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PARTISAN REVIEW
our troubled days, either try to stain the purity of poetry or try to confuse
the issues in man's struggle for freedom by reilltroducing into esthetics
such malodorous terms as apocalyptic or mystic poetry." The statement,
in itself, is execrable, hut what concerns me at the moment is the fact that
Calas ends his Introduction with a
quotatio~
from St. John of the Cross,
"a great poet of darkness, of a darkness filled with the light of inspiration
only vast synthetic concepts of the world can shed." Shall we conclude
that Calas is entirely irresponsible? Of course. But the matter goes further.
This poet is a mystic to end all mystics; and when he tells us that "poetic
action has to he directed against all metaphysical conceptions of life," we
are doubtless expected to understand his hook-and Surrealism in general
-as one more ideology to end all the rest.
The advance-guard movement in France has frequently and curiously
combined a revolutionary spirit with certain millenia} or otherwordly
mystiques
(often centering about an inflation of the role of art itself). It
was a "social" period which saw the birth of the advance-guard, and there
were many artists on the barricades when Louis-Philippe lost his throne.
But the poets (see Flauhert) were "betrayed," and increasingly thereafter
they turned their insurgence to art-a world they could control-and to a
renewal of those analogical speculations which had worked through the
Romantic underground to Baudelaire, and which were found to he able,
as efficiently as opium, to induce chiliastic dreams in latter-day poets.
(Note the case of Rimhaud who sought
power
through
poe~ry.)
Now, as
we emerge from the "social" thirties, there has been a new birth of Sur·
realism with all its attendant revelations in New York. The apostles are
here, and it is pertinent to ask why. Simply to help us cross the
pons
asinorum
from the proletarian revolution to the unconscious one?
To what end have they handed together? "We liye in a scientific age,"
says Mr. Calas, "and only reactionary forces are ready to accept Wagner
and Claude} and to turn against science." Presumably it is the surrealist's
"monism" which makes him suppose that the "acceptance" of Wagner or
Claude} must imply a rejection of science. It was Dewey's "monumental
error" to consider art an experience, whereas every child in the
petite
c/w,pelle
knows that it is an "infernal machine." But just as this most
literary of characters professes the most complete disinterest in form
("what really counts is what has been said and not how it is said")--so
the super-scientist, intoxicated by theories that may not outlast the decade,
is profoundly opposed to that
metlwd
of problem-solving which is science's
humble and enduring contribution to our intellectual life. Witness his dis·
trust of psychoanalysis itself-when used as a medical technique rather
than a source of incantations. Witness such word-juggling as, "Experience
can never prove the error of a theory; only facts can he false, and experi·
ence may, when repeated in the same conditions, fail again, and it is for
others to discover the proper conditions in which an experiment may
succeed." Obviously, an experiment is defined by its conditions, which
depend in turn upon theory
(i.e:
upon what we are trying to prove) . This
