I know that many of you are approaching a turning point in your lives, that you see drawing near the day when society will demand from you an effort of a completely different kind than that to which you have been accustomed. For you, the wide vistas of study will suddenly narrow; the peaks of consciousness glimpsed through the act of learning will be brought low; and the pleasures promised by civilization will, without warning, reveal their harshest reverse. Life, no longer as it might be expected upon leaving school—radiant, brimming with opportunity—but life condemned, from one day to the next, to be risked, to be contested inch by inch on the physical plane, at the expense of everything that gives it individual worth. Life not only threatened, but first dissolved into anonymity, abstracting in each of you what is most unique, in order to conceive itself merely as an infinitesimal, more or less negligible part of a whole—a whole which, for ideological reasons, or reasons presented as such, must now prevail over another. We all know that human greatness comes at the price of such renunciations, and it is philosophically well established that human misery is measured in the same scale as that greatness. Yet, I cannot help but feel a certain anxiety in addressing you: it is as though I feel very poor, as though what the world is asking of you far exceeds what I am able to give you. From where I stand, I can only view you structurally, unable to distinguish your individual selves clearly. I feel bold in facing the collective mass of thoughts you represent, all ready to disperse and run toward your destinies. Under these circumstances, I am careful not to forget that I am speaking to a magnetized mass, and that in the glow of these eyes—eyes that to me appear as one single light—are already forming some of the acts of self-sacrifice, perhaps even heroism, upon which the world to come will in part depend for what it will be. May it be a better one! In any case, so that the sacrifice it asks of you does not become even more burdensome, the best course is to accept its omen.

Why should I feel poor? Because the quarter-century that separates us, filled with what it was, grants my generation no authority whatsoever over yours. What have you inherited from those old enough to be your fathers? Their ever-smart uniforms, some hideously cruel duties, and a horizon that becomes more elusive by the day—enough to furnish rather convincing arguments in favor of the Oedipus complex. The smallest trace of wisdom that might be considered the privilege of age has been conspicuously absent from their knapsack, for all they know how to pass down to you is the burden slung across their backs. Their advice can only be meager and devoid of any true value. I have not forgotten the state of mind of the young soldiers in the last war. How they cursed the old men! And not nearly enough—far too little, in fact—since they allowed them to remain in power until the moment they all found release in the figure of Pétain of Rethondes and beyond, of whom the great writer Georges Bernanos once said he was 'the spittle of the dead of Verdun.' No, neither old age nor even pontificating maturity can claim any rights over you: I would gladly go so far as to say that it is you who must keep them in check, who must call them to decency whenever they presume to illuminate your path. And how could you not feel the greatest distrust toward them?

Not for a single moment, believe me, do I lose sight of the fact that there is HITLER and, through him, the most unpardonable racial persecutions, the resurgence of certain myths—seemingly of Germanic origin—that are wholly incompatible with the harmonious development of humanity; that there is MUSSOLINI and, with Italian fascism, a hideous itch that can only be remedied by a wire brush; that there is the Mikado, reportedly propped up by a deranged clique to whom warfare appears as both a religious necessity and an end in itself. Their will to global domination—and the servitude that would result from their military victory—must, without question, rally us against them and make us accept, in all its severity, the law of the jungle. Yet, these three heads of the Beast, however well they may serve the naïve imagery that propaganda demands, must not so mesmerize us that we come to believe that by slaying them we will have slain all evil. The evil they generate must be understood as also having generated them. To regard them solely as the causes of that evil exposes us to the most dramatic disappointments if we fail to see them simultaneously as its products. The monstrous agitation over which they preside—though the immediate urgency is to suppress it—will only be prevented from rising again if we recognize its epiphenomenal character, and react against that which made it possible. (Pathology teaches us that in the presence of illness, it is not enough to combat a symptom, to prescribe quinine for a fever.) It is vain for men to hope to cure their erroneous conceptions with shells and incendiary bombs. Even in this domain—their tendency to divide into camps and destroy one another—true healing can only come from identifying the virus and implementing prophylactic measures on a global scale. The constraints of my situation as a refugee in the United States do not permit me to be more explicit on this point.

Gentlemen, this digression was imposed upon me by the need to show you how I perceive the current war and, more broadly, how it is perceived from the surrealist point of view. To the extent that this war will demand your participation in the very near future, I believe this is the very heart of your questioning. My experience—not only of this war but of the previous one—has taught me that, given the simultaneously appalling and exhilarating nature of such adventures, very few thoughts manage to rise above them, and fewer still find in them an opportunity to be reforged. Either these thoughts retreat—or worse still—they sink entirely into a short-term conformism, the very same that journalistic literature tends to propagate. I say that if a line of thought today sets out to account for its own prior movement, integrity demands that it begin by demonstrating that, when applied to the critical pressure points, it still functions on its own terms and has not fallen prey to contagion.

I have chosen this afternoon to speak to you about the situation of surrealism between the two wars—that is, necessarily in relation to them. Surrealism is, in fact, the only organized intellectual movement that managed to bridge the gap separating the two. It began in 1919 with the publication in the journal Littérature of the first chapters of The Magnetic Fields, a work written in collaboration by Philippe Soupault and myself, in which automatism as a method openly gave itself free rein for the first time. It culminated, twenty years later on the literary plane, in the appearance of The Castle of Argol by Julien Gracq, where—perhaps for the first time—surrealism turned freely back upon itself to confront the great sensory experiences of the past, and to assess, from both the emotional and lucid points of view, the scope of its conquests. On another level, it culminated in the uncontested worldwide triumph of the art of imagination and creation over the art of imitation—a triumph sealed by the unprecedented brilliance of the last international surrealist exhibition in Paris. I know that, even in recent months, you may have heard at Yale that surrealism is dead. While I was still in France, I had promised myself that one day I would publicly display the press clippings I had collected over the years bearing the same refrain: 'Surrealism is dead.' It would have been amusing to show that these declarations appeared almost monthly since the very founding of the movement! Criticism—the kind found in serious journals and books—has more than made up for these maniacal predictions. I mention this only to guard you against a resurgence of such claims in the climate of a war where it is always difficult to know who is truly alive and who is dead. Much to the dismay of some impatient gravediggers, I claim to know more than they do about what would actually signify the final hour of surrealism: it would be the birth of a more emancipatory movement. Such a movement—by the very dynamic force that we continue to place above all else—my closest friends and I would take pride in joining immediately. We must believe that such a new movement has not yet been, is not yet. Historically, surrealism can rightfully claim the unique place it has held at the avant-garde between the two wars. Over the emotional current connecting them, nothing can prevent surrealism from forming a bridge—from the beat distance of one to the blind and anguished approach of the other. Nothing can prevent surrealism from representing, at the very least in what it offered during those twenty years of most acute experience, the balance's decisive weight.

Still confined for now within these limits, covering the entire effective zone that stretches between the two explosions, surrealism traces a path that leads from the psychological and moral repercussions of the first catastrophe to the rapid apprehension of the second. In the meantime, life has nevertheless resumed all its rights, and it is this contradiction that surrealism has had to confront in order to propose a rapid readjustment of values.

Today, now that the storm is once again fully unleashed, it is, alas, easier to understand the necessity of this readjustment. Once again, positivist realism—which resurfaces yawning above the waters during times of flat calm—finds itself proven powerless and must flee, struck with ridicule. So-called 'common sense', which prides itself on never having learned anything, is kindly asked to come back at the end of the month with its bill. What! Humanity tears itself apart more savagely than in the early centuries, two successive generations see the sun of twenty years rise only to be flung onto the battlefield—and we are expected to believe that this humanity knows how to govern itself, and that it is sacrilegious to question the principles on which its psychic structure is founded! But what is this so-called 'reason', I ask you—what is this narrow reason that is taught, if this reason, from life to life, must give way to the unreason of war? For this to be the case, must it not be that this supposed reason is a delusion? Must it not be that it usurps the rights of a true and uninterrupted reason—one which we must at all costs substitute in its place, and towards which, as a first step, we can only move by wiping the slate clean of all conventional modes of thought?

If I told you that in front of you I felt poor, it was less in my own particular name than in the name of the men of my generation. From the very moment the surrealist attitude became clear, it was to exalt youth, to urge it not to let itself be too quickly dispossessed of its treasures, to command it to rely only on itself. The waves of youth today surge not over the shadows of the palm trees of Guadalcanal, nor over the ruins of Stalingrad or the sands of Libya. They possess an intrinsic virtue: to cover over the insufficient states of consciousness that gave rise to their return in a delirium of iron and fire. These too embryonic states of consciousness will be swept away. Already the future belongs solely to this youth and to it alone. Surrealism, I repeat, was born from an unbounded affirmation of faith in the genius of youth. On this point, one must admit it has never denied itself, since it has never ceased to proclaim an unparalleled radiance, a sense, one might say, of revelation — with all that this word necessarily implies — in the message of a LAUTRÉAMONT, who died at twenty-four, of a RIMBAUD, who at eighteen completed his work, of a CHIRICO for whom the doors of a world opened at twenty-three and closed at twenty-eight. This gallery could be extended to SAINT-JUST, guillotined at twenty-seven, to NOVALIS, who died at thirty, to SEURAT, who died at thirty-two, to JARRY who, at fifteen, wrote the great prophetic and vengeful play of modern times: Ubu Roi. Will this not ultimately furnish youth with all its letters of credence? Will this, along with the overflowing tribute of blood that the world periodically demands from it, not finally grant youth a preponderant voice in the matter? Will it endure that the bold solutions that would be its own to remedy such grievous defects in organization and thought be once again dismissed as childishness and postponed? This is roughly the content of the interrogation and, if localized as it may be, of the surrealist summons at the end of the 1914–1918 war. This interrogation, this summons, I very much doubt that, at the end of the present war, they will not reappear with an altogether greater scope.

At the time, the focus was much less on ideological conflict than it is today. Fascism had not yet been formulated, and theoretically, the only opposing views of the world were frustrated ones, poorly disguising a growing conflict of interests between European nations, sharpened by endless quarrels and neighborly grudges. Yet I seem to remember that despair was very great: for a long time, the fate of arms had been most uncertain. Those who returned, a little haggard and still angry to see themselves so sparse, after a suspicious look around them decided to turn the page. In so doing, they would confidently return to the same book that had reserved the same terrible alarms for them and their sons. I'm not afraid to say that Surrealism attacked the meaning of the book itself, that it was not afraid to revoke its premises, that it boldly set out to rewrite it.

A lot of intelligent people had faltered, had let themselves be drawn back into a bellicose overbidding that sounded false and that the combatants didn't forgive them for.

In France, this was the case with BERGSON, BARRES, CLAUDEL. Some, like GIDE, had fallen silent, and they were not too badly blamed for it. Others, few in number, had continued their work, carefully keeping it separate from what had just occurred—this was especially true of the painters MATISSE and PICASSO, who were largely excused. VALÉRY confined himself to poetic exercises of a strongly non-current character, and PROUST to studies of social milieus which the events seemed not even to have touched; paradoxically, they would soon be rewarded with the highest honors. Already a focus of admiration among some young people, the greatest poet of this century, Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, had just died from wounds sustained on the very day of the armistice. He had insisted on paying with his person, yet insofar as he had taken it upon himself to “sing the war,” one had to admit that often his great means had betrayed him. Nevertheless, I still see as if it were yesterday this uniquely singular man, whom I personally witnessed embodying, to the highest degree, the spirit of intellectual adventure. Enormous, tightly bound in a pale blue sub-lieutenant’s uniform, disdainful of sidewalks—the taxis were still at the front—he advanced somewhat like a balloon from his home to the Café de Flore on the pavement of Boulevard Saint-Germain. Up close, the eye both mocking and so anxious, topped by the leather disc covering the trepanation scar—this disc and this wound which CHIRICO distinctly traced in the portrait he made of APOLLINAIRE in 1915, that is, by a pure act of divination two years before the injury. APOLLINAIRE: if I linger on him, it is because he came much closer than anyone else to thinking that, to improve the world, it was not enough simply to restore it on fairer social foundations, but that one had to also touch the essence of Being. This is at least the manifest meaning of his great poem La Victoire, one of the last in his oeuvre and among the most hermetic in detail, which can be regarded as his spiritual testament.

O mouths, man is in search of a new language,
To which no grammarian of any tongue will have a say.
The word is sudden, and it is a God who trembles.

Literally taken, it is quite clear from a distance that writing and the various other forms of automatic expression established by Surrealism have only responded to Apollinaire’s call by providing every person with the means to awaken at will the god within whom they speak. However, in spirit, I believe what he demands goes even further. Valéry, in a novella of about twenty pages, La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste, written at the age of twenty-five and which towers above the rest of his work, seems to have anticipated and invoked something similar when he says, with great deference, of his character: “Sometimes, his (the character’s) words lost all meaning; they seemed to fill only an empty space when the intended term was still doubtful or unforeseen by language. I heard him designate a material object by a group of abstract words and proper names.” What is awaited and pressed for by two such different minds deserves more than ever our attention at the moment when, probing the abyss that daily news digs before us, Denis de Rougemont writes with full objectivity: “Should we think that people kill each other over misunderstandings? Or that words no longer mean anything… The more one talks, the less people understand each other. Death alone settles everyone’s accounts. The twentieth century will appear in the future as a kind of verbal nightmare, a delirious cacophony. People spoke more than they ever had before—imagine those radio stations that can no longer keep silent day or night, where speech is delivered at so many words per second, regardless of listeners or whether there was anything to say. A time when words flowed faster than in any century of history, the age of the great prostitution of this speech that was supposed to be the measure of truth, and of which the Gospel says, in its source, it is ‘the life and the light of men!’ Alas, what have we done with speech?” Without prejudice to the other necessary changes, we must return to this source. The call to undirected thought places us in possession of the key to the first chamber. To enter the second, nothing less than restoring to man the feeling of his absolute dependence on the community of all men is required. But some have fallen so low that one will not avoid resorting to energetic remedies.

It is not impossible, moreover, that individual help may present itself in the great distress of today. This help, no doubt, whoever might be called upon to bring it would have difficulty being recognized—but there is no reason to despair of its coming. Around the same time when I could see Apollinaire leading behind him the beasts of Orpheus wandering down Boulevard Saint-Germain, I discovered that someone had just single-handedly pierced the night of ideas in the domain where it was thickest; I speak of Sigmund Freud. Despite some minor reservations warranted by the vastness of his work—which is the least price a man can pay for fallibility—could anyone have concentrated more fresh, striking, essential truth in the scope of a thought, of a life? Tell me if the hardest shell, that of prejudices, taboos, and age-old concealments, did not crack as soon as that finger of light pointed at it; if from this shell speech did not gush out clear, better yet, pure—at least until others, capturing it for strictly utilitarian ends, began to muddle it. And yet, from the dawn of this century—The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900—until the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, were there many communications of extreme importance so persistently misunderstood, irreplaceable lives so long paid in ingratitude before ending in persecution? I was twenty when, during leave in Paris, I tried successively to explain to Apollinaire, to Valéry, to Gide what, through Freud—whose name was then known in France only by a few psychiatrists—had appeared to me as a force to utterly overturn the mental world. I was then very prone to enthusiasm and also extremely anxious to share my convictions with those I cared about—the rumor goes that I am not entirely cured of this flaw—and I remember that I offered each of my victims the bait to which they seemed least able to resist: to Apollinaire, “pansexualism,” to Valéry the key to slips of the tongue, to Gide the Oedipus complex. Yet, despite my efforts, from all three I succeeded only in provoking smiles mixed with friendly commiseration and pats on the shoulder. Here, indeed, we discover under another angle the whole of the Babel syndrome: not only have words become wildly lax, not only—as Rougemont also said—“our language is disengaged,” but even the intelligences which in our time could be considered masters are experts only in their own fields; they do not hesitate to deny themselves as soon as one attempts to take them beyond their sphere. Notice how very different it was during the much-maligned Middle Ages. Today, we face at least this double problem: the meaning of words to recover—I am not mad enough to claim universal knowledge, but certainly the appetite for rediscovering universal knowledge.

It's a question of making human exchanges fruitful again, of making them desirable again, exchanges that today absorb and deny themselves in the sole exchange of machine-gun fire. This will be possible provided we fight against the endless depreciation of language as a true currency, and oppose the development of this malignant tumor, the division of the world into castes of increasingly narrowly specialized individuals. It's a question of watching, without ever tiring, for anything that has a chance of re-establishing - as art and psychology have already done - the most general, unbiased contact between beings. This something will be. All that's needed for its realization, other than the right economic conditions - but this may change - is a spectacular discovery, which certain forerunners, generally unmistakable, have already suggested will occur in physics.

In 1924, at the beginning of the first MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM, I wrote: “The single word liberty is all that still exalts me. This exaltation has remained with me, Liberté: whatever gross misuse has been tried of it, this word is in no way corrupted. It's the only word that would burn the tongue of GOEBBELS, and it's the one that commands the inscription that his accomplice PÉTAIN couldn't bear on the pediment of public monuments. Liberté is at once the oldest, the most apres, the most exciting of theologians' disputes, and at once some of the most weighty phrases I know, those that carry so much more than their words, take possession of my memory. I hear SAINT-JUST's voice thundering: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” I see the bent brows of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century gathering from the depths of the crucible this certainty that looks like nothing and is everything: “Freedom is necessity realized.” What's hissing now like a challenge, cui, is still this brief notation by APOLLINAIRE: “Le marquis de SADE, cet esprit le plus libre qui ait encore existé.” And I saw rising, inexorable, from the rubble under which some had sworn to suffocate it, the conscience of the vintner, where freedom today holds the place of the finest woman's handkerchief in a massive fist, this one black and tense.

From one war to the next, it can be said that the passionate quest for freedom has been the constant driving force behind Surrealist action. To those who periodically ask why such splits have occurred within the Surrealist movement, why such abrupt exclusions have been pronounced, I think I can answer in all conscience that, along the way, those who, in some more or less obvious respect, have deserved freedom have been eliminated. In Surrealism, freedom was revered in its purest form, that is to say, advocated in all its forms. In my opinion, it was a demerit, for example, to return, as some of the early Surrealists did, to fixed forms in poetry, when it has been demonstrated, particularly in the French language - and the exceptional influence of French poetry since the Romantic period allows us to generalize this view - that the quality of lyrical expression has benefited from nothing so much as the desire to break free from outdated rules: RIMBAUD, LAUTRÉAMONT, the MAL-LARME of “Coup de dés”, the most important symbolists (MAETERLINCK, SAINT-POL-ROUX), L'APOLLINAIRE of “poèmes-conversations”. At the same time, the same would be true of painting: in place of the above names, we could simply add those of VAN GOGH, SEURAT, ROUSSEAU, MATISSE, PICASSO and DUCHAMP.

It's also a sign that you've once and for all forfeited your freedom to express yourself personally, and thus always dangerously outside the strict frameworks to which a party wants to bind you, even if that party is the party of freedom (loss of the feeling of uniqueness). It's the same thing with believing that you'll always be so much your own person that you can commit yourself with impunity to anyone (loss of the feeling of dependence): freedom is both wildly desirable and fragile, which gives it the right to be jalcuso. To find oneself in disgrace with it, there's no need to have come, like CHIRICO fifteen years ago, to underline the misery of one of his canvases with a fascist title like “Légionnaires remains regardant les pays conquis” or to have come, more recently, like AVIDA DOLLARS, to sweat obsequious academicism over the portrait of the Spanish ambassador, that is to say, FRANCO's representative, to whom the portrait's author owes the oppression of his country, not to mention the death of his best friend from youth, the great poet GARCIA LORCA, - FRANCO, whose terms with life, spirit and freedom are well known.

I insist on the fact that surrealism can only be understood historically in terms of the war, by which I mean from 1919 to 1939, in terms of both the war from which it started and the war to which it returned. Admittedly, this time was measured in France by unbounded unconsciousness and short-sightedness, but it is indisputable that it rolled on the marbles of the worst complacency and laziness. I'm thinking of the almost totality of successive governments, made up of unchangeable, velvety personalities who have long since given their mediocre measure, and who disbelievingly prolong the life of parties in which, for cos twenty years, any new blood has proved incapable of circulating.

If these men understood nothing, anticipated nothing—neither they nor the majority who kept them in power—I believe I can maintain that, at the forefront of disinterested intellectual speculation, particularly within Surrealism, there was no participation in their blindness; no trust was placed in them, neither to avert a new cataclysm nor to maintain the foundations of republican institutions in depth. Does this mean that the Surrealists had a clear intuition of this new slide toward the abyss? Better yet, that they were able to say roughly when the inevitable chasm would open? I offer but one convincing proof: this sentence from the 1925 “Letter to the Seers,” found in the 1929 reissue of the Manifesto of Surrealism: “There are those who claim that the war taught them something; they are nonetheless less advanced than I, who know what 1939 has in store for me.” If, fourteen years in advance, the coming of the war is rigorously prophesied in this phrase, it follows that Surrealism’s theses present in relation to this same war both a “this side” and an “other side.” The “this side” lies in the affirmation of a nonconformist will in every respect, intended to desperately shake the general inertia, and which does not come without a certain frenzy. This, without doubt, is the expression of a return to an age of clemency and free meditation on the ends of human life. Man senses that the society he has built is setting a new trap for him at a close distance, that the goods it offers him are of an ephemeral nature, that even the ethics it imposes on him are deceptive insofar as they are called upon to make way for a very different scale of values, as soon as the relentless perfection and accumulation to its peak of engines of death demand it.

What, in Surrealism’s theses, may lie beyond this war is more for you than for me, Gentlemen, to decide. It would have seemed pedantic to me, especially under the current circumstances and even more so as you approach such a turning point in your lives, to impose upon you a didactic lecture. I know that you have not lacked the most authoritative clarifications and explanations from Mr. Henry PEYRE, who has done me the honor and grave joy at such a moment to invite me to speak to you. In the trial that Surrealism has instituted, it is clear that I have been “a party” for too long to be able to judge it today. Yet I believe that all the activity carried out under the name of Surrealism cannot have been in vain; in any case, you will agree with me on this point because there is no example to the contrary, on the level where it took place, with such persistence and circulation of people in both directions. When we emerge from the current tunnel, it will be necessary to attempt to reposition man in his element. One can hope that the disastrous experience of the other “post-war” will have been instructive and that people will not be content to return to the impoverished conceptions that then prevailed. “True life is absent,” RIMBAUD already said. This moment must not be wasted if we want to reclaim it. In all domains, I think we will need to bring to this search all the boldness that man is capable of. If it is possible, if this time it is the right one—though it will only be a postponement otherwise—I doubt that we can avoid seriously reconsidering, whether head-on or obliquely, the Surrealist propositions which, in the presence of—this must be repeated endlessly—the desperate situation of man in the heart of the twentieth century, have sought, as I said a moment ago, to put new keys in his hands. These propositions, as they have been gradually but unwaveringly formulated to us, I can only finally group here for memory’s sake.

1° — We must concede to FREUD that the exploration of the unconscious life provides the only valid basis for understanding the motives that drive human beings to act. The so-called conscious justifications that believe they can dismiss these motives merely serve to cover up the real reasons, like a layer of varnish. Therefore, Surrealism made a point of asserting automatism not only as a method of expression in literary and artistic fields but above all as a primary means toward a general revision of modes of knowledge.

2° — As I said in 1930, and now more than ever: “It is a question of testing by all means and insisting at all costs on the artificial nature of the old antinomies hypocritically designed to prevent any genuine agitation on the part of man, even if only by giving him a decisive idea of his means, by daring him to escape in a valid way from universal constraint... Everything suggests that there exists a certain point in the spirit where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory.” This is not merely a view inherited from occultists; it expresses such a profound aspiration that it is essentially from it that Surrealism will undoubtedly emerge as its substance. For Surrealism — and I believe that one day it will be its glory — everything has been good to reduce these oppositions, wrongly presented as insurmountable, deplorably deepened over the ages, and which are the true crucibles of suffering: the opposition between madness and the so-called “reason” that refuses to acknowledge the irrational; the opposition between dream and “action,” which believes it can dismiss the dream as futile; the opposition between mental representation and physical perception, both products of the dissociation of a unique, original faculty, traces of which are retained by the primitive and the child, which lifts the curse of an impassable barrier between the inner world and the outer world — and it would be salvation for man to recover this.

3°- Among the contradictions that feel fatal to us, the most ambitious to resolve - and the one I've tackled the longest - is the one that pits nature against man, in the idea that man can form of nature's necessity and his own, Although I don't claim to have solved it, I have at least shown that it doesn't entirely stand up to close observation of coincidences and other so-called “chance” phenomena. ” Chance remains the great veil to be lifted. In its own movement, war, where the scope of calculations appears constantly limited by this unknown factor: the oscillation of a certain chance, is moreover designed to bring it to the forefront of preoccupations.

4°- There are two more sentences of mine, dating from the other war, that I won't refrain from quoting to you, as they are equally applicable to my case and to yours. Here they are: “We who, during this war, reached the age of twenty - the age when one's life is systematized - had to take into account implacable realities. So as not to feel too unpleasant, we were led to attach little importance to all things. We came to ask our philosophers and poets to make the same sacrifice.” I'm saying that these words have become fully topical again. In this case, they were intended to introduce a eulogy of Alfred JARRY and, with him, of a kind of dramatic humor, proceeding with inspired jokes, in reaction against the most tragic aspects of man's situation. The human spirit is made in such a way that it enjoys this paradoxical relaxation at moments when the springs of life feel taut to break, This disposition should dissuade it, thereafter - and sometimes surrealism has called it to account - from trying to take everything seriously.

5° — By applying itself to coordinate the various preceding approaches, Surrealism naturally found itself brought to the very threshold of the unconscious, which, as opposed to the word “conscious” in psychoanalytic vocabulary, designates, as you know, the whole of very active powers hidden from consciousness by virtue of various reprobatory judgments. Freud saw in the unconscious “the aroma of the struggle that pits Eros against the death instinct.” Such a conception cannot fail to take on full significance in light of today’s events. From the return to what is called normal existence, what must be illuminated by spotlights and then resolutely purified is this immense and dark region of the unconscious, where myths swell disproportionately as wars are fomented. But you might ask me: through which part of this region does one approach it? I say that only Surrealism has concerned itself with the concrete resolution of this problem; it has truly stepped into the arena and taken bearings. For all practical purposes, and with a view toward an undertaking that far exceeded its numerical strength but whose necessity appeared paramount, it alone has placed, here and there, some lookouts. Persistent faith in automatism as a probe, persistent hope in dialectics (the tradition of Heraclitus, Meister Eckhart, Hegel) for the resolution of the antinomies that overwhelm man, recognition of objective chance as an indication of the possible reconciliation of the ends of nature and the ends of man in the eyes of the latter, the will for permanent incorporation into the psychic apparatus of the black humor which, at a certain temperature, alone can play the role of safety valve, practical preparation for an intervention on mythical life that primarily promotes, on the largest scale, a kind of cleansing — such remain, to this day, the fundamental watchwords of Surrealism.

Gentlemen, on this improbably fast train, its windows crossed out with the inscription: “1942 - Avenir” and which is willing to park for a moment in front of the platform where we are, I'm thinking again that some of you are getting ready to leave, and under no circumstances would I want to burden them with anything that would embarrass them. Even more so, if surrealism aspires to subsist on the devastated field like an ear of corn, that is to say, like a thing that is insignificant in itself and marvellous in that it holds the secret of the infinite repetition of the same field, may it have the pride of weighing as lightly as this ear of corn on the scales of the wind! Whatever the ambition of savcir and the temptatien to act, I know that as I approach twenty, they are all ready to cider it in power to a woman's gaze that fixes all the world's attraction in itself. All that I have been able to hold on to, and can still hold on to, on another level, would lose much of its importance for me if I didn't make sure that, driven by the set of ideas I've just outlined for you, while expressing the angst of its time, Surrealism has succeeded in giving beauty a new face.

It is in this spirit that I have chosen to present before your eyes, while avoiding the burden of commentary, some images whose significance matters precisely because of the seduction they exert — so much so that I thought it preferable to let this seduction play on its own. And this is also why, despite everything, I would prefer to leave you less with the echo of the preceding considerations and more with that of the few poems I am about to read to you. (These poems are La Jolie Rousse by Guillaume Apollinaire, Monsieur le Antiphilosophe by Tristan Tzara, In Honor of the Mutes by Paul Éluard, The Shed Blood by Benjamin Péret, and The Free Union.)

André BRETON.