El Mercado Interbancario en MN

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Paris had become the headquarters of the European avant-garde, a series of political, cultural and artistic movements known as

Modernism. After the chaos and devastation of the First World War, it was felt that rationalist philosophy was insufficient to explain life. The postwar Modernists shared their value of the irrational and their contempt for tradition as common traits. Surrealism was one of the most radical Modernist movements. Founding member André Breton (1896-1966) published the First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. There, the surreal was defined as “the spark arising from the collision of two or more chunks of reality”. This spark can be found in the discourse of the unconscious-dream, which is considered an integral part of reality. Breton describes as the Surrealists’ main aim “to express -verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner- the actual functioning of the unconscious mind” (Linda Williams [1992] 11). These twentieth-century schools of thought do not imply a rupture with nineteenth-century

considered to be the descendants of the 1840s European revolutionaries. We mentioned in Chapter 1 that the artistic life postulated by Romanticism had been a form of rebellion against nineteenth-century strict bourgeois structures. The Surrealists collected their legacy by showing a rebellious contempt for Church, State and conventional morality. The ethical goal of the

movement was the “subversion of bourgeois values in order to substitute them for others more respectful of the uncontaminated energy of desire” (Sánchez Vidal. Luis Buñuel 10. My

translation). This absolute rejection of any kind of social structure approaches the Surrealists to the German Romanticism, the same one that had influenced Brontë.

Another nineteenth-century predecessor was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, collected in The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin had challenged the traditional religious views that considered humans as possessors of an ennobling spirituality. On the contrary, he postulated that they were driven by the same irrational impulses as animals. Darwin was a big influence on Surrealists like Luis Buñuel, who recognized that the origins of his atheism were in his reading of The Origin of Species (Aub 39). This influence also accounts for the director’s

fascination for the insect world, which would prominently feature in the films he directed. Another crucial influence on Surrealism was Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis (Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899). Like Darwin’s, he emphasized the irrationality of human

behaviour, which could only be completely understood by analyzing the mind’s hidden instincts. For the Surrealists, this implied that social rules and morality were nothing but a contract

established to guarantee civilization. This social contract had forced humans to repress their true desires, only allowed to exist in the unconscious. Therefore, the imagination became the only place were humans could be totally free. When trying to justify his admiration for the writings of the Marquis of Sade, Buñuel declared that Sade’s crimes were committed only in the imagination, as a way of liberating himself of the impulse to do it in real life (Baxter 66).30 _{If Darwin had}

emphasized the irrationality of biology and Freud the irrationality of the human psyche, Karl Marx explained the irrationality of the purely material life (Aub 261). He postulated that the problems of the economic order were not within the system, but the problem was the capitalistic system in itself. Marx’s Communism (which, we must remember, had inspired the Chartism), was also an important political influence for many Surrealists, like Luis Buñuel and Georges Sadoul.

Like their Romantic predecessors, the radical revolution proposed by Surrealism was more theoretical than real. First, the vast majority of members were able to live on the margins of social conventions because they were bourgeois with family fortunes to support them. Second, despite

30

Buñuel said to have discovered the Marquis of Sade in a 1931 edition of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome by Heine (Hammond 56).

considering marriage “a reproductive prison” (Preckshot 98), the Surrealists were not especially interested in challenging patriarchal stereotypes. On the one hand, Surrealist women artists were regarded as muses by their male counterparts, and not as creators in their own right. On the other, woman was customarily positioned in Surrealist works of art as the object of erotic desire through which the male artist would be able to transform human consciousness (Kuenzli 19). Third, their strong rejection of moral and artistic conventions resulted in a series of strict self-imposed rules, which provoked continuous (and frequently futile) disputes between the members. In 1929, the publication of the Second Manifest of Surrealism caused a split inside the group (Linda Williams [1992] 108). On the one hand, there were those members who saw Surrealism mainly as a revolutionary movement. This tendency was represented by people like film director Luis Buñuel, who once declared that his choice of Surrealism was influenced by its ethics rather than its aesthetics (Sánchez Vidal. “Buñuel and the Flesh” 205-206). On the other, there were those members who preferred to concentrate on Surrealism as aesthetic experiment. Georges Bataille (1897- 1962) and his magazine Documents represented this tendency. In his Second Manifest, André Breton left it very clear that any Surrealist reluctant to compromise with the revolution would be expelled from the group. He also issued a personal attack against Bataille, accusing him of not totally rejecting the ideology of the establishment (Weiss 168-169). Although he kept Surrealist ideals all his life, Luis Buñuel himself decided to separate from the Surrealist group in 1932 because he considered that they had become an “intellectual aristocracy”, totally isolated from the world (Sánchez Vidal. Luis Buñuel. 58).31