Breton, André (1896—1966)
French writer and poet best known as one of the founders of Surrealism. He was the author of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) and one of the movement’s principal theorists. Because of his outspoken attitude and doctrinal approach---he frequently ‘excommunicated’ people from the movement for not agreeing with his vision of how things should be---Breton was known as the ‘Pope of Surrealism’. Breton was born in Normandy. His family were not wealthy. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris, but World War I interrupted his studies and he did not complete his training. During the war he worked in a neurological ward for soldiers with ‘shell-shock’ (i.e. post-traumatic stress syndrome) in a hospital in Nantes. There he began exploring the potential of psychoanalysis to unlock the creative side of the psyche. One of his patients was an eccentric young writer, Jacques Vaché, whom Breton later credited as a major influence, describing him as the spiritual son of Jarry, Alfred. After the war, Breton returned to Paris and became involved with several Dada artists and writers. In 1919 he co-founded the journal Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. Breton and Soupault were particularly interested in a procedure they called automatic writing which, inspired by Freud, Sigmund’s notion of free association, they thought would provide a window into the operations of the unconscious. Together they published a novel utilising this method, Les Champs magnétiques (1920), translated as The Magnetic Fields (1985)---almost incomprehensible by traditional standards of writing, this novel signalled a departure from Dada because it was active rather than reactive. It proved highly influential and soon a great number of artists began experimenting with this technique, including visual artists like André Masson and musicians like Edgard Varèse. In 1924 Breton published the first of three manifestos for Surrealism, which served to define the movement as a revolution in the arts. Breton joined the Communist Party in 1927, but was expelled in 1933. His sympathies never deviated from Marxism, however, and his work continued to explore the dialectic. He travelled to Mexico in 1938, ostensibly for a conference on Surrealism at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. There he got to meet the great socialist artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as well as the exiled Leon Trotsky, with whom he wrote yet another manifesto, this time for revolutionary art. He returned to France at the outbreak of World War II and once more volunteered his services in the medical corps. After France’s surrender, however, the Vichy government banned his writings and declared him an enemy of the state. He escaped from France to Martinique, where he met Césaire, Aimé. He returned to France in 1946. He was an outspoken critic of France’s involvement in Algeria and was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121 written to protest against the Algerian War. Surrealism continued after the war, but its influence declined. It was succeeded by Situationism in France and Abstractionism in the US. Further Reading: M. Gale Dada and Surrealism (1997). D. Hopkins Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (2004). H. Richter Dada: Art and Anti-Art (1964). bricolage The French word for ‘tinkering’, ‘making do’, or even ‘DIY’. Someone who engages in bricolage is known as a bricoleur, which is the equivalent of ‘handyman’ or ‘jack of all trades’. It has passed into the critical theory lexicon because of French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, Claude’s comparison of western science and ‘primitive’ mythic thought in La Pensée sauvage (1962), translated as The Savage Mind (1966), arguing that the latter is a kind of bricolage because it is constrained to work with existing material and is therefore only ever the contingent result of the combination of things that were ready to hand. In contrast to an engineer, the profession that personifies western science for Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur cannot plan or make projects since to do so implies both that the necessary tools and materials can be obtained as required and do not have to be ready to hand. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix describe schizophrenic productions as bricolage in L’Anti-Oedipe (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977).