Cowl of Cavalier Perspective: Final Essays, 1952-1966 (2025) by André Breton, translated by Austin Carder (picture courtesy Metropolis Lights Books)
What does Surrealism, a serious artwork motion within the twentieth century, need to do with surrealism, a time period usually used to explain so many uncanny aspects of life within the twenty first? The phrase “surreal” was first utilized in 1917 to explain a ballet choreographed by Jean Cocteau and composed by Erik Satie, with Cubist costumes by Pablo Picasso. At the moment, it has been used to explain the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention heart and the Trump administration’s local weather coverage. Does the world right this moment merely resemble dreamlike visions by Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí? Or is the American thoughts reaching for a deeper affinity?
To reply this query, we should flip to André Breton, the architect and apostle of Surrealism. At simply 28 years previous, Breton established the motion in a 1924 manifesto, the place he outlined it as manifesting one’s unconscious “in the absence of any control exercised by reason.” His try to exert dictatorial powers over this motion could be his undoing, after a caustic Second Surrealist Manifesto in 1929 largely alienated him from his friends for suggesting that he may excommunicate them. However Breton continued to suppose, write, and talk about Surrealism till his demise at age 70.
In Cavalier Perspective: Final Essays 1952–1966, translated by Austin Carter, an elder Breton seems for the primary time in English — gentler, wiser, and way more adept at analyzing the ideological underpinnings of a motion that had ballooned into a global sensation. It’s in these late writings that his concepts concerning the surreal start to mingle with our personal.
Cowl of the Could 1954 version of Médium: Communication Surréaliste, which Breton contributed to (picture courtesy Metropolis Lights Books)
Whereas it’s now understood instinctively as shorthand for unreality, one of many ironies of Surrealism is that it has by no means neatly circumscribed a selected type or approach, the best way Fauvism or Impressionism as soon as did. In a 1952 essay titled “Link,” Breton explains that this was by design; Surrealism was by no means meant to easily outline an aesthetic. “When I began searching as early as 1936 for the emotional catalyst for Surrealism,” he wrote, “I discovered it right away in the anxiety inherent to a time when human brotherhood was collapsing more and more each day.” He was referring to the interval between World Wars, when the “rational” forces of business capitalism, fractious nationalism, and international imperialism continued unabated, with violence looming on the horizon once more.
Breton had spent World Struggle I in a neurological ward in Nantes, treating troopers affected by what we now perceive as PTSD. As poet Garrett Caples writes in his wonderful introduction to Cavalier Perspective, Breton “saw firsthand the effects of technologically advanced weaponry on the human psyche” and responded with a system of thought that was each mystical in energy and revolutionary in scope. By the Nineteen Fifties, Breton’s imaginative and prescient of a liberatory anti-rationalism had change into totally postcolonial. He hailed France’s Algerian Struggle as “an orgy of crime,” championed the work of Martinican author Aimé Césaire and Haitian poet Clément Magloire Saint-Aude, and helped foment a pupil revolution in Haiti.
In Cavalier Perspective, Breton explores this anti-rationalism as inherently accessible and corrosive to techniques of logic that demand conformity and deride creativity. His many quick essays of the interval championed astrology, Medieval alchemy, video games of automated phrase affiliation, and emotionally expressive artwork varieties dismissed by mainstream Western establishments as “primitive,” from Celtic poetry to African masks. I used to be notably struck by “The Language of Stones,” which means that sure polished rocks draw delicate seekers towards them and should even be imprinted with divine messages. At the moment, the idea reads like a startlingly acquainted concoction of new-age pure mysticism poisoned by a terminally on-line paranoia that “it’s all connected” — Make America Wholesome Once more, avant la lettre.
Nonetheless, Breton’s writing agitates for an openness to the world that counters what he referred to as “the significant emotional poverty that we suffer from today.” Breton recognized the illnesses as Enlightenment positivism and the modes of business civilization that adopted in its wake, which scale back individuals to small, interchangeable components in a logical, orderly world. Maybe what we now instinctively outline as “surreal” are the cases when the masks of that world falls away, revealing one thing far stranger, much less predictable, and extra protean beneath it — the identical forces of the unconscious that Breton wished us to harness.
Cavalier Perspective: Final Essays, 1952-1966 (2025) by André Breton, translated by Austin Carder, is printed by Metropolis Lights Books and obtainable on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
