23.01.1997

Revolt of the spirit

Phil Watson reviews 'Dada turns red: The politics of surrealism' by Helena Lewis (Edinburgh University Press 1990, pp229, £12.95)

Helena Lewis’s book is a well documented work which traces the evolution of the relations between the French surrealists and the communist movement in the inter-war period. In considering the surrealist movement from an overtly political perspective this book represents an important starting point for a re-evaluation of the surrealist contribution to Marxism.

As Lewis points out in the preface, surrealism and other avant-garde artistic movements need to be understood in the context of the phenomenon of aesthetic movements committing themselves en bloc to social change in the period during and after World War I. Surrealism emerged from Dada’s nihilistic subversion of western culture to represent this development at its most codified stage.

The movement gestated from 1920 onwards through the work of Breton, Aragon and Soupault in the pages of Littérature, culminating in 1924 with the First manifesto of surrealism. The group began to move quickly towards a neo-Freudian standpoint, which stressed the liberation of the mind and spirit:

“The surrealists were not interested in employing Freud’s methods as therapy; they had developed what they considered to be a revolutionary application of Freudian theory. They were interested in dreams and free association purely as a method of liberating man’s creativity. They wanted to teach man to rediscover his own unconscious and show him how to grasp the imaginative fantasies that lay hidden, even from himself” (p18).

Figures such as Breton were able to appreciate the potential of the irrational and the unconscious. Breton himself was apparently much taken with a vivid image of a man being sliced in half by a window after he began to drift off to sleep one evening (p19). The researches of the surrealists into automatic writing or ‘psychic automatism’ were accorded a similar significance, being seen as another route out of the prison of logical thought. This assault on traditional culture was also given a practical twist, as the surrealists sought to use ridicule and occasionally violence in their subversion of contemporary norms.

Lewis shows that it was the developing political consciousness of Breton and the surrealist opposition to the French colonial war against Moroccan independence (1925-26) that led the group away from the nihilistic clutches of anarchism and towards an espousal of revolutionary Marxism, a step that was to prove vital for its future coherence and purpose. This shift was reflected in the manifesto that the surrealists co-produced with the editors of the journal Clarté, entitled ‘Revolution first and forever’:

“We are the revolt of the spirit. We think of the bloody revolution as the inexorable vengeance of the mind humiliated by our works. We are not utopian; we can only conceive of this revolution in its social form” (pp34-35).

Breton saw the next logical step as allying the surrealists with the Communist Party of France (PCF) a development that proved to be highly problematic. Pierre Naville (later to become a leading figure among the French Trotskyists), who himself had formerly been a surrealist, attacked the group for their ‘metaphysical’ emphasis on the liberation of the mind and its unwillingness to sacrifice the independence of their group for effective class struggle activity. Internal surrealist critics of Breton, such as Edouard Kasyade, questioned the need to become involved in the PCF, arguing that “a debate concerning the mind cannot, by its very essence, be a part of an economic struggle” (p61).

These assorted schisms were allied to the hostile attitude that the PCF and L’Humanité consistently displayed toward the surrealists. In 1927, in an effort to convince the Party of their sincerity, Breton, Peret, Aragon, Eluard and Pierre Unik joined the PCF. This did nothing to allay the mistrust of the Party bureaucracy. Breton remembered being constantly hauled before the PCF’s control commission to explain various controversial activities, an experience which he likened to a “police interrogation” (p69).

By 1932, Aragon, Breton’s close friend and collaborator, had left the surrealists to become immersed in the PCF and the style of ‘proletarian literature’ which had been much touted at the second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers (1930). Aragon justified himself by stating that “apolitical workers are militant weapons for the preservation of the regime in power” (p116). Breton on the other hand rejected this narrow subordination of the artist to the overtly political, arguing that a revolutionary art could be both “subtle and indirect” (p117) and that workers should learn to disseminate the strengths and weaknesses of bourgeois heritage and not be confined to a specific art form such as ‘proletarian literature’.

Lewis sees the adoption of ‘socialist realism’ as the aesthetic standpoint of the Soviet Union and the Comintern in the mid-1930s as the final rupture in an already strained relationship. The break also has to be seen in the context of the surrealists’ revolutionary critique of the Franco-Soviet pact in May 1935 and the French communists’ subsequent drift into social-patriotism. Socialist realism represented nothing more than a crude means with which to anchor the cultural workers of the communist movement to Stalin’s police regime. An ideology that paid such scant regard to the freedom of artists only symbolised in graphic terms how far the paths of surrealism and the Comintern had diverged.

After their removal from the claustrophobic orthodoxy of the PCF, the surrealists moved toward a collaboration with Trotsky and the Fourth International. Although Trotsky was apparently sympathetic to surrealism (in particular the stand it had taken against socialist realism), Lewis states that Trotsky “had reservations about certain aspects of its philosophy. He was sceptical of the surrealists’ Freudian emphasis on dreams and the subconscious ...” (p145).

It was this consistent philosophical tension that underpinned the fractious relations between the surrealists and the communist movement. The fashion in which the author treats this debate is the most disappointing part of her work. Lewis seems content to map out the boundaries of this conflict, seemingly unable to offer the reader a solution to the question of whether surrealism was antithetical to the method of revolutionary Marxism.

Surrealism was consistently denounced by Comintern and PCF luminaries as “idealist” and of having a dualistic commitment to both the liberation of the mind and the proletarian revolution. This argument was decisively refuted by Breton in the Second manifesto of surrealism (1929):

“Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point in the mind where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the uncommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictory. Indeed, one would search in vain for a motive of surrealist activity other than the determination of this point” (p82).

In their own unique fashion, the surrealists were able to countenance the humanistic totality of a genuine revolutionary practice that theorists such as Karl Korsch had insisted upon in the 1920s.

It is no accident that the so-called ‘idealist’ conclusions of Korsch (and also those of Lukács in History and class consciousness) were persecuted in a similar manner to those of the surrealists inside the ranks of a Comintern which proved unable to grapple effectively with Lenin’s contradictory philosophical legacy. The bureaucratic mangle of Stalinism only intensified the drift of the communist movement (and the subsequent development of the multifarious Trotskyist grouplets) back to a set of crude ‘materialist’ dogmas. Helena Lewis’s fine work will hopefully prove to be useful ally in the efforts to rehabilitate the role of surrealism in Marxist theory and practice.

Phil Watson