What governs the strange movement of Breton’s great prose trilogy, Nadja, Communicating Vessels and Mad Love? There is a sense of a great quest, a great movement, but to where is it going? What magnetises these peculiar texts? ‘Desire, yes, always’, Breton writes – but a desire for what?
n Mad Love, Breton writes:
Desire arranges multiple ways to express itself … the least object to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation than can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like the other….. Whether in reality or in the dream [desire] is constrained to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations.
Condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations: Breton is drawing, of course, upon Freud.
It was his technique of allowing his patients to free associate which drew Freud towards the phenomenon of dreaming. For it was to their dreams that such patients returned. Freud began to see them as symptoms which were capable of an interpretation which would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The ‘manifest’ dream – the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient – conceals the true meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the superego. For Freud, it was necessary to understand what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attests to the play of latent desires, in a kind of thinking-desiring.
Such latent thoughts can be divided into prelogical ways of thinking – condensation, displacement, plastic representation and a rational, logical component: secondary revision. Here, condensation should be understood as the combination of latent dream thoughts into a single manifest element and displacement as the way in which, in the dream, the apparently innocuous detail can become highly significant and the apparently significant event is treated casually (more formally: there is a transfer of cathexis – interest, investment and affect – from one content to another). Thirdly, there is plastic representation (this is perhaps what Breton means by substitution) through which important people in the patient’s life are represented by a stock of common symbols (the king = the father, etc.) The latent content manifest in prelogical thought is retrospectively ordered by secondary revision, through which the patient, under the guidance of the censoring superego, is able to construct a narrative out of the material of the dream.
The shared goal of psychoanalysis and Surrealism is to show the play of latent desire not just in dreams, but in fantasy, parapraxes, myths, symptoms – and then to surprise it and catch it unawares.
Recall Breton’s account of his visit, with Giacometti, to a curiosity shop. Breton tells us he was obsessed with the phrase, cendrier de Cendrillon, the ashtray of Cinderella. He encounters a spoon, which, for some reason, he feels is linked to the ashtray of the phrase. This seems to link, for him, to the symbol of the shoe, the slipper of Cinderella. A series of associations is produced: ‘slipper-spoon-penis-perfect mold for this penis’; thus, according to Breton, the mystery announced in the phrase le cendrier de Cendrillon is solved: the series spoon-shoes-slipper, the search for the foot that fits, is about a desire for love. Now recall the analysis of Dora’s mother’s jewel case – Freud insists, to cut a long story short, that ‘The box … like the reticule and the jewel case was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals’. The correspondence between Breton and Freud is clear. For Breton, desire opens a path through the world; it is a matter of attending to the signs of this desire. For Freud, the neurotic patient might be cured if those signs are understood in terms of the latent content to which they bear witness.
The paths of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism diverge in their respective methods of research. Freud is a man of science, Breton a poet; Freud separates unconscious desire from reality, and Breton seeks to bring together desire and the real, claiming our conception of the real is produced by our desire. ‘Desire, yes, always’: everything in Breton is magnetised by a desire for the surreal, understood as a revolution of desire and the real (they cannot be thought apart from one another). This is what drew Breton and his friends towards communism just as it made Surrealism forever incompatible with the French Communist Party.
Still, I can’t help but remember the way how, after the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents symbolism as on a par to the Kantian categories, innately and universally organising experience according to shared unconscious fantasies. Why didn’t this bring Freud closer to the Surrealist desire for the great revolution, the great liberation of desire? With fascism on the rise and the second world war looming, Freud despaired of the liberatory force of desire. It is hard not to share that despair and to regard Surrealism as a period of joyous adolescence, a dream which had to vanish in the realities of an absolute war.
Giacometti, the former Surrealist, did not want his work included in the Surrealist exhibition of 1947. He commemorated the dead women and children of the Shoah in a sculpture called ‘Night’. A woman strides, hands splayed, across a sarcophagus. Could it have been shown alongside the works of the Surrealists? I don’t know the answer. But, strangely, in the same year, Bataille, against whom Breton directed such a fearsome invective in the second Surrealist Manifesto, wrote several articles celebrating Surrealism. ‘The great Surrealism is beginning’, he wrote. Why? What was left in Surrealism to begin? A liberation of desire? But look at where desire could lead! But perhaps it is still a matter of thinking and affirming desire, even as it appears to lend itself to its own denial. To understand why it might be brought to deny its play, and how that play might play anew. Desire, yes, always.
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