Breton versus Breton : le refus d’être soi

Résumé

We know of the exclusives launched by Breton against Bataille, Aragon or Éluard, and, to a lesser extent, Masson or Artaud - a renunciation which tended to identify these artists with rebels of surrealism, located on the margins and followers of a critical position eccentric in relation to surrealist orthodoxy. Less well known, perhaps, is Breton’s use of the spirit of revolt directed against oneself. The designation of rebels is also a way for him to question the advances, limits, and dead ends of surrealist action. Breton is always suspected of «somme useful and secret intelligence with the enemy», as Gracq points out in En lisant, en écrivant. Gracq’s sentiment seems all the more wellfounded since Breton, hostile to the novelistic genre, deemed false since Lautréamont, recognizes certain exceptions such as the novels of Gracq himself. It is these exceptions to an orthodoxy that deserve to be questioned, insofar as they suggest that surrealism knew how to take advantage of its internal contradictions, not by resolving them, but by cultivating them in their ambiguous singularity.