Surrealism: Key Concepts by Fijalkowski Krzysztof Richardson Michael

Author:Fijalkowski, Krzysztof,Richardson, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Notes

1 Of course, the surrealist conception of the role of the poet (which unites Breton and Caillois) was drawn from Rimbaud: ‘I say that the poet must be a seer, must make himself a seer …’. This relation of the poet with the shaman is very different from the ethnopoetic ideology that has emerged especially in the US seeking to integrate poet and shaman, since for surrealism poetry is a temporal activity not exempt from cultural determinants.

2 Caillois published ‘Art Poétique ou confession négative’ as a plaquette in 1958 and reprinted it in Caillois 1978: 65–87. The response of Breton and Schuster was published in the review BIEF/Jonction surréaliste, no. 7, July 1959 (see Breton and Schuster 2008).

3 It is strange that Breton didn’t recognize this, given that a decade earlier, in Arcane 17, he had spoken the formula ‘Osiris is a black god’, linked as it is to the negative confession, the aim of which is not redemption but annihilation of one’s individual self in contact with universal awareness, represented by the god as the sun.

4 The two aphorisms are the following:

Caillois: I have often worked for a whole night and, as dawn is announced, have only a single word to show for all my work. At other times, in periods of leisure, laziness and distraction, my finest verses are born without even my knowledge. I recall that for water the path from the rain to the spring is both arduous and uncertain. I have not maintained that I am like the spring and able to produce pure water by miracle, but rather to be like the earth and the clay. I filter like one, collect like the other. Verses surged forth at the finish (1978: 80).

Breton and Schuster: Work? Pain? Unknown. I have recalled that for water it was an easy, unquestioned course from rain to the spring. I have presented myself as a spring, producing pure water naturally. Verses surged forth from the very first.

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