224
PARTISAN REVIEW
man, but
homo sapiens
has split himself into an infinite number of
specialists.
What a spectacle the world of today offers us with the welders
who can no longer use a screw-driver; the surgeons who, if they have
learnt to remove a tumour of the brain, hardly remember how to set
a fractured thigh-bone; the physicists whose absorption in the neutron
does not allow them to take any interest in thermodynamics, the
anthropologist for whom the study of a South Seas tribe is too exacting
for him to observe the rites of children playing in his street, the gene–
tician and the psychologist, pursuing, in opposite directions, one the
germ-cell
and the other the
libido,
who will never realize that per–
haps their ways will converge.
In
1939
I tried to give the alarm in a film called
Violon d'lngres.
I contrasted this increasing specialization with the disinterested
activ~
ities which still tend to fill the leisure of people gifted with enduring
youth.
·At the time the above lines were taking me to the core of this
problem, I received from New York one of Andre Breton's recent
texts in which appreciably parallel views are expressed:
'Not only have words fallen into crazy laxity, not only, as Rougemont
says, "Our language is out of gear," but what may be considered the
masterminds of our time are no longer expert except in
their own line:
they think nothing of negating themselves if one tries to take them out of
their own sphere. Notice that it was quite different in the so hastily
decried period of the Middle Ages. Today we are confronted at least
by
this double problem: the meaning of words to be recovered; I am not
mad enough to say universal knowledge, but at least the appetite for
universal knowledge to be rediscovered.'-ANDRE
BRETON--Situation du
Surlalisme entre les deux guerres-VVV,
Nos.
2-3.
One of the principal obstacles which seem to me to be in the
path of this rediscovery is the individualism which has taken possession
of minds most gifted in every sphere. This attitude can result
in
nothing but the slow wasting away of mind and knowledge. The
conception of genius and invention is more and more surrounded by
a superstition which demands their isolation, an isolation which be–
comes the condition and price of the glory attached to genius and
invention. The least little bungler, whether he uses brush, fountain–
pen or microscope, would think himself unworthy of the fame he
covets if he consented, to share in its pursuit.
The amount of reprobation earned by surrealism for such scan–
dalous customs as that of several people writing one poem, or of
failing to sign a composite drawing of tl1e 'cadavre exquis' sort, is
well known. The mere thought of a 'group' was enough to make all
the daubing and versifying guinea-fowls utter shrieks of horror.
