Communicating Vessels (French Modernist Library)

In this book Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, discusses his dreams and their relationship with the rest of his life. He also discusses art, literature and the Surrealist philosophy of life. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Surrealism.

For about a decade, the writings of André Breton (1896-1966) have become increasingly translated into English from the original French. It is clear his ideas hold relevance for a wide audience among English speakers of the 21st century. As with his view of dreams, Communicating Vessels (1932) is layered upon layers of interwoven levels of reality. Talk of dreams becomes descriptions of surrealistic paintings, which in turn transform into the revolution. Beginning his focus on the nature of dreams, he briefly treats continental dream analysts of the 19th and early 20th century, some of who are relatively obscure to us today. In this study, he inevitably speaks of the most influential of these thinkers, Freud, saying, while the doctor analyses the sexual symbols of numerous subjects in his The Interpretation of Dreams, he omits such details in the analysis of his own dreams. Breton sets about to correct this by example in Communicating Vessels.For his efforts, Breton drew the attention of Freud himself, whose letters to the author, Breton included in his appendix to Communicating Vessels. These letters are translated by Breton from German into French and we can only trust the reliability of his pen. While collegial in tone, Freud takes exception to a remark Breton makes concerning an alleged bibliographical omission in The Interpretation of Dreams, claiming the oversight was the fault of a later editor. While apparently unconcerned about the larger charge of intentionally omitting the content of his own dreams, Freud is clearly concerned about the bibliographical data. The following day, he writes to Breton again further clarifying the details of that problem.More interesting from the standpoint of the reader of Breton is Freud's comment in one letter, "Although I have received many testimonies of the interest that you and your friends show for my research, I am not able to clarify for myself what surrealism is and what it wants. Perhaps I am not destined to understand it, I who am so distant from art" (150). Breton's translators feel Freud's tone throughout is diminutive, beginning the correspondence, "Rest assured that I shall read carefully your little book" (149). If so, there may be a concealed massage in Freud's professed inability to understand surrealism. Freud may be saying: you artists claim to represent ideas from my work but 1) you do not; 2) my work is far superior to the frivolous concerns of artists; and 3) the positions of power are established in the fact that you know my works but I don't know yours. If, on the other hand, we take Freud's statement at face value, are we to believe he cannot understand the dreamlike confusion portrayed in such works as The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dali, a plate of which Breton includes in Communicating Vessels?To understand what surrealism is and what it wants beyond representing dream-thoughts, one needs only to read through Communicating Vessels. While Dali and others furnished the painting media for the movement, Breton took up the task of collecting and writing manifestos for that cause. For Breton in particular, surrealism wanted nothing short of realizing the social vision of the revolution; not simply an artistic revolution (if such can be imagined simple), but indeed The Revolution: the Marxist-Leninist final transformation of humankind into unalienated, or to mix the media, self-actualizing beings. Proof of this being Breton's goal abounds in this and other writings by him. In fact, in speaking of a dream he had in 1931, Breton explains that was a year in which he was loosing faith in the potential of surrealism to reach the Marxist-Leninist goal. From the standpoint of those interested in Breton's thought today, one might expect to find from a writer so intimately tied to the founding and growth of surrealism, Marxism-Leninism in the service of that movement, rather than the opposite, which is the case.Interwoven in and enriching the descriptions, commentary and analysis are artistic instances such as run-on sentences of dreamlike fluidity, nearly train-of-thought sequences Henry Miller would soon be proud to imitate. Likewise, a number of illustrations accompany the text. These are not merely to illustrate the events Breton recalls, such as a still shot of the vampire Nosferatu, who the author recalls appearing in a dream. Nosferatu appears in the picture with one hand raised on the right-side page, effectively pointing to the words on the left-side page - as translator Mary Ann Caws notes, pointing to the surreal, just as, circularly and dreamlike, the words point to him.Breton considers the extremes of various theories of his time: are dreams independent of awake reality or are their content completely tied to events; is logic void in the dream world; does space have meaning and is time relevant? Breton professes a fondness for nineteenth century German philosophers, citing Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and Freud. One wonders what he might have made of the inner-time analysis of his contemporary, principal founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859-1938).A fourth element (along with dreams, surrealism and the revolution), Breton calls love, is interwoven, becoming the focus of the middle of Communicating Vessels. This subject receives further elaboration and, in my view, better treatment in Mad Love, another work by Breton. In Communicating Vessels we come to realize the woman receiving Breton's complete devotion in Mad Love and elsewhere, may be most any woman. Near the beginning of Communicating Vessels, Breton marvels at an experiment by the dream analyst Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys. In the writing Dreams and the Way to Control Them: Practical Observations, Hervey tells of conjuring a vision of one of two women by having a certain song played while he sleeps. Each of these women is associated with a particular song, because Hervey has arranged, in wakening life, to dance with them only during the performance of the particular song he is trying to associate with each respectively. Breton, devoted as he was to the ideal of love existing between one woman and one man only, is astonished that the experiment would proceed with two. Herein lies the first glimpse of Breton's greatest prejudice: his fanatic (should I say 'religious' since Breton calls surrealism an 'anti-religious' movement?) belief that what he is convinced is right for him, which may well be true, is likewise and necessarily the universal truth, which it certainly is not.As Breton elaborates this view, we discover at the time of writing he is without a romantic partner and is in search of a suitable woman to fill this role. In his pursuits, which is precisely that to the point of stalking, Breton describes how one night strolling by a boulevard, he approached eight women he did not know, asking each for a date. Likewise, in a coffee shop, he ogles the legs of a woman, who is sitting with a man at another table. Breton decides the woman is much too beautiful for the less attractive man she is with and later tries to discover her name and address from anyone who might know. Meanwhile, he complains that his last girlfriend left him due to the unjust reasoning of social disparity, as explained, according to Breton, by Engels. While the entire book is riddled with small and large examples of interacting facts, events and seeming contradictions, Breton is so persistent in his pursuits of unknown women, the reader must conclude he is unaware of the consequence: that he wishes to impose the same injustice on the man, whose girlfriend he hopes to lure away; doing so both through judgment (by believing there is disparity) and through action (by matching her with a presumed social equal: himself).In the days to follow, Breton, having never spoken with the woman, looks for her in the coffee shop and on the street. He has composed a calling card to present to her if they should meet. The card says, "I no longer think of anything but you. I madly desire to know you. Might that man be your brother? If you are unmarried, I ask for your hand in marriage," and following his signature, "I beg you" (75).Breton accused Freud of not revealing the true content of his own dreams, Freud having a scholarly reputation to uphold. To the contrary, as a proponent of surrealism, Breton's reputation could only be enhanced by expounding upon the quirks and turns of his dreams. However, in his blatant objectification of women, having no concern with personality when desiring marriage based on appearance, is not only bourgeois (yes, I dare apply the term most repugnant to him), but bourgeois in the worst way: exploitative. Breton says he finds it in some ways lamentable that he can never live the structured life of the bourgeois family man, even while criticizing the hypocrisy of that arrangement vise vie Engel's The Origin of the Family. We must consider, from the point of view of the revolution, the way he pursues a relationship, and there are numerous example in the book, would be more vehemently condemned. Yet, without 'love,' Breton assures the reader, he would not be able to go on.The dreams and other events accounted in Communicating Vessels take place from 1931 to 1932. In these we find a multi-layed picture of Breton's life in Paris, his views on literature and art, and a variety of valuable insights into the day. Regardless of the value of his take on 'love,' interspersed are some of Breton's most lucid statements on surrealism to be found. He writes, "I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on" (86). Though writing his book from the vantage point of having seen the surrealist movement abandoned, Communicating Vessels is a vivid instance of just such a conduction wire.