Antidote to Miserablism
THE MARVELOUS Basis of a Free Society
THE MARVELOUS Basis of a Free Society
by PIERRE MABILLE
Pierre Mabille (1904-1952) was a physician and one of surrealism 's outstanding theorists. Jn 1941 he introduced Andre Breton to voodoo ceremonies in Haiti
Society, which makes us what we are, crystallizes thick shells of understanding all around us. It engenders laws, organizations, prejudices, customs, learned arguments, textbooks, hierarchies and esthetic habits. It is like a cultivated, stratified crust which increasingly tends to separate the inner fire of our being from the surrounding universe. The human individual is fond of this comfortable cloak, and recognizes its value, but also knows that it is an obstacle to desire and is therefore sclerosis and death. It is the Marvelous, then, which offers possibilities of contact between all that one has within oneself, and all that lies outside.
The Marvelous expresses the need to exceed limits imposed by our very structure--our need for a greater beauty, increased strength, expanded pleasure, a longer lifespan. Extending beyond the limits of space and time, the Marvelous seeks to destroy barriers. It is the struggle of freedom itself against everything that holds it back or tries to destroy or weaken it. The Marvelous is tension-something rather different from routine, mechanical work: tension that is passional and poetic.
The Marvelous takes advantage of every weak spot in the structure of our understanding, just as volcanic fire seeps through faults in rock. It illuminates the attics of children; it is delirium's strange lucidity; it is the light of dreams, the green lightning of passion; it flashes over the masses in times of revolt. And it is also the conjunc tion of desire and external reality-the disturbing instant when we are in tune with Earth itself: when individual and planet agree.
Human society takes a dim view of such phenomena and states of mind. It locks up the "mad." It laughs at dreams and premonitions. It rules out of order everything that does not immediately find its rational explanation. It relegates the Marvelous to an elementary theatrical activity, or to allegory, or the "fantastic," or other cheap phantoms .
In my view, Andre Breton's definition remains best: "The imaginary is that which tends to become real . " For some of us, faith ful to the thought of Heraclitus, oneiric, imaginative, poetic activity is not just a gratuitous game, a vain adornment for idle dilletantes and esthetes-in the contrary, it corresponds to the dangerous zones in which energy is transmuted into tangible reality. We recognize the artist's message as a prophetic prefiguration, a step forward into the unknown.
The Marvelous is a force of renewal, common to all the world's people, of whatever culture or intellectual level. Beyond natural boundaries and special interests, the Marvelous enables us to foresee a deeper harmony, a true human solidarity which has its universal lan guage in poetry and authentic art.
The Marvelous is probably the only reality which sustains our hope in humankind and the future.
No longer is it a matter of the narrow roads where traditional beauty is offered in its clarity and obviousness to the admiration of the crowds. The crowds were taught the victory of intelligence over the world and the submission of the forces of nature to man.
Now it is a question of seizing and admiring a new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent, and which nevertheless, in the very spectacle of things ignored or silenced, opens unsuspected possibilities to the artist.
And this is the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness. . . . Here at last the world of nature and things makes direct contact with the human being who is again in the fullest sense spontaneous and natural. Here at last is the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered and recognized, the mystery now a friend and helpful.
“Domain of the Marvelous” appeared (untitled) as a letter in the “Surrealist Number” of View magazine (1941)
1943: Surrealism and Us
Many believe that surrealism is dead. Many have declared it so in writing. What childishness! Surrealism’s activity today extends throughout the entire world, and it remains livelier and bolder than ever. André Breton may regard the period between the two wars with pride, and he can affirm that an increasingly immense, indeed boundless, “beyond” has opened up to the mode of expression he created more than twenty years ago.
If the entire world is struck by the radiance of French poetry just as the most terrible disaster in French history crushes France, it is in part because André Breton’s powerful voice has not been silenced; it is also because everywhere — in New York, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Canada, and Algiers — other voices also resound: voices that would not be what they are (either in timbre or resonance) without surrealism. In reality, today as twenty years ago, surrealism can claim the glory of being at the extreme point of life’s super-taut bow.
Surrealism lives! And it is young, ardent, and revolutionary. In 1943 surrealism surely remains, as always, an activity whose aim is to explore and express systematically — and thus, neutralize — the forbidden zones of the human mind, an activity which desperately tries to give humankind the means of reducing the old antinomies, those “true alembics of suffering,” and the only force enabling us to recover “this unique, original faculty, traces of which are retained by the primitive and the child, and which lifts the curse of the insurmountable barrier between inner and outer worlds.”
But surrealism, further proving its vitality, has evolved — or, rather, blossomed. When Breton created surrealism, the most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and of so-called reason. But in 1943, when freedom herself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism, which has never for one instant ceased to remain in the service of the largest and most thoroughgoing human emancipation, can now be summed up completely in one single, magic word: freedom.
[…quotes from André Breton and brief commentary…]
And now let’s return to us.
We know how things stand, here in Martinique. Dizzyingly, the arrow of history points to our human task. A society corrupted by crime at its foundations, currently propped up by injustice and hypocrisy, and, in consequence of its unhappy consciousness, terrified of its own becoming: such a society must perish morally, historically, and necessarily. And from the powerful bombs and other weaponry of war the modern world has placed at our disposal, our boldness has chosen surrealism, which in our times offers the surest chance of success.
One result is already evident. Not for one instant during these hard years of Vichy domination has the image of freedom been completely obliterated here — and this we owe to surrealism. We are glad to have sustained this image in the face of those who believed they had rubbed it out forever. Blinded by their ignorance, they could not see freedom laughing insolently, aggressively across our pages. When they did realize it, they succumbed to cowardice, timidity, and shame.
Thus, far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals.
And I am also thinking of tomorrow.
Millions of black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes.
Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages — at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder’s blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions.
Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.
Suzanne Césaire
Translated from the French by Erin Gibson
“1943: Surrealism and Us” appeared (in full) in Tropiques no. 8-9 (1943)
Surrealism was the last great western art movement and the peak of high modernism, it has all been grifts and (((art investor))) fart sniffing ever since.