Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington

Abstract

This article explores the idea of experience in Surrealism through the writings of André Breton and Leonora Carrington. Breton's founding manifestoes of Surrealism and novel Nadja (1928) make the claim for a revolutionary experience of the everyday world. However, the feminine tropes he uses clearly valorize an experience based on masculine perception. Additionally, in the years leading up to and following World War II, Surrealism was decried for not engaging with history or politics. Carrington's narrative Down Below (1944) addresses both Breton's concept of experience and Surrealism's historical force by demonstrating a negotiation between Surrealist aesthetics and its nefarious gender politics; further, Carrington also relocates Surreal experience into corporeal and historical registers. By choosing Carrington for inclusion in his postwar Surrealist Anthologie de l'humour noir, Breton reveals the extent to which he addressed interwar Surrealist politics and tried to shape the future of Surrealism as a movement.

Acknowledgments

Erich Hertz is an assistant professor of English at Siena College, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary British and European literature and film. He has published and researched on Adorno, Benjamin, and contemporary music.

Notes

¹While there were many who attacked Surrealism during and after the war, the most prominent figure is Jean-Paul Sartre who claimed in Qu-est ce que c'est la littérature?: “Ils ont été les annonciateurs de la catastrophe au temps des vaches grasses; au temps des vaches maigres ils n'ont plus rien à dire (239). See Eburne 215–17. For an excellent assessment of Breton's wartime concerns, see Mahon 65–106.

²Much important work has already been done in this area: Susan Rubin Suleiman (Subversive Intent), Mary Ann Caws (“Seeing the Surrealist Woman”), Rudolf Kuenzli, Whitney Chadwick, Renée Rise Hubert, Katherine Conley, and Alice Gambrell. In regard to the body in Leonora Carrington's work, also see Madeleine Cottenet-Hage. However, what is at stake for Cottenet-Hage, as for Caws, is to see how certain Surrealist women reassembled the female body that was disassembled by various male Surrealists from Man Ray to Hans Bellmer. My task here is to illuminate the way that Carrington invents a Surrealist aesthetics that counters a version of Surrealism that merely reduces woman in her various tropes to an abstract category.

³See Richard Wolin, “Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism,” in which he traces Benjamin's intellectual development through Surrealism and Adorno's understanding of the movement.

⁴This missing aspect of mediation is precisely what Sartre found to be the fundamental problem of Surrealism after the war. See Bruce Baugh's excellent assessment of this contest between Sartre and the Surrealists, pp. 53–69.

⁵This maneuver is a complicated one. As Whitney Chadwick reveals in her very influential and groundbreaking study Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, many of the Surrealist women denied that what they were doing was a “feminine” version of Surrealism. Further, several of them believed that to treat them differently was to perpetuate the problem (7–12).

⁶In Subversive Intent, Suleiman thus claims that: “Down Below is a kind of Nadja, but told from the point of view of the madwoman, not the observer” (172).

⁷See Suleiman's discussion in the chapter “A Double Margin” in Subversive Intent, 11–32.

⁸After listing all of the male members in the Surrealist movement, Breton quips: “et des femmes ravissantes, ma foi” (27). Further, Breton emphasizes: “Puis l'essentiel n'est-il pas que nous soyons nos maîtres, et les maîtres des femmes, de l'amour, aussi?” (28).

⁹See Chadwick 11–12.

¹⁰The same is, of course, offered in the introduction to the other woman in the anthology, Gisèle Prassinos. Breton states: “Il sied encore de dresser sur l'horizon de l'humour noir ce que Dali a appelé le ‘monument impérial à la femme-enfant’” (399). Breton here goes on to wonder at her age (14 when they met) but not to marvel sincerely at such talent at such a young age; rather, he merely wants to offer an embodiment of the Surrealist trope of the “femme-enfant.” See Inez Hedges, “What Do Little Girls Dream of,” which details how Prassinos undercuts the role of the child-woman with which she was straddled.

¹¹Breton in Nadja critiques asylums in conjunction with prisons as perpetuating the very kind of people that they claim to be reforming (159–72).

¹²In regard to his refusal to check on Nadja, Breton states: “Le mépris qu'en général je porte à la psychiatrie, à ses pompes et à ses œuvres, est tel que je n'ai pas encore osé m'enquérir de ce qu'il était advenu de Nadja” (167). Here again, it is an idea that leads Breton to mishandle this situation.

¹³In the first “Manifeste du surréalisme,” Breton goes to great lengths to hold up Dostoevsky as the kind of writer he dislikes the most. He cites a paragraph from Crime and Punishment that is basically a description of a room, and he tells us that he refuses to go into such an overly described room (17–18).

¹⁴Alice Gambrell has done much to show how these minor changes of Carrington's “self-revision” alter the text. She also importantly highlights how David Hare and the other editors of VVV in New York were concerned with the future of Surrealism and were keen to showcase younger talent. I will focus on the first English edition of the text from 1944.

¹⁵See Suleiman's exploration of Ernst and Carrington's partnership in Risking Who One Is.

¹⁶See Eburne's chapter “Persecution Mania” in Surrealism and the Art of Crime, pp. 215–43.