Books like Manifestoes of Surrealism

"Surrealism is the "invisible ray" which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents. "You are no longer trembling, carcass." This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."The Surrealist world is a beautiful place: houses with eggshell roofs, a half-fried egg for a sun hanging from the sky, birds flying and splashing into the sunny yoke and painting the clouds bright yellow, people with mirrors for faces walking down alleys and pathways lined with seashells and coral and strange weeds, talking in symphonies, the world resounding with the sound of music! Anything and everything is possible in the Surrealist world! Secret houses pave the floor of the ocean in which secret people live among mermaids and dolphins! The waters of such oceans turn into honey and milk as they crash on the chocolate shore, where children build castles, children having big, resplendent eyes, children with little wings, children like fairies and forest nymphs, darting in and out of little chocolate rooms. I am besotted with André and his delectable prose and his stunning imagination! The Soluble Fish, a piece of surrealist fiction, sandwiched between two manifestoes in this book, is a quintessential surrealist work; perfectly embodying the ideas of the grand master. It is strange, it is disturbing, it is vivid imagination at its eloquent best!"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going..."The first manifesto, published in 1924, gives a comprehensive outline of the Surrealist agenda. The avant-garde had already expressed his discontent with Realist and Naturalist fiction which resulted in the inception of the schools of Expressionism and Symbolism. But Breton took it up a notch and, though, in veering away from traditional fiction, Surrealism does resemble Expressionism, its underpinnings are slightly different. The Surrealist sees and interprets the world from the eyes of the unconscious. Freudian psychoanalysis and dream-theory had a great influence on Breton who sought to incorporate and apply Freud's theories to literature. Thus, in the first manifesto, he defines Surrealism as: \ SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express--verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner--the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.\ \ ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.\ To open up the vaults of the unconscious, the Surrealist surrenders complete control over his conscious thought and eases himself into a trance-like state. With a pen in his fingers and a paper on the desk, he becomes a mere medium of expression. Language gushes and spills forth and makes all sorts of associations on the paper without the avant-garde controlling or manipulating anything. This is what Breton calls automatic writing."Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it."Surrealist aesthetics and the need for a Surrealist sensibility after WWI forms the subject of the first manifesto. The second manifesto is a kind of a rant in which Breton answers to criticisms and vilifications. A few extracts follow the second manifesto in which the political sympathies of Breton and the Surrealists are explored. Frankly speaking, everything after the The Soluble Fish is tedious, dense and gratuitous. Those interested in the dynamics present between Socialism/Marxism and Surrealism might find these latter extracts useful but even so Breton never speaks in a clear and succinct voice in these excerpts, and his thought is ultimately lost in unnecessary verbiage. Even so, the first manifesto and the piece of fiction justify their function completely and are a triumph. This is recommended to all those who seek understanding of the Surrealist agenda. Breton, at least in the first half of the book, shall not disappoint. "And you will see into the bowels of the earth, you will see me more alive than I am now when the boarding saber of the sky threatens me. You will take me farther than I have been able to go, and your arms will be roaring grottoes full of pretty animals and ermines. You will make only a sigh of me, that will go on and on through all the Robinsons of earth. I am not lost to you: I am only apart from what resembles you, on the high seas, where the bird called Heartbreak gives its cry that raises the pommels of ice of which the stars of day are the broken guard."