Tightrope of Hope

Should​ we confine our use of the term ‘fascism’ to its time and place of emergence, the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, Germany and Spain, or extend it to recent manifestations in the United States, Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere? In the first instance we risk distancing ourselves from the problem; in the second we risk draining the term of analytical precision. A third approach – reconstructing the way opponents of fascism reacted to it at the moments of greatest danger – could illuminate its historical particulars while still pointing to connections in the present. Such at least is the wager of Surrealism and Anti-Fascism, a rich anthology of texts by Surrealists and fellow travellers in France and beyond, which doubles as the catalogue for the ambitious exhibition But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism, shown at the Lenbachhaus in Munich this past year. As the Surrealists and associates were inveterate makers of manifestos and signers of communiqués, there is no shortage of documents to sift through.

Born out of Dada, the Surrealists began life as anarchists. A group portrait from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open the Prisons, Disband the Army’, the early proclamations of the group in La Révolution surréaliste, its first magazine, were also anarchistic. ‘We do not accept that the free development of a delirium should be shackled,’ they declared in an open letter (in all likelihood prompted by Antonin Artaud) to the directors of mental institutions. ‘The asylum for the mentally ill, under cover of science and justice, is comparable to a barracks, a prison or a penal colony.’ Anti-militaristic, anti-disciplinary and anti-psychiatric, these tracts anticipate positions later taken by Foucault, Laing and Cooper, Deleuze and Guattari, and today’s prison abolition movement.

In his great essay on Surrealism from 1929 Walter Benjamin too underscored its anarchistic dimension. The Surrealists were ‘the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom’, he argued, and ‘to win the energies of intoxification for the revolution’. In relating the discoveries of Freud to the demands of Marx, they insisted that subjective transformation was part and parcel of political transformation. However, truly to bind ‘revolt to revolution’, Benjamin continued, the group had to weld ‘this experience of freedom’ to the ‘constructive, dictatorial side of revolution’ – that is, it had to come to terms with communist discipline. Here was the rub for the Surrealists, whose relationship to the Parti communiste français (PCF) was fraught from the start, philosophically as well as politically.

The ‘motivating force’ of the Surrealists, Breton wrote in his ‘Second Manifesto’, also from 1929, was to ‘find and fix’ the ‘point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’. To many supporters then and later, this goal was in keeping with the principles of dialectical materialism. But if that really was the case, the PCF demanded of Breton (who was summoned no fewer than five times before its control commission), why persist with this artistic business at all? The Surrealist commitment to psychoanalysis was another non-starter for the PCF; one official dismissed the Surrealists as gadflies who ‘study pederasty and dreams’. Soon any involvement in avant-garde practice became problematic as well: in 1934 Moscow ruled out all modernist art in favour of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935.

A chief attraction of the PCF was its anti-fascism, yet already in the early 1930s the Surrealists were able to forge other alliances on that front, first with the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists and then with the Union of Revolutionary Intellectuals; both groups anticipated the Popular Front of 1936. In the late 1930s the Surrealists agitated directly against French neutrality in the Spanish Civil War as well as opposing homegrown fascist movements like Action Française and Croix-de-Feu, which called for the deportation of all aliens. Their texts of protest didn’t hold back in their use of such labels as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’.

By this time, Breton was identifying as a Trotskyist, and in summer 1938 he travelled to Mexico City to meet with the great dissident communist. Both men stayed with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (quite the ménage), and there they collaborated on the influential manifesto ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’. In the wake of the decree about socialist realism as well as the Nazi condemnation of modernist art as ‘degenerate’, Breton and Trotsky insisted on the semi-autonomy of art. At the same time, they brooked neither ‘pure art’ nor ‘political indifference’ (pure art, they noted, ‘generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction’). While Stalin and Hitler wanted to remake artists into ‘domestic servants of the regime’, Breton and Trotsky held that ‘true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society,’ turning an apparent contradiction into an overly neat chiasmus: ‘The independence of art – for the revolution. The revolution – for the complete liberation of art.’ This was just what many artists and writers wanted to hear. Translated by Dwight Macdonald in Partisan Review, the manifesto helped to justify the displacement traced by Clement Greenberg in a sunny retrospect from 1957. ‘Some day,’ he wrote in the essay ‘The Late Thirties in New York’, ‘it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism”, which started out more or less as “Trotskyism”, turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.’ That heroic thing was Abstract Expressionism. So much for the caution about pure art and political indifference.

The Surrealists saw colonialism and imperialism as intrinsic to fascism, and from start to finish they campaigned against both, opposing the wars in Morocco in the 1920s and Algeria in the 1950s. ‘You are being sent to die in Morocco,’ they wrote in ‘To the Soldiers and Sailors’ (1925), ‘to allow the bankers to get their hands on the natural resources of the Republic of the Rif to line the pockets of a few capitalists.’ The group was also alert to the ways in which primitivist spectacle supported the imperialist project, condemning the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris (which put Senegalese men and women on display) as the ‘piracy’ of ‘vultures’. What was on sale at ‘the pavilions at Vincennes’, the Surrealists argued, was the ‘particularly repugnant idea of “Greater France”’, with which ‘the whole bourgeoisie’ was complicit, and they called on readers ‘to recognise colonial peoples as allies of the world proletariat’: ‘We use our surplus capital to send ships, shovels and pickaxes to Africa and Asia, thanks to which they are finally introduced to wage labour, something we are pleased to present as a gift to the natives.’ In a similar spirit they signed a tract in 1934 titled ‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, which pointed to the ideological cover that humanitarian gestures can provide for imperialist ventures, calling for a reframing of colonial war as ‘civil war’.

As a counter to the Colonial Exhibition, which attracted more than eight million visitors, the Surrealists participated in a little show called The Truth about the Colonies; only about four thousand people saw it. The show also pointed to a complicity of their own, since it drew on tribal pieces from the collections of both Breton and Éluard. More problematic still was the involvement of the ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris – members of the dissident Surrealist group around Georges Bataille that produced the journal Documents – in the Dakar-Djibouti mission of the early 1930s which, among other expropriations, helped to stock the future Musée de l’Homme with sub-Saharan artworks. Leiris produced L’Afrique fantôme (1934) from notes made on this trip, yet this sui generis text is more self-ethnography than anything else.

Despite such complications many colonial writers and artists embraced Surrealism, and in keeping with recent scholarship Surrealism and Anti-Fascism tracks their connections beyond the usual bounds of the movement. Martinican writers feature prominently. In 1932, while a student in Paris, René Ménil launched a journal called Légitime Défense dedicated to ‘the Caribbean question’. Reviling ‘the extermination of love’ and the ‘confinement’ of dreaming, ‘generally known under the name of Western civilisation’, Ménil called on ‘the children of the black bourgeoisie’ to become ‘traitors to this class’. Although it was banned after just one issue, fellow Martinicans Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, who were also in Paris in the 1930s, followed up with the journal L’Étudiant noir, in which they developed the philosophy of Négritude with the poet Léopold Senghor (later the first president of independent Senegal). Back in Martinique by 1941, the Césaires launched another magazine, Tropiques, which suggested that the cultural syncretism of the Caribbean was Surrealist avant la lettre. Aimé explored this notion in his poetry, as did the Cuban Chinese Wifredo Lam in his painting, both mixing European languages with local idioms. Lam arrived in Martinique in the spring of 1941 aboard the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with an extraordinary group of escapees from Vichy France including Breton, Victor Serge, Germaine Krull, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Anna Seghers, whose novel Transit (1944) narrated the deadly catch-22s of exit visas at that most precarious of times. ‘It was more like the departure of a convict ship,’ Lévi-Strauss recalled in Tristes Tropiques (1955), and some passengers were in fact interned in Fort-de-France. Breton was one of them, but this enforced layover gave him the opportunity to influence new friends like the Césaires and to be influenced by them.

Hardships notwithstanding, exile reanimated the movement. ‘Many have believed that Surrealism is dead,’ Suzanne Césaire wrote in ‘Surrealism and Us’ (1943). ‘Childish nonsense: its activity today extends to the entire world, and Surrealism remains livelier and bolder than ever.’ Not only did it preserve ‘the image of freedom’ during the ‘difficult years of Vichy domination’, but as the ‘tightrope of our hope’ it also pointed to a world beyond ‘the sordid … antinomies: Whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilised/savage’. In the meantime, Suzanne added, anticipating Frantz Fanon (yet another Martinican), ‘millions of Black hands … will spread terror everywhere.’ While Suzanne looked to a radical diaspora ‘in New York, in Brazil, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Cuba, in Canada, in Algiers’, Aimé underscored the colonialist blowback already visited on Europe. For this one-time teacher of Fanon and longtime mayor of Fort-de-France, the civilised/savage hierarchy was not transcended but inverted. ‘A poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery,’ he wrote in ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ (1950). ‘And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.’ Once reserved for Algeria, India and Africa, ‘colonialist procedures’ are now applied to ‘the white man’.

While the Surrealists’ involvement in psychoanalysis was derided by the Communist Party, for Pierre Yoyotte, another Martinican writer, it was key to the ‘anti-fascist significance’ of the movement. As early as 1934 he argued that communism had failed to exploit the ‘political importance of collective emotions’ as adroitly as fascism had: ‘The great discovery and the essential originality of fascism is its utilisation of the irrational as [an] autonomous … factor in the political domain.’ Fascism was an ‘emotional and ideational revolution’ that exploited the ‘psychological misery’ of the proletariat as much as its ‘economic poverty’. Surrealism spoke to this ‘misery of desire’ too, but in a way that opposed the fascist manipulation of ‘masochism and sublimation’. Such attention to collective emotions suggests that Yoyotte had read Freud, in particular Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921).

Certainly Bataille knew this text when he wrote ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ in 1933, soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor. Bataille saw socialism and fascism as enemy twins with a ‘common opposition to the general dissociation of homogeneous society’. Both, that is, opposed the thinning out of the social compact said to be caused by parliamentary democracy – a common critique at the time. Fascism, in Bataille’s analysis, responded to this ‘homogeneous’ loosening of societal ties with a ‘heterogeneous’ order of strict hierarchies held together by the emotional bond forged between the leader and the masses, as Freud had intimated in Group Psychology. The genius of fascism was its ‘timely recourse to reawakened affective forces’ that drew on the primordial ambivalence of the sacred realm, which was powered by poles of ‘attraction and repulsion’. In a group called the College of Sociology with collaborators including Leiris and Roger Caillois, Bataille went on to explore various brotherhoods and secret societies which, they thought, tapped into this sacred force. There were accusations that Bataille was more seduced by fascism than critical of it, accusations that resurfaced in the 1980s when interest in this complex thinker revived. In his defence, Bataille was also involved in the mid-1930s, with his bitter rival Breton no less, in an explicitly anti-fascist group called Contre-Attaque, which in one of its communiqués inveighed against the ‘heterogeneous’ trinity of French fascism: père, patrie, patron.

Despite these anti-fascist involvements, not many Surrealists were active in the Resistance. Éluard participated, as did the poet Robert Desnos, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died a year later at Theresienstadt. Another committed Surrealist was Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob), whose marvellous anti-memoir of texts and photomontages, Aveux non avenus, has appeared in a new English edition as Cancelled Confessions.* A lesbian, a Jew and a Trotskyist, Cahun couldn’t have been more vulnerable. She lived with her partner, Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe), on Jersey; the Channel Islands were the only British territory occupied by the German army. There, as a form of ‘militant Surrealist activity’, she wrote and distributed subversive notes, usually signed ‘the soldier without a name’ or simply ‘Heine’. ‘Fool!’ one of them admonished. ‘You are only commanded one small thing! That you should die so that the Führer may live a little longer!’

The more​ famous Surrealists, such as Breton and Ernst, left for the US and Mexico, which, again, had significant ramifications for young writers and artists in the Americas. However, when the Surrealists returned to a ravaged Europe after the war, they faced criticism from new artistic groups like CoBrA, and the indifference of new philosophical schools, notably Existentialism. They were dismissed by prominent intellectuals across the left – from Sartre, who was committed to political engagement, to Adorno, who insisted on aesthetic autonomy. Adorno was especially caustic. ‘Surrealist constructions are merely analogous to dreams, not more,’ he wrote in a critique from 1956 that was also a rebuttal to his long-dead interlocutor Benjamin; they express a subjectivity more ‘estranged’ than liberated ‘from the world’. As Adorno saw it, Surrealist art had also been compromised by postwar conditions: made of ‘world-rubble’, the montages of Surrealism created only ‘nature morte’; ‘After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force.’

Surrealism underwent a different sort of assimilation in the postwar United States; as early as the 1950s some of its subversive devices were turned into seductive gimmicks by Madison Avenue ad men and Hollywood movie directors. In the late 1960s, however, a group in Chicago arose to reclaim Surrealism from co-option. Led by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, the group pointed to the Surrealist dimension in folk, pop and Black forms of expression like the Watts Towers, Tex Avery cartoons and jazz. They also worked to realign the politics of Surrealism with the New Left, a move that prompted a letter from Herbert Marcuse on the ‘Surrealistic’ aspect of 1968. ‘“All power to the imagination” was a genuine Surrealistic call in the midst of the insurrection,’ he wrote to the Chicago group. ‘But the call was silenced in the confrontations with the political reality: the organisation of the labour movement, the armed forces of the government. In this confrontation, the Surrealistic appeal to spontaneity, to the unconscious, madness also comes to naught.’ The Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem presented a more scathing retrospect in A Cavalier History of Surrealism (1977). Although Situationist practices like dérives and détournements were Surrealist in inspiration, he disparaged Surrealism as a mere art movement ‘always doomed to be part of the game of old and new in the cultural sphere’. ‘Wandering between the devil of total freedom and the death of culture’, these old anti-fascists had failed to see that, in the society of spectacle, fascism operates primarily through the colonisation of everyday life.

More productive, certainly less fatalistic, were the postwar legatees of Surrealism who carried forward the anti-colonial project developed by Ménil, Yoyotte and the Césaires. ‘The revolts of the colonial world,’ the historian Robin D.G. Kelley has argued, ‘animated Surrealists as much as reading Freud or Marx.’ First among this number was Ted Joans, an African American artist who travelled widely in search of kindred spirits, expanding the Surrealist map of the world to feature Africa more prominently than before. Others deepened this connection, either by reading jazz as a Surrealist art (Kodwo Eshun) or by positing an Afro-Surreal aesthetic (D. Scot Miller) encompassing diverse artists and writers from Lam, Romare Bearden, Bob Kaufman, Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker. ‘Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past,’ Miller writes in his manifesto of 2009. ‘We revisit old ways with new eyes.’ Also in 2009 Robin Kelley edited, with Franklin Rosemont, a volume titled Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, which is an important precursor of the present anthology. Kelley is especially interested in juxtapositions of ‘Surrealist and Black conceptions of liberation’, as summed up in the thought-experiment ‘[Thelonious] Monk meets Lautréamont on the night train to freedom.’ Here the Surrealist trope of the chance encounter, in this case an imaginary one, points to new kinds of historical interpretation as well as artistic creation, along the lines of the ‘critical fabulation’ practised by the cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman and the notions of a ‘Black Bataille’ and ‘Black Dada’ proposed by the artists Aria Dean and Adam Pendleton respectively. The circle of ‘Surrealism and Us’, traced by Suzanne Césaire more than eighty years ago, continues to expand.