In L'Art magique André Breton locates a strange precursor in the gnostic belief that the image of a god can be infused with such strength and vitality as to terrify its creator. From the Romantics to his own day the “sentiment of being moved, when it is not one of being played, by forces exceeding our own will not cease to make itself sharper, more invasive in poetry and in art: ‘It’s wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am being thought’ (Rimbaud). The entire field since then has been given over the question: 'What we create, is it ours?’” (1)
Magical art regenerates the magic that generated it. The through-line from gnostic theology to the surrealist image is a terrible autonomy. For automatist images like opium images are not evoked but come to the artist “spontaneously, despotically. They can’t be dismissed, since the will no longer has force and no longer governs the faculties.” (2)
The murmuring recorded by automatic writing need not be an externalized hallucination to lie beyond the writer’s control any more than opium visions need be externalized. And the murmur may be both an infinite source of pleasures and of torments. Breton hallucinated large cats prowling through Paris traffic after prolonged sessions of automatic writing. But he goes much farther: “All of these [images] seem to testify that the mind is ripe for something other than the benign joys it grants itself in general. It is the only means that it has to turn to its advantage the ideal quantity of events with which it is charged. These images give the mind the measure of its ordinary dissipation and the disadvantages which that offers.” (3)
A footnote citing Novalis’ formula hones his point: “There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.”
What is an Event? The Novalis quote appears again in Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze, whose interpretation teases out elements that occasionally parallel or contrast usefully with Breton’s thinking. Deleuze argues that where Novalis speaks of two series of events—the ideal and the real—the distinction instead lies between the event, which is ideal by nature, and the accident, the event’s actualization in a state of things. To clarify, Deleuze turns to Joë Bousquet. As Bousquet described in a Minotaure enquiry on the capital encounter of his life, in 1917 he’d shot and killed a French sergeant. A year later he was struck with an identical wound that left him a paraplegic. (4) During his years of association with the Surrealists, he came to an understanding of this horrific, doubled injury, seeing the events of his life as “in place” before he made them his own. He sought to make himself their equal in the sense that these events would only grasp the best, the perfect in him. In other words, he wished to be worthy of what occurred. “My wound existed before me, I was born to incarnate it.” This is not the same as resigning oneself. “If to will the event is first of all to release its eternal truth, like fire from its fuel, it is to will to attain that point where war is led against war, the wound traced alive like the scar of all wounds, death willingly turned against all deaths.” (5)
An Event is one with the mind sensing it—it is something new and singular that remains virtual, unknown until actualized by the mind. Events are in becoming; they are situations and their unique meaning combined. They aren’t to be confused either with Plato’s ideal forms or empirical experience.
For Deleuze, this means “willing not precisely what occurred, but something within what occurred, something to come conforming to what happened according to the laws of an obscure humorous conformity: the Event. (…) The brilliance, the splendor of the event is its meaning. The event is not what occurred (accident), it is the pure expressed within what occurred that signals to us and awaits us.” (6)
Events string together singularities that are opposed to the ordinary; they are moments of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anguish, but also nodes, inflection points, changes of state. These singularities are pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual, indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, or the particular and the general. (7) “I am being thought.”
Novalis’s quote appeared much earlier as an epigraph to Poe’s “The Mystery of the Marie Roget,” a story featuring his detective Dupin whose method (from “The Murders of the Rue Morgue”) neatly sums up the Event: “it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred,’ as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before.’” Dupin finds solutions by seeking out the peculiar in events, ignored or dismissed by the common sense attitudes of others, that lead him to the marvelous murderer of Rue Morgue (Poe, Surrealist in Adventure).
This is not far from Breton’s conclusions in his essay “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality” in which he compares poetic witness with that of an explorer, and suggests the construction of surrealist objects that like an explorer’s artifacts serve as evidence of their source, while at simultaenous throwing into discredit utilitarian objects that always produce the same results. Our tired commonplaces and worn-out metaphors are traps: “The mediocrity of our universe, does it not depend upon our power of enunciation?” Whereas Breton finds in the hallucinatory power of certain images and the gift of evocation possessed by some a demonstration that we have yet to read the first pages of Genesis. (8)
Bringing novelty into the world, grasping Events, changes the world. “The image alone, insofar as it is sudden and unseen, gives me the measure of the liberation possible and this liberation is so total it frightens me. By the force of images over time true revolutions might well be accomplished. In certain images there is already the beginnings of an earthquake.” (9)
So how to turn to advantage this ideal quantity of events we’re charged with? Deleuze speaks of becoming the actor of events, playing a complex theme (or meaning) with more than a touch of umour. This theme only retains from the event its contours or splendor to counter the dumb sequence of the everyday.
For Breton it begins with dreaming and automatic writing, writing that cultivates its unconscious sources and speaks like a seer about the situations of our dreams. The two are inseparable, like the meaning and its event. Not only does automatic writing employ and transfer images from dreams, but Sarane Alexandrian points out that Breton’s practice of recording dreams derived from automatic writing (10). This practice accustoms our memories to experiences other than the poor realities of our daytime lives, as Aragon noted in Wave of Dreams. Like Poe’s Dupin, we must attend to the peculiar.
This isn’t writing locked in the private world of the dreamer, far from it. Its complex theme, its meaning, is open to all who listen. It is the events of dreams rather than those of waking, the dream as continuously experienced in its peculiar organization night after night, by which we may find the path to the Great Mystery that will replace today’s pseudo-mysteries (11). In part this was through openness to the dream, the murmur, and chance, and to those events in which these capture one another as if in a blinding flash that illuminates fresh paths.
Maybe like Bousquet we should speak of being worthy of our dreams, worthy of their absurdity, their singularity, their novelty, their unsettling nature, their infinite details, their continuity, their depths…worthy of our being played.
—Paul McRandle
NOTES
(1) André Breton, Oeuvres Complètes (OC), IV: 76
(2) Breton quoting Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels in Manifeste, OC I: 337
(3) OC I: 339-340
(4) Georges Sebbag, Foucault Deleuze, Nouvelles Impressions du Surréalisme, 277-278
(5) Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (LS): 175
(6) LS: 175, my emphasis
(7) LS: 67
(8) OC II: 278
(9) “Le Maître de l'image,” on Saint-Pol-Roux, OCI: 901
(10) Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surréalisme et le rêve, 147
(11) OC I: 319
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