80
PARTISAN REVIEW
a book of poems which imitated the speech of "victims of mental
debility, acute mania, general paralysis, etc." They "hoped," in
their notes to these productions, "that attempts to simulate the
maladies for which one is usually confined, may one day replace
the ballad, the sonnet, the epic...." Breton wished his recitals of
dreams to be stenographic, and his approach to "madness, the dream,
the absurd, the incoherent, the hyperbolic and all that opposes the
summary appearance of the real" is one of "precise experiment."
The truth is, that in surrealism, the dream is treated in the most
primitive way: it is recounted or imitated; Surrealist poets have
gone into the subconscious as one would take a short trip into the
country, and have brought back some objects of grisly or erotic·
sadistic connotation, or a handful of unrelated images, in order to
prove their journey.
It
has not occurred to them that the journey
has been taken many times, that human imagination has, before
this, hung a golden bough before the entrance to hell, and has
described the profound changes the true journey brings about. It is
a journey not to be undertaken lightly, or described without ten–
.sion of any kind. And the
aller
et
retour,
if merely approximated,
produces approximate expression: the sulphurous, the sadistic, the
luxurious macabre, the Grand Guignol; or the childish, fatuous
game.
II.
"Give the initiative to words," said Mallarme, and if this
command is followed to its logical conclusion, the subject dis–
appears. It is (or has been) a surrealist pleasure to take the kernel
of meaning out of forms into which meaning is most closely com–
pressed. Here are three surrealist proverbs by Eluard and Peret:
Les
elc~phants
sont contagieux
Les cerises tomhent ou les textes manquent.
Les grands oiseaux font les petites persiennes
Or the definition. Here are two Eluard. "definitions":
Un homme vivant monte sur un cheval vivant rencontre
une femme vivante tenant en laisse un chien vivant.
Une robe noire ou une robe blanche? Des grands
souliers ou des petits?
If
the fortuitous brings in (by chance?) a semblance of wit
(as it does, certainly, in the above quotations), this wit must be
countered by the "fortuitous" poem dull as a flat joke:
