The failures of automatic writing do not discourage André Breton. In his eyes they do not in the least diminish the demand it represents. And if he continues to hope for an absolute success from it, and even to ask of it something like a means toward its own purification, this hope is
analogous to the one which protects the artist when, wanting to produce a work, but not wanting to betray what inspires it, he seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable and to find the work where he must expose himself to the essential lack of work, the essential inertia. This is a harrowing experience, which can be pursued only under the veil of failure. And yet, while the experience is the infinitely hazardous movement which cannot succeed, we call what issues from it success. This torment we call happiness, and this and poverty becomes the bountifulness of inspiration. This laborious, this indefatigable despair is the sheer good fortune or the grace of a gift that requires no effort. One artist tells us what all of them encounter within the experience: "My paintings are valueless." "As a painter I will never amount to anything important, I feel this absolutely." That is the truth of the experience. The artist must persevere in the realm of this "valuelessness"; he has to maintain the will to achieve and the claim on perfection while suffering the distress of an irredeemable failure. And yet for us this failure is called Van Gogh. And this distress becomes a flaming torch, the very essence of color.
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The essential thing to be said about this experience is perhaps as follows: for a long time works went through it, but unknowingly. Or they gave it a name that hid it. That was when art wanted to make the gods present or to represent men. Today it is different. The work is no longer innocent; it knows whence it comes. Or at least it knows how to seek, and in this seeking how to approach always nearer to the origin, and in this approach how to keep without fail to the path where possibility is gambled, where the risk is essential and failure threatens. This is what the work seems to ask, this is where it pushes the artist: away from itself and from its realization. This experience has become so grave that the artist pursues it endlessly. Despairing of success yet at the same time concerned for the essential, he produces this experience in the broad daylight. He seeks to express it directly or, in other words, to make of the work a road toward inspiration -- that which protects and preserves the purity of inspiration -- and not of inspiration a road toward the work.
It makes no difference that this process is logically erroneous. For it is precisely the necessity of this error, the fact that it apparently precludes any outcome and that nonetheless it is the extreme demand -- it is precisely this quality as requirement ruling out result -- which obliges the artist not to turn away from it and mysteriously to sustain the inordinateness of it. But there is another difficulty which puts him even more profoundly in the wrong. Rilke alludes to it in a letter to Clara Rilke:
This shows you incontrovertibly that we must submit to the most extreme ordeals, but also, it seems, that we are not to breathe a word about them before plunging into our work. We are not to lessen them by communicating them. For the unique -- that which no one else would
understand or have the right to understand, that sort of disorder which is proper to us -- must enter into our work to become valid and to reveal its law, which is an original design that only the transparency of art renders visible . . . . I imagine sometimes what folly -- and what an error - - Van Gogh would have committed if he had had to communicate to anyone at all the nature of his vision, if he had had to consider with other people the motifs from which he was going to extract his paintings.
Van Gogh's call to Gauguin is born of this desire for an immediate communication. Gauguin comes. "Hardly was he there, the friend so much desired, his other self, than Van Gogh, from despair, shaved off his ears."
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Perhaps, in effect, the experience is wrecked from the instant it breaks with its intimacy and seeks to reveal itself. Perhaps it seeks disclosure only in order to become bearable, to lighten and "lessen" itself. To such a perhaps, each responds for himself alone: one cuts off his ear, but he makes no painting of it; another wanders, makes disturbances in the streets -- and it is the beginning of Aurelia, which ends under the snow, rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. It suffices to point out here that automatic writing is another answer to this question. It says intrepidly: only the moment of the experience counts; all that matters is the anonymous, visible trace of an absence without reserve. Everything must become public. The secret must be violated. The dark must enter into the day, it must dawn. What cannot be said must nevertheless be heard: Quidquid latet apparebit. Everything hidden: that is what must appear. And not with the anxiety of a guilty
conscience, but with the insouciance of happy lips. -- What, without risks or perils? With the ease of a word that escapes, of an unconscious, ignorant liberty? Not without risks and never in the calm of an indifferent spontaneity. Automatic writing is passive; this also means that it places itself in the imprudence and the temerity of a movement of pure passion. It is the word become desire, trusting to desire to bring it back to its source. And what it tirelessly affirms, what it cannot silence, what it can neither begin nor finish expressing, is what René Char echoes when he says, "The poem is the realized love of desire still desiring." And André Breton: "Desire, yes, always."
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