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finding our way back, precisely, to the side of the light, and to
neglect the shadows. . . .
[Here he quoted Lautn!amont's
Poesies,
stating that the passage
applies perfectly to the surrealists:]
There are debased writers, dangerous jokers, two-bit fools,
solemn mystifiers, veritable lunatics, who deserve to be in an
asylum. Their cretin heads, which must have a hole in them
somewhere, dream up gigantic monsters which come down to
earth instead of drifting away ." Who has shouted loudest for
freedom of expression? Marinetti - and look where it has led
him: to Fascism. We have nothing to hide, and that is why we
welcome as a joyful expression the new slogan of Soviet
literature: Soviet realism. Culture is no longer something for just
a handful of people .
Aragon was a very valuable property. As time went on, he seemed to
be able to get away with anything.
The next pair of speakers had no use for socialist realism and
the party line. Breton loved to rumble his rhetoric. He was also hop–
ping mad as he wrote. One hopes Eluard read the text as if it were a
sermon. "Beware of the perils of too great faith!" Breton said of Com–
intern directives backing the Franco-Soviet pact. After an attack on
those who took Rimbaud's name in vain as a political rather than a
poetic revolutionary, he concludes:
We maintain that the activity of interpreting the world must go
on and remain linked to the activity of transforming the world....
The movement of authentic contemporary poets toward a poetry
of propaganda . . . signifies a negation of the very factors which
historically determine the nature of poetry. To defend culture
means above all to take in hand the cause of whatever stands up
under serious materialist analysis, of what is viable and will con–
tinue to bear fruit. Stereotype declarations against fascism and
war will not ever succeed in liberating the spirit from its
shackles, old and new.. . . "Transform the world," said Marx;
"Change life," said Rimbaud. Those two watchwords are one
and the same to us.
Allusions to Marx's
Theses on Feuerbach
formed one of the refrains of
the Congress; Breton made it clear that there should be no com–
promise with bourgeois values and that popular front politics meant
just that.
