BOOKS
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extent does it place obstacles in the way of the artist? Do the "great"
men anticipate the movement (Picasso, Chirico) and does the movement
function mainly as a critical one, that is, elucidates, makes coherent the
fragmented, instinctual findings, etc.? Does the remaining body tend to
become an academy? (Breton appears not a little concerned with this
possibility.)
"Greatnese does not show itself in pushing to any one extreme, but
in
straddling opposites and filling all the middle ground." We would not
always agree with Pascal's remark. We would need to know the historical
moment: the extreme polemic at a time of complacency, or extreme seep·
ticism at a time of credulity may very well become acts of greatness for
us. (At any rate, Baudelaire eludes the principle if Gide or Rouault do
not.) Nevertheless, Pascal's statement seems just with regard to Surreal–
ism as it shows itself through its magazine.
VVV
not only doesn't fill in the middle ground, it doesn't have any.
In this instance, the absence of middle ground tends to destroy even the
edges that it does have. It is a knife that cuts two ways into the magazine.
Naturally one doesn't expect to find an analysis of the economy of the
U.S.S.R. nor does one expect an analysis of the dynamics of British
policy, etc. But it is shocking not to detect the semblance of an article on
poetry, criticism, metaphysics, philosophy, literature; or any work that is
substantial, thorough, comprehensive, dedicated to some significant, con–
temporary problem. Nothing. It gives the magazine a floating quality
and a peculiar timelessness and spacelessness, without urgency or immi–
nence. To repeat, even the edges tend to disappear---+and this is the second
cutting. For what is in itself an interesting curio, a side-light, a corner–
piece (the one on Indian cosmetics, for example) is pushed out into the
middle of the floor.
It
has to do something
it
can't do and consequently
creates an atmosphere of depression. The magazine is composed of these
fine bits of odds and ends and, because it contains little of anything else,
they are forced out of their corners. My point is that these pieces would
he all right as relief, as complements, as accessories. But you can't make
a what-not shelf into a table. Marginalia is marginalia.
The gloom exists because these extremes are imposed on a world of
quite substantial distress.
It
appears cadaverlike in gay costume--but the
party is now a wake. The dancer performs as he always performed but
that is the trouble, and he himself,
if
he is clever, becomes aware of the
gloom.
This calls to mind a remark of Ramon Fernandez: "A belief is
bankrupt when the actions that it inspires are too flagrantly out of har–
mony with the actual situation..." Lionel Abel, in what is the key state–
ment of
VVV,
formulates it differently: "We believe that the only valid
criterion of the livingness of ideas is their capacity to inspire us to crea–
tion." It would seem to me that this criterion operates with terribleness
on the main body of work which follows his remarks.
