andre breton slapping the face of art, demanding a duel \/\/ surrealism’s demand for better beauty
Hello again, readers,
First, a quote from the venerable wiki:
“Under Breton’s direction, Surrealism became a European movement that influenced all domains of art, and called into question the origin of human understanding and human perceptions of things and events.” – Wikipedia (‘Andre Breton’)
“human perceptions of things and events”, of course, included our perception of beauty…and leads me to the quote from Breton that is this week’s theme.
“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.”
If beauty must remain convulsive, and there is a moving threshold of tolerance (the degree of any experience which we require exceeded for a thrill of emotion, a frisson – another good one, worth looking up), then the implications of Breton’s formulation are troubling. For example, there has been much discussion of escalating levels of sexuality in culture over the last few decades. (Sexuality being, arguably, a kind of beauty.) These cries of alarm have, themselves, become something of a genre of prurient entertainment focused on outrage.
Boobies!! Dongs!! Nooooo!!!
The problem can be illustrated by looking at the change in response to two books and their popular reception. Ulysses, by James Joyce, has, as one of it’s opening scenes, a man sitting on the crapper, reading a paper and enjoying his own funk. The book was banned in the good ole US for decades after its initial European publication because of its references to masturbation and sex (which is ridiculous because you have to have been in school for a long time to even hear about the book, and even longer to actually know what Joyce is talking about).
American Psycho, by Brett Easton Ellis, contains multiple accounts of torture, in exacting detail. It was published at the end of the 20th century. A rat is place inside a person and left to eat it’s way out…people are cooked (no PETA, the rat was not cooked…this was not some extra-horrible tirducken). Some people called out to the book in hatred, but Ellis is still a widely respected author, none of his work has been censored, in fact, it’s mostly been made into popular movies.
There will always be people that get off on outrage, but the diminishing returns are evident, it takes much more to get that kind of reach now, than it did at the beginning of the century when Ulysses was published.
A different conception of the convulsive in beauty is necessary if we are to read Breton’s statement as other than dooming us simply to spiral ever further into extremities of crude shocks. What other interpretation is there? What other convulsion could strike us as beauty does? And what dramatic response do we have that might be free of the diminishing returns of the increasing tolerance that exists for violence, shock, and all kinds of pain? Let us look now to the holy “book” of academics, this venerable JSTOR. (The snobby internet collection of academic articles that one can only look at if one is in school.)
AAAaaaaand, I found this:
“For Andre Breton, poetry is a magic art that liberates both the poet and the reader from the bonds of rationalism.” (Jean Snitzer Schoenfeld – “Andre Breton, Alchemist”). The suggestion is that a limitation of the rational faculties will help us approach beauty.
“I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never never
has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and
the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life of each
night, reality mingles with dream, all that’s inexplicable in the life of deaf man. -Louis Aragon, in a letter to Breton (well after the latter’s death) entitled, “on robert wilson’s ‘deafman glance’”
This “reality mingles with dream”, is a hallmark of the surrealist art discipline. It leads away from the rational mind, which is the focus of entertainment, and into territory less understood, because it’s not ‘about’ our organ of understanding.
“…-it’s the wedding of gesture and silence, of movement and the ineffable.” More ineffability, but in the “wedding of gesture and silence”, Aragon gives us a clearer glimpse at what beauty must be. The ineffiable. If you look at that definition, friendly reader, note the first part of that first sentence. This is what interests me in relation to this “convulsive” beauty. If we get away from the rational mind and the simple senses, perhaps there can be an escape from the diminishing returns problem.
The senses are brought in, and pure version of motion (sight), hearing (silence) are referenced. This, coupled with the ineffable, is the sublime. (not the SoCal band, great as they are, this is a ‘THE’, it’s the concept of the sensation beyond rational experience, that takes the person beyond mere humanity and gives a glimpse of the ultimate.
I doubt the internet’s ability to represent the sublime.
the artist is Caspar David Friedrich - in the Sunday, 4 February 2007 edition of the Library Princess blog
The problem is that it has to be experienced with the whole body. I admit that even writing has a huge challenge in approaching the sublime – and I chose a profession that will keep me locked away with books for years at a time, with little or no human contact. That’s how much I like reading.
Painting comes closest, for me, which may be why I was always terrified to paint, because I had felt how perfect it could be, and feared to fail as miserably as I knew I would before I ever came close to beauty.
This image of the broken churchyard presents elements of the sublime. There is a church, lit and structured mysteriously, there is a representation of death, there is the composition that suggests meaning only, telling us nothing solid.
The snow, the presence of the divine, the confounding visual, all of this is an encapsulation of the sublime. Because the sublime creates a sensation of intense beauty that dwarfs our tiny humanity, that is the experience, the meaning of the sublime. That’s why it can’t be put visually onto the internet, it needs to be impactful, and very immediate in a way that computer screens can’t approach yet. God (the church structure) stands in the image to represent this quality of beyondness only. One probably cannot experience the sublime through this painting, certainly not through my re-posting of it here, but this is the answer I come to when thinking of the challenge of Breton’s admonition to beauty.
The sublime breaks our sense of centrality, and convulses the little ego with a sense of it’s own insignificance. For a mental quality (the ego) that is defined by it’s belief in its own vast importance, this is indeed a convulsive experience.
The sublime is rare, but it is also exact. This is a qualitative experience, the shock of the sublime. There is no degree, as there are degrees of sexual quality, or degrees of humor. Diminishing returns, the feature of the rational mind grasping the shock of difference, or irregularity, better each time, cannot interfere because in the experience of sublimity, the rational mind is left behind with the ego.
SO. That’s all very pretty. Now, go out and find a bunch of things so beautiful they subvert your sense of your own importance and unplug your rationality. Go ahead. That’s easy, right?
Dammit, Andre...
If Breton’s demand is to be met…we will see this beauty once or twice a lifetime…
Maybe that’s true already?
…
So, I haven’t come to peace with Breton’s conception, or demand, for a beauty that is always convulsive. But I thought a lot about beauty, rather than just taking it for granted, and perhaps some of you thought with me? That might have been a part of the surrealists master plan – though they would object to the suggestion that they had one.
Anyway…I’m done for now…regular dull life to get back to, etc.
Stay beautiful, readers.
Love,
g.a.
Friedrich is sublime, indeed. I once visited a ruined chapel in Scotland that felt distinctly Friedrichian. Awe.
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