31. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 672-699

Myth: Myth and Literature (Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot). Self-Consciousness: Introduction; Self-Realization (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

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Thomas Mann: Psychoanalysis, the Lived Myth, and Fiction

When Mann gave his address, "Freud and the Future," in 1936, he was completing the third volume of his tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, his own exploration of myth. So he was interested in the way Freud's psychoanalytical theories connected with his own concept of mythology.

Mann recognizes the similarity between "Freud's description of the id and the ego" and "Schopenhauer's description of the Will and the Intellect" as "a translation of the latter's metaphysics into psychology."

The pregnant and mysterious idea ... developed by Schopenhauer is briefly this: that precisely as in a dream it is our will that unconsciously appears as inexorable objective destiny, everything in it proceeding out of ourselves and each of us being the secret theatre-manager of our own dreams, so also in reality the great dream that a single essence, the will itself, dreams with us all, or fate, may be the product of our inmost selves, of our wills, and we are actually ourselves bringing about what seems to be happening to us.... I see in the mystery of the unity of the ego and the world, of being and happening, in the perception of the apparently objective and accidental as a matter of the soul's own contriving, the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory. 

The Germanic syntax retained by H.T. Lowe-Porter in his translation of Mann's address is hard to follow. At its basis, Mann is endorsing Freud's theory that accidents like slips of the tongue are manifestations of the unconscious, hence not accidental at all, and extending that to Schopenhauer's concept of an immanent will working out the destiny of humankind. So things don't happen to us, we cause them to happen. Mann quotes Jung ("an able but somewhat ungrateful scion of the Freudian school"):  "It is so much more direct, striking, impressive, and thus convincing, ... to see how it happens to me than to see how I do it." And he asks, "Would this unmasking of the 'happening' as in reality 'doing' be conceivable without Freud? Never!"

But Mann chides Freud for underestimating the power of philosophy, which Mann sees as a manifestation of the Freudian unconscious and/or Schopenhauerian will: "Has the world ever been changed in anything save by thought and its magic vehicle the Word? I believe that in actual fact philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences and that all method and exactness serve its intuitions and its intellectual and historical will.... One might strain the point and say that science has never made a discovery without being authorized and encouraged to by philosophy."

Returning to Jung, he gives the apostate credit for discovering a "bridge" between Eastern mysticism and Western metaphysics: "It is true that the East has always shown itself stronger than the West in the conquest of our animal nature, and we need not be surprised to hear that in its wisdom it conceives even the gods among the 'given conditions' originating from the soul and one with her, light and reflection of the human soul." Mythology is a human emanation, and thus the gods depend on the existence of humans. Mann acknowledges that to Western religion the concept of God as anything but "absolute reality," as "one with the soul and bound up with it, must be intolerable ... equivalent to abandoning the idea of God." But he posits that even the word "religion," which may be derived from the Latin religare, to tie fast, "essentially implies a bond," and that Genesis speaks of "the bond (covenant) between God and man."

This idea underlies his own novel, he says: "Abram is in a sense the father of God. He perceived and brought Him forth; His mighty qualities, ascribed to Him by Abram, were probably His original possession. Abram was not their inventor, yet in a sense he was, by virtue of his recognizing them and therewith, by taking though, making them real." The mythmaker brings not only the myth into being, but also the god(s) to which the myth refers. And mythmaking is an essential human process: "For man sets store by recognition, he likes to find the old in the new, the typical in the individual." And "the typical is actually the mythical."

As a novelist, Mann says, he "took the step in my subject-matter from the bourgeois and individual" -- e.g., Buddenbrooks -- "to the mythical and typical," which established his connection with psychoanalysis: "The mythical interest is as native to psychoanalysis as the psychological interest is to all creative writing." Awareness of the work of ethnographers has led to a recognition that "the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious."

Through myth we gain "a knowledge of the schema in which and according to which the supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naïve belief in himself as unique in space and time, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod it before him."

Actually, if his existence consisted merely in the unique and present, he would not know how to conduct himself at all; he would be confused, helpless, unstable in his own self-regard, would not know which foot to put forward or what sort of face to put on.... The myth is the legitimization of life; only through and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration.

Historical figures such as Cleopatra and Alexander found the patterns of their life through myth, Cleopatra following the model of Aphrodite: "it was far more her erotic intellectual culture than her physical charms that entitled her to represent the female as developed into the earthly embodiment of Aphrodite.... Cleopatra fulfilled her Aphrodite character even unto death -- and can one live and die more significantly than in the celebration of the myth?" As for Alexander, "he walked in the footsteps of Miltiades" and set a pattern that was continued by Julius Caesar, whose "ancient biographers ... were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that he took Alexander as his prototype," and by Napoleon, who "regretted that the mentality of the time forbade him to give himself out for the son of Jupiter Ammon, in imitation of Alexander."

Jesus, too, worked with the consciousness of the patterns of the past:

His life ... was lived in order that that which was written might be fulfilled.... His word on the Cross, about the ninth hour, that "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" was evidently not in the least an outburst of despair and disillusionment; but on the contrary a lofty messianic sense of self. For the phrase is not original, not a spontaneous outcry. It stands at the beginning of the Twenty-second Psalm, which from one end to the other is an announcement of the Messiah. Jesus was quoting, and the quotation meant: "Yes, it is I!" 

So Mann proclaims his Joseph novels as "a narrational meeting of psychology and myth, which is at the same time a celebration of the meeting between poetry and analysis."


T.S. Eliot: Myth and Literary Classicism

As Eliot says in this essay about James Joyce's Ulysses in 1923, the novel hadn't "been out long enough for any attempt at a complete measurement of its place and significance to be possible." But Eliot gets some things very right about it: chiefly, that the mythic structure of the book is not just "an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author for the purpose of disposing his realistic tale." That the myth of Odysseus is organic to Ulysses has been obvious to us for a long time now, but Eliot was one of the few who got it at the time.

Much of the essay centers on Richard Aldington's criticisms of Ulysses. Aldington was a friend of Eliot's, though they later parted company when Aldington sided with Eliot's wife, Vivienne. Eliot and Aldington agreed on the virtue of what they called "classicism," as "a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its place and time." Eliot's classicism is "doing the best one can with the material at hand," and his criticism of Joyce centers on the question, "how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it ... as an artist?" In Eliot's view, Joyce deals with it properly by breaking away from the novel as traditionally practiced.

If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter.... The novel ended with Flaubert and with James.

As Eliot admitted to the editors of The Modern Tradition, "To say that the novel ended with Flaubert and James was possibly an echo of Ezra Pound and is certainly absurd." But Joyce had found in both his narrative style -- the disjointed, often playful, show-offy technique that Aldington attacked as chaotic and Dadaist -- and in his use of the mythic structure "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.

Eliot's skepticism about psychology aside, this is a pretty succinct expression of how myth became central to modernism.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Experiment in Self-Revelation

Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1753

Rousseau's Confessions, written from 1765 through 1770, but not published in its entirety until 1789, four years after his death, is the precursor of every memoir, autobiography, and confessional written since then. (There are some who would trace the genre back to St. Augustine, but his Confessions were as much about God as about himself.) It is, as the subtitle in this book suggests, an "experiment," very much in the scientific mode of the Enlightenment of which Rousseau was so signal a figure, but it is also one of the first "modern" books.

The introduction to this section of the anthology, "Self-Consciousness," points out that the preoccupation with "self" stems from the "exploration of the unconscious mind and of the heritage of myth." It is "part of a larger concern with the distinctive qualities and value of subjective life."

Subjective life at its most intense is personal and private, wholly individual, and the value of subjective reality in this sense is a modern article of faith. The individual person has turned round upon himself, seeking to know all that he is and to unify all that he knows himself to be. The totality of the self has become the object of an inner quest. This cultivation of self-consciousness -- uneasy, ardent introspection -- often amounts to an almost religious enterprise. A first principle of self-consciousness is that nothing, however inglorious or unpleasant, should be ignored.

And Rousseau claims that he has attempted in the Confessions not to ignore the "inglorious or unpleasant." He even assures the reader that he is "laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence," and that if the reader suspects from "the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus," that he is "refusing to tell the whole truth," that reader is mistaken both about Rousseau's candor and the nature of his enterprise.

The story that he tells about stealing a trifle, "a little pink and silver ribbon," and then blaming it on an innocent cook who, he assumes, lost her job -- "I do not know what happened to the victim of my calumny" -- may strike us as an insufficient objective correlative for the pangs of guilt that he claims to have experienced: "This cruel memory troubles me at times and so disturbs me that in my sleepless hours I see this poor girl coming to reproach me for my crime, as if I had committed it only yesterday." It seems less like a "confession" than like a moral fable, when Rousseau tells us, "So long as I have lived in peace it has tortured me less, but in the midst of a stormy life it deprives me of that sweet consolation which the innocent feel under persecution." He even reduces it to an epigram: "remorse sleeps while fate is kind but grows sharp in adversity."

But what makes the episode so remarkable in its context is the amount of analysis that Rousseau lavishes on it, examining minutely his motives -- or lack of them -- and the psychological drives that impelled him: "It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me." He is also able to transfer blame: "If M. de la Roque had taken me aside and said: 'Do not ruin that poor girl. If you are guilty tell me so,' I should immediately have thrown myself at his feet, I am perfectly sure. But all they did was to frighten me, when what I needed was encouragement."

Self-analysis leads Rousseau to generalizations about his personal failings:

In me are united two almost irreconcilable characteristics, though in what way I cannot imagine. I have a passionate temperament and lively and headstrong emotions. Yet my thoughts arise slowly and confusedly, and are never ready till too late. It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me. I feel everything and I see nothing; I am excited but stupid; if I want to think I must be cool.

Rousseau is positing a norm here: the man who can unite passion with intellect. And he finds himself wanting. "If I had known in the past how to wait and then put down in all their beauty the scenes that painted themselves in my imagination, few authors would have surpassed me." This kind of self-analysis inevitably leads to a perception of one's own failings, and not of one's strength: "I have studied men, and I think I am a fairly good observer. But all the same I do not know how to see what is before my eyes; I can only see clearly in retrospect, it is only in my memories that my mind can work." After recounting a social faux pas, he sums up, "I think that I have sufficiently explained why, though I am not a fool, I am very often taken for one, even by people in a good position to judge."

And so there is another function of the Confessions: self-defense.

There is a certain sequence of impressions and ideas which modify those that follow them, and it is necessary to know the original set before passing any judgements. I endeavour in all cases to explain the prime causes, in order to convey the interrelation of results. I should like in some way to make my soul transparent to the reader's eye, and for that purpose I am trying to present it from all points of view, to show it in all lights, and to contrive that none of its movements shall escape his notice, so that he may judge for himself of the principle which has produced them.

He admits that the Confessions may even be faulty as to fact -- "memories of middle age are always less sharp than those of early youth" -- but dismisses this as irrelevant: "I easily forget my misfortunes, but I cannot forget my faults, and still less my genuine feelings.... I cannot go wrong about what I have felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do." And he constantly insists on making the reader aware of what he is up to: "I warn those who intend to begin this book ... that nothing will save them from progressive boredom except the desire to complete their knowledge of a man, and a genuine love of truth and justice." The Confessions are self-revelation for the purpose of educating the reader as to the nature of a particular human character, and by extension, of the characteristics Rousseau shares with all human beings.

Above all, Rousseau prides himself on honesty:

I had always been amused at Montaigne's false ingenuousness, and at his pretence of confession his faults while taking good care only to admit to likeable ones; whereas I, who believe, and always have believed, that I am on the whole the best of men, felt that there is no human heart, however pure, that does not conceal some odious vice. 

27. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 581-613

The Unconscious: The Freudian Unconscious (Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann); Liberation of the Unconscious (D.H. Lawrence, Tristan Tzara, André Breton)

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Sigmund Freud: The Origins of Culture


In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud extended his theories of the unconscious from the individual to civilization itself, not without stretching a point or a few. Asserting that "we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual," he finds that sublimation of instinct both gives rise to civilization -- "it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life" -- and makes civilized humans more neurotic.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or other means?) of powerful instincts. This "cultural frustration" dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.

He posits that civilization arose because the constant "need for genital satisfaction" led to the cohabitation of males and females and thence to the family: “the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their interests, to remain with the stronger male.” Greater combinations of peoples eventually followed all “in the service of Eros.” So civilization demonstrates “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.”


Of course, the community has to find ways of dealing with aggression, so it causes it to be redirected into the individual. “Civilization ... obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency with him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” It reinforces the superego and with it the sense of guilt.


And when Freud says guilt, he immediately thinks of the Oedipus complex. He posits that “the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, the remorse for which “was the result of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but they loved him, too.”

Now, I think, we can at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has killed one's father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death.

It's the primordial Catch-22.


Civilization, then, can only thrive “through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate.... The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”



Thomas Mann: The Significance of Freud

Thomas Mann in 1937

This address, “Freud and the Future,” was delivered in Vienna in 1936 on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday. It lauds him as “a great scientist,” which is not a characterization that everyone would agree with today, but more particularly because of Freud's influence on “the world of creative literature,” which is still undeniable.

Mann observes that Freud “did not know Nietzsche” or Novalis, Kierkegaard, or Schopenhauer, but that he seems to have intuited their ideas and given them practical application:

By his unaided effort, without knowledge of any previous intuitive achievement, he had methodically to follow out the line of his own researches; the driving force of his activity was probably increased by this very freedom from special advantage.

Freud's theories, Mann observes, have “penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.” The particular connection between psychoanalysis and literature that Mann observes “consists first in a love of truth, in a sense of truth, a sensitiveness and receptivity for truth's sweet and bitter, which largely expresses itself in a psychological excitation, a clarity of vision, to such an extent that the conception of truth actually almost coincides with that of psychological perception and recognition.”

But what Mann finds most congenial in Freud is “an understanding of disease, a certain affinity with it, outweighed by fundamental health, and an understanding of its productive significance.” For Mann is all about “disease as an instrument of knowledge,” as any reader of The Magic Mountain surely knows.

Mann is also struck by the coherence of Freud's work with the thought of Schopenhauer, who also “preached the primacy of the instinct over mind and reason,” though “not in the anti-human spirit of the mind-hostile doctrines of today” (i.e, Nazism). He notes that in the New Introductory Essays in Psychoanalysis, Freud “describes the soul-world of the unconscious, the id, in language as strong, and at the same time as coolly intellectual, objective, and professional a tone, as Schopenhauer might have ued to describe his sinister kingdom of the will.”

Again, Mann touches on the political horrors of his day in his discussion of the id, which “can take the upper hand with the ego, with a whole mass-ego, thanks to a moral devastation which is produced by the worship of the unconscious, the glorification of its dynamic as the only life-promoting force, the systematic glorification of the primitive and irrational. For the unconscious, the id, is primitive and irrational, is pure dynamic. It knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” But he holds out hope “that the resolution of our great fear and our great hate, their conversion into a different relation to the unconscious ... may one day be due to the healing of this very science” -- i.e., psychoanalysis. “The free folk are the people of a future freed from fear and hate, and ripe for peace.”

D.H. Lawrence: A Non-Freudian Unconscious 

Freud had a dirty mind, Lawrence asserts in this excerpt from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), so Lawrence sets out to discover "the pristine unconscious in man." Freud's unconscious "is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own bastard spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity." Bad stuff happens when you hook your passions to the ideal instead of listening to the unconscious: 

This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.

In Freud, Lawrence claims, idealism and materialism, supposed philosophical opposites, unite: "the ideal becomes a mechanical principle," a kind of ghost in the machine. By identifying love as sex, Lawrence thinks, Freud sanctions all of its manifestations as physical: "incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no escape from logic."   

The "true unconscious," Lawrence asserts, "is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism." This life-motive begins "where the individual begins," at "the moment of conception." (Lawrence would almost certainly be a pro-lifer of some sort.)  

By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact soul would be a better word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul.

But not, he hastens to add, the soul as imagined by idealism, which has been reduced "that which a man conceives himself to be," so he returns to the word "unconscious."  

Lawrence's unconscious is not, unlike Freud's, susceptible to the reductionism of science, which would reduce the sun to "some theory of burning gases, some cause-and-effect nonsense." We apprehend the sun imaginatively, not scientifically: "And even if we do have a mental conception of the sun as a sphere of blazing gas -- which it certainly isn't -- we are just as far from knowing what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a matter of mental conception merely." 

Lawrence now goes off into his own psycho-physiological theories, which involve the solar plexus and the diaphragm and separate "planes" of the body. It's a personal myth that he compares to the concepts of the Greeks: "When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor." What he is aiming at is a theory of unification. "The individual psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an unthinkable process of calamity ensues unless there be a reconciliation."  


Tristan Tzara: Dadaism 

Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Tristan Tzara, 1923

Tzara's "Dada Manifesto" (1918) and "Lecture on Dada" (1922) rejects Freudian psychoanalysis as "a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie." This reaction against the normative is epitomized by Dada, which attacked what its proponents saw as the stultification of art. It aimed at liberation through mockery. If "everyone dances to his own boomboom," as Tzara proclaimed, then Dadaism was a way of freeing everyone from the lockstep of artistic conformity. "I am against systems," Tzara says, "the most acceptable system is on principle to have none at all." Dada would abolish logic, but have "absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity." 

Dada rejects "explanations": 

You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of a calm, level state of mind that makes everything equal and without importance.

And yes, Tzara recognizes that there is an element of Buddhist detachment to that attitude. 

Dadaism is anti-intellectual: "Intelligence is the triumph of sound education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its pleasures are innumerable." Dadaism sees itself as above all, life-affirming: "It is diversity that makes life interesting. There is no common basis in men's minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us." Moreover, art is inferior to life: "Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Lie is far more interesting." 

Tzara rejects idealism:  

The Beautiful and True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.

The origins of Dada are in disgust, Tzara says. Disgust with the useless explanations of metaphysics, the pretentiousness of artists, "the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of money," and so on.  Dada is, in short, the first step toward postmodernism.


André Breton: Surrealism 

André Breton in 1924

Most often associated with Salvador Dalì, the great commercializer of surrealism, the movement has its intellectual roots in Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto," from which he quotes in these excerpts from What Is Surrealism? (1934). Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry, and during his reading of Freud had experimented with "automatic writing" as a means of gaining access to the unconscious mind. Surrealism then became a kind of portal to what Breton calls "the superior reality of certain forms of association" manifested in "the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought." 

Breton claims to find surrealist elements in Dante and Shakespeare and lists a number of precursors and contemporaries, including Jonathan Swift ("surrealist in malice"), Charles Baudelaire ("surrealist in morals"), Lewis Carroll ("surrealist in nonsense"), Georges Seurat ("surrealist in design") and Pablo Picasso ("surrealist in cubism").  Surrealism is not subject "to processes of filtering"; instead, surrealists are "content to be silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace," and therefore "we are perhaps serving a yet much noble cause." 

He gives Freud credit for awakening interest in and awareness of the processes of the unconscious, "an aspect of mental life -- to my belief by far the most important -- with which it was supposed that we no longer had any concern." Hence, "The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights." Freud's greatest achievement was that he gave scientific credibility and utility to the imaginative life and its reflection in art. 

The Manfesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach.

Surrealism is a way of "securing expression in all its purity and force." It places surreality on the same plane as reality, "neither superior not exterior to it." 

Breton acknowledges that Dadaism, as enunciated by Tzara, "although claiming until 1930 no connection with surrealism, is in perfect accord with" it. Indeed, surrealism, as Breton sees it, can claim kin to "several thought-movements." But unlike Tzara, Breton has "social action" in mind: "we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non of the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian Revolution." Surrealism, he says, "undertakes particularly the critical investigation of the notions of reality and unreality, of reason and unreason, of reflection and fimpulse, of knowing and 'fatal' ignorance, of utility and uselessness" -- it is consequently, like "Historical Materialism,' dialectical in nature.

I really cannot see, pace a few muddle-headed revolutionaries, why we should abstain from taking up the problems of love, of dreaming, of madness, of art and of religion, so long as we consider these problems from the same angle as they, and we too, consider Revolution.

But the "muddle-headed revolutionaries" succeeded in kicking Breton out of the Communist Party. 

Breton is most sanguine about the influence of surrealism on literature:

The hordes of words which were literally unleashed and to which Dada and surrealism deliberately opened their doors, ... will penetrate, at leisure, but certainly, the idiotic little towns of that literature which is still taught and, easily failing to distinguish between low and lofty quarterings, they will capture a fine number of turrets.... There is a pretence that it has not been noticed how much the logical mechanism of the sentence is proving more and more impotent by itself to give man the emotive shock which really gives some value to his life.

Surrealism, Breton says, is the "excessively prehensile tail" of Romanticism. 


He's not uncritical of some of the published pieces of surrealist "automatic writing":  "The presence of in these items of an evident pattern has ... greatly hampered the species of conversion we had hoped to bring about through them." Such writing has to be "as much as possible detracted from the will to express" and "lightened of ideas of responsibility." If so, "they allow of a general reclassification of lyrical values" and "offer a key to go on opening indefinitely that box of never-ending drawers which is called man." The aim is not "to produce works of art, but to light up the unrevealed and yet revealable part of our being in which all the beauty, all the love and all the virtue with which we scarcely credit ourselves are shining intensely." 


In short, surrealism will put an end to "the provoking insanities of 'realism'."

1. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. v-ix, 7-16

Preface; Symbolism: Introduction

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If we're postmodern, then what is it that we're post? When Ellmann and Feidelson published their anthology in the mid-1960s, their aim was to provide the material to define "modern" as it applies to the arts and literature, to give clarity and precision to a word that then denoted "a blur of book titles, a mood of impatience with anachronisms, a diffuse feeling of difference." Modern, they noted, was a label for "a distinctive kind of imagination," and  "works we call modern ... claim modernity; they profess modernism." But the vagueness persists, even now that "the great age of the [twentieth] century's literature, the age of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence, of Proust, Valéry, and Gide, of Mann, Rilke, and Kafka, has already passed into history." And the word denotes more than literature; rather, it encompasses "a large spiritual enterprise including philosophic, social, and scientific thought, and aesthetic and literary theories and manifestoes, as well as poems, novels, dramas."

If we can postulate a modern tradition, we must add that it is a paradoxically untraditional tradition. Modernism strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either a liberation from inherited patterns or, at another extreme, deprivation and disinheritance.... [M]odern literature has elevated individual existence over social man, unconscious feeling over self-conscious perception, passion and will over intellection and systematic morals, dynamic vision over the static image, dense actuality over practical reality.

At the same time that modern artists and writers have embraced the future eagerly, they have also been haunted by "a sense of loss, alienation, and despair. These are the two faces, positive and negative, of the modern as the anti-traditional: freedom and deprivation, a living present and a dead past."

But giving the modern a starting point is not easy. Did we become "modern" at "the end of Victorianism, the beginning of romanticism, the mid-seventeenth century, the end of the Middle Ages"? Stephen Spender observed that the modern is characterized by a confrontation with the past and an inclusion of this confrontation "within itself as part of a single total experience," in what Spender called "the vision of a whole situation." Writers who valued originality and an attempt to free themselves from established models, media and genres, nevertheless "have been classicists, custodians of language, communicators, traditionalists in their fashion."

Ellmann and Feidelson say that their anthology is an attempt to provide materials toward an understanding of modernism, not "to argue a general theory of modernism." The selections in the anthology are from the "discursive statements by writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists" -- not the works themselves, but the essays, letters, prefaces, and other writings in which they discuss their works or the ideas that give rise to them.

The book has been divided into nine sections, each of them a topic "around which modern thinking whirls or clings." they are:

• Symbolism: "the concept of imagination, the autonomy of the work of art, formalism, the creative process, and the heroic role of the artist.
• Realism: "art as a function of environment," historic or social, "the pressures of experience and the responsibility of truthfulness."
• Nature: theories "of organic harmony, of biological struggle, of mechanistic force, and of human or scientific experiment."
• Cultural History: the "patterns -- dialectical, repetitive, symbolic, or religious -- by which the historical process has been shaped."
• The Unconscious: "Freudian ... and post-Freudian programs for the liberation of impulse."
• Myth: "anthropological and Jungian versions of the myth-making mind, along with more properly literary doctrines of mythic imagination." 
• Self-Consciousness: "self-realization, the situation and process of consciousness, the inner divisions of the self, and the pursuit of personal freedom."
• Existence: "The existentialist analysis of ... selfhood."
• Faith: religion "in the decline of Christianity."

The first topic, symbolism, focuses on the nature and function of the imagination and its role in the life and work of the artist. It valorizes imagination as a unifying force, and views the artist as heroic in his or her creative role, and tends to disparage logic and reason. It also often elevates the human over the natural, and the fabrications of the artist over the phenomena of the external world. Rilke sees the artist as "uncovering a hidden reality that nature, especially our own human nature, urges us to ignore." Art is to be judged not by its fidelity to nature but by its own coherence, and hence has a way of reeducating the viewer (or reader, listener, etc.). "When people objected to his portrait of Gertrude Stein as on the grounds that it did not resemble her, Picasso replied, 'It will.'"

Pablo Picasso, "Gertrude Stein," 1905-06

"The world of aesthetic ideas, the products of genius, is like a second nature built out of the first.... It has the ideal quality of intellectual forms and the intuitive, untranslatable immediacy of sensory perception." Coleridge saw imagination as "an activity or function that lies between" nature and the human, "a union and reconcilement of" the two.

Symbolism also stresses the open-endedness of art, asserting that "art is perhaps most effective when imperfectly understood. For Flaubert, "not to conclude is a characteristic of the creative mind," an affirmation of what Keats called "'negative capability,' meaning he acceptance of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any compulsion to resolve them in rational terms or to weigh them by factual probability." I.A. Richards asserts that poetry makes what he called "pseudo-statements," which are "not to be judged by truth or falsity, but only by their effect in releasing or organizing many impulses and attitudes." Not surprisingly, didacticism is shunned in this view of art. Walter Pater's dictum that "All the arts aspire to the condition of music," emphasizes the premise that literature and the visual arts should give immediacy priority over description. Poetry advances beyond prose by attempting to evoke that which is beyond speech. Paintings should not be given titles that suggest they are "about" something but should be considered as things in themselves.

As for the artist, he or she should disappear into the work. "Though art does not reproduce the objective world, the work itself must be objective, not subjective." The medium in which the artist works is more important than the artist: It "takes control, leaving [the artist], as [T.S.] Eliot once wrote ..., no more than a catalytic agent." Eisenstein, writing about the effect of montage in film, notes that "splicing heterogeneous images together [achieves] an effect not paraphrasable or in any other way attainable."

The power of the artist to create makes him or her a heroic figure, one who "takes risks and suffers in order to create," becoming "an exemplar for human behavior.... On this principle, life itself may come to be a kind of artifact," and the creations of the artist may serve as guides to life, especially with the waning of the role of religion in people's lives.