it, who enter the colorless aviary; it's you who consigns the tides to this damning efflorescence.

    "The wonder, Madam, is that on the shore where you cast us up half-dead, we retain the awestruck memory of our disaster. There are no more living birds, no more real flowers. Every creature harbors the disappointment of knowing itself to be unique. Even what is born of it does not belong to it and, moreover, is anything born of it? Does it know? The wonder, again, is that the engulfing of all that splendor should be a matter of time, let's say almost of age, and that one day we might discover a wreck on the sand where we know there was nothing the day before.

    "I bring you the most beautiful and perhaps only remnant of my shipwreck. In this chest that I deliver to you and for which I don't have the key sleeps the disarming idea of presence and absence in love."

* * *

Here the magnetic needle goes crazy. Everything that obstinately indicates the deserted north no longer knows which way to turn before the dawn. On the whole, the enigma of the sexes reconciles the wise and the insane. The sky falling on the heads of the Gauls, the grass ruined by the hooves of the Huns' steeds -- nothing from the slippery Thermopylae to the marvelous formula "After me, the Flood" can better lead us to the edge of our precipice. Museums at night, spacious and lit up like music halls, preserve the chaste and audacious nude from the great whirlwind.

I, a man, now watch that woman sleeping. We await the end of the world, of the external world, from one moment to the next. We are the ones who have braved the consequences from the start, putting forth the fatal character of our minds. What should I care what they say about me, since I am not the one speaking, to whom I am speaking, and in whose interest we are speaking? I forget, I speak about what I've already forgotten. I've systematically forgotten everything that ever happened to me, good or bad, if not indifferent. Only the indifferent is admirable. The terrible psychological law of compensations, which I have never seen formulated -- and by virtue of which apparently we will soon pay dearly for a moment of lucidity, pleasure, or happiness; not to mention that our worst collapse, our greatest despair will gain us immediate revenge, and that the regular alternation of these two states, as in manic-depressive psychosis, presupposes a rigorously equal intensity of our good and evil emotions -- the terrible psychological law of compensations leaves indifference (in the balance of the world, the only thing not subject to flaws) by the wayside. It is toward indifference that I have tried to exercise my memory, toward fables without moral, neutral impressions, incomplete statistics ... And yet I, a man, now watch that woman sleeping. A woman's sleep is an apotheosis. Do you see this red sheet bordered by a wide band of black lace? Strange bed!

    Is it my fault if women sleep beneath the stars, even as they claim to keep us near them in their luxurious bedchambers? They hold over us an incredible power of failure, and I am flattered to include myself in this. To include myself like a lake with mayflies. The lake must be charmed by the incomparable brevity of their lives, and I envy the changing perspectives of the woman for whom the future is never the beyond; the woman who knits her brow at my calculations, and who is sure that I will except her from the pillage, sure that she will be spared the extermination I'm contemplating. She is not angry (on the contrary) at the feeble resistance to my desire for the unreal both by other men and by everything our love could easily do without.

    To love each other, even if only a few days remained; to love each other because we are the only ones left after that famous earthquake, and no one can ever free us because we are buried under too much rubble. Only this recourse remains: to love each other. I have never imagined a more beautiful end to my life. Just think, we would no longer have to make allowances. A few square yards would suffice -- oh! I know you won't agree with me, but if only you loved me! And besides, it's kind of what is happening to us. Paris collapsed yesterday; we are very low, very low, where there is hardly any room. We have no food or water -- you who were afraid of prison! Before long it will be over: yes, we wish we had a weapon to use on the third or fourth day, but there you have it! And yet, think about it, what can't be accomplished by a union such as ours? You are mine for perhaps the first time. You will never leave again; no longer will you have the choice of making me miss you for a few hours, or even for a second. Don't bother, we're shut in on all sides, take my word for it.

    And to love each other as long as we can, because I, who accepted the augur of this formidable collapse, stopped wishing for it quite so much the first time I saw you. Our next-to-last candle is fading; we won't light the other until our lives are almost at an end. It will be better, believe me. Come closer, closer still. Is it you? How we desired this obliviousness to everything else! Do you remember? You no longer wanted to dance. You wanted me to fill the time you were kept from me by writing to you, isn't that so? Now we are delivered to ourselves for all eternity. Night is falling. What, are you crying? I'm afraid you don't really love me.

* * *

Ghost stories, tales of horror, terrifying dreams, prophecies, I leave you all. Rigid mathematicians, attracted by this blackboard (as I might have expected), have taken advantage of the woman's disappearance to pose the problem of my illusion:

A PROBLEM

"Given that the author of these pages, who is not quite twenty-nine years old, has, from the 7th to the 10th of January 1925 (the present date), contradicted himself a hundred times on a crucial point, namely, the value that should be granted to reality -- a value somewhere between o and [infinity] -- we can wonder how much more definite he will be eleven years and forty days from now. In case that reality is positive, say also for roughly how many persons he has written this, knowing that poets have one-third as many readers as philosophers, and philosophers two hundred times fewer readers than novelists."

* * *

Fine -- I can see they respect my doubt, that they treat my sensitivity with care. Still, what a horrible problem! Each day I live, each action I commit, each representation that occurs to me as if from nowhere, makes me feel like a fraud. By writing, I pass, like a smuggler at nightfall, all the instruments needed for the war I wage against myself. Just see how I want to place all my bets on the other side, and how my defeat is my own doing. Let's face it: whatever they might have written on the subject, two leaves from the same tree are rigorously alike; they're even the same leaf. I have only one word to say. If two drops of water can resemble each other so closely, it means there's only one drop of water. A thread that repeats and crosses over itself makes silk. The staircase I walk up never has more than one step. There is only one color: white. The vanished Great Wheel has only one spoke. From there to the first and only ray of sunlight is but a single step.

    Where does that will to reduction lead, that terror of what someone before me called the demon Plural? Many times people looking at photographs of me have taken it into their heads to tell me, "It's you," or, "It isn't you." (Then who could it be? Who could succeed me in the free exercise of my personality?) There are others who study my face, claiming to recognize me, to have seen me somewhere, especially in places I've never been -- which is much worse. I remember one sinister joker who, one evening near Châtelet, stopped the passers-by along the quay -- if they weren't alone he roughly took one of them aside -- and asked point-blank: "What is your name?" I suppose that almost everyone told him their names. He thanked them tersely and walked away. In the small group that my friends and I formed, I wasn't the one he chose. I admire the courage of that man, who could offer himself such a show for free, the way I admire the courage of a few other famous practical jokers, able to act without witnesses at the expense of one or several individuals. All the same, how alone one must feel! I'm also thinking of poetry, which is a practical joke of another kind, perhaps the most serious kind.

    These days it displays such particular demands. See the importance it attaches to the possible, and its love of the implausible. What is, what might be -- how insufficient it finds all that! Nature, it denies your reign; things, what could it care about your properties? It knows no rest so long as it has not run its negativistic hand over the entire universe. It's the eternal dare of Gérard de Nerval walking a lobster on a leash near the Palais-Royal. Poetic abuses are not nearly over. The Doe with bronze hooves and golden horns, which I carry wounded on my shoulders to Paris or Mycenae, transfigures the world as I pass. The changes occur so quickly that I hardly have time to notice. In 1918, on the ward in the Val-de-Grâce that they euphemistically called the "Quatrième Fiévreux" and that at the time was an entire poem in itself -- in that ward where I had been assigned to keep watch -- on some evenings I saw a middle-aged gentleman of modest appearance inside his padded cell, whose knife and laces they had taken the precaution of removing, whom they often forgot to feed, and who they frequently made sure had nothing on him but some ratty trousers, his hospital blouse, and the horrible blue coat with one red sleeve that constituted the uniform of the insane. Well, you won't believe me, but when we were alone that man, who had come to trust me, unfurled to my ever renewed surprise huge flags, including a German and a Russian flag, which he pulled from who knows where. One night he even sent two doves flying out before my eyes, and for our next meeting he promised me rabbits. I stopped seeing him around that time, and to this day I regret not having tried harder to find out who he was. I insist that this anecdote is strictly true, and I hope it doesn't make me appear too suggestible. I can't escape the thought that this bizarre magician, who hardly ever spoke, was suffering from something other than an incomprehensible lapse in surveillance.

Our own surveillance, as I've since noted, is no better. Poetically speaking, our senses, with the just barely acceptable nature of their data, are a reference that can't satisfy us. Render therefore unto Porphyry the things that are Porphyry's: "Do varieties and species exist in themselves or only in the mind? And in the first case, are they corporeal or incorporeal? In a word, do they exist apart from tangible things or are they to be confused with them?" The record has been set straight once and for all: "I clearly see the horse; but I do not see horseness."

    What remains are words, since the same dispute is still ongoing. Words are likely to group together by particular affinities, and as a result they constantly recreate the world on its old model. Everything happens as if a concrete reality existed outside of the individual -- what am I saying, as if this reality were immutable. On the level of pure and simple observation, if this is how we envision it, we need an absolute certainty to advance something new, something liable to clash with common sense. The famous E pur, si muove! , which Galileo muttered under his breath after recanting his doctrine, remains forever apropos. Does every man of today, eager to conform to the directions of his time, feel he could describe the latest biological discoveries, for example, or the theory of relativity?

    But I've already said that words, by the nature we grant them, deserve to play a far more decisive role. Nothing is gained by modifying them since, just as they are, they respond so promptly to our call. It's already enough for criticism to concern itself with the laws presiding over their assembly. Doesn't the mediocrity of our universe stem essentially from our powers of enunciation? Poetry, in its driest seasons, has often given us ample proof: what a riot of starry skies, precious stones, and dead leaves. Thank God, a slow but certain reaction against all this has started building in people's minds. Things said and repeated are now running up against a solid barrier. They are what bound us to that common universe. It is through them that we acquired our taste for money, our restrictive fears, our love of the "fatherland," our horror of our own destiny. I believe it isn't too late to reconsider that disappointment, inherent in the words that we have used so poorly up to now. What should prevent me from mixing up the order of words, and so from violating the merely apparent existence of things! Language can and must be severed from its bondage. No more descriptions from nature, no more studies of mores. Silence, so that I may pass where no one has ever passed, silence! -- After you, my beautiful language.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Break of Day by ANDRÉ BRETON. Copyright © 1970 by Editions Gallimard.
Translation copyright © 1999 Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.