El viento y las energías renovables

Phyllis Taoua’s essay, ‘Of Natives and Rebels: Locating the Surrealist Revolution in French Culture’ characterises Surrealism’s ‘vanguard primitivism’, but Taoua argues that ultimately it is ethically incompatible with their politics of anti-colonial protest.64 Louise Tythacott’s Surrealism and the Exotic of 2003 is the first monographic study of Surrealism and primitivism.65 In a similar vein to Taoua, Tythacott argues that in many ways the Surrealistswere ‘ahead of their time,’ but contends that despite their best efforts they were caught in the ideological web of Western cultural imperialism. The scope of Tythacott’s study is greater and the data rich, but ultimately her

interpretation of it leads her to adopt an opinion which lines up with those of Spector, Archer Straw and Blake. Both Taoua and Tythacott pose firm commonalities

between the Surrealists’ views and those of their influences, for example Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Rimbaud, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Sigmund Freud and James Frazer.66 _{The imputation that the Surrealists faithfully subscribed to the ideas of their}

intellectual heroes is a weakness in the arguments. The third text discussed in this section is an essay, ‘Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of “Reason”: Whiteness, Primitivism and Négritude’ by Amanda Stansell.67 _{Stansell shares some of the views}

of Taoua and Tythacott, but provides a much more positive view of Surrealism’s power to confront racist stereotypes, and her perspective is linked in important respects to those authors represented in my next chapter.

In ‘Of Natives and Rebels…’ Taoua describes the Surrealist’s primitivism, posing an inextricable connection between their preoccupation with the Unconscious and their interest in non-Western cultures. She says they looked to both to challenge the alienating aspects of their own culture, and she dubs this tendency ‘vanguard primitivism.’ She wishes to claim that primitivism was instrumental for defining essential Surrealist concepts, principally the Unconscious, arguing that the pitfalls of

64 _{Phyllis Taoua, ‘Of Natives and Rebels: Locating the Surrealist Revolution in French}

Culture,’ South Central Review 20 (Summer – Winter, 2003), 67 – 110.

65

Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

66 _{The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, published in 1890 was written by}

Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854 – 1941). French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Brühl (1857 –1939) wrote How Natives Think (1910). He distinguished between the ‘primitive’ and the Western mind, arguing that the primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, and doesn’t address contradictions.

67

Amanda Stansell, ‘Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of “Reason”: Whiteness, Primitivism and Négritiude,’ in Raymond Spiteri and Donald La Coss, eds., Surrealism,

vanguard primitivism ‘are not peripheral to the Surrealist movement but rather embedded in the very logic of Surrealism.’68

During the interwar years [writes Taoua], vanguard primitivism became a trend: it was a fashionable expression of cultural desire; an affiliation with elsewhere born of disillusionment. This imaginary space of dissidence – a place to sit aside (dissidere) – is a historical abstraction predicated on multiple forms of remoteness: formal, cultural, temporal and geographical. References to non-Western cultures in these terms became part of an avant-garde cultural idiom that was influenced by Pablo Picasso’s discovery of African masks and the formalist experimentation to which his Africanist epiphany led. During the 1930s, an aesthetic interest in non-Western cultures among Parisian artists directly contributed to the development of an ethnographic study of the distant lands from which the objects in the Trocadéro came…. Surrealism actively participated in this ongoing process of cultural

exploration and incorporation with a range of publications from Philippe Soupault’s novel Le nègre (1927) to essays on “la mentalité primative” in Surréalisme au

service de la revolution (1933).69

A weakness here is that Taoua does not discriminate between Surrealism and other ‘vanguards’. In referring to Picasso’s work of the 1910s, Taoua rather

indiscriminately rolls it together with Surrealism. Other lapses into broad

generalisations about ‘vanguard primitivism’ and her connections between Rimbaud and Surrealism, and Cubism and Surrealism, blur, rather than clarify, her attempt to distinguish a specifically Surrealist primitivism from other modernist tendencies. The question as to just where Surrealism’s ‘embedded’ primitivism is locatable and self- evident proves difficult for her to answer convincingly. Taoua refers to one clear instance, but some of her points of reference are no more compelling than those we have already reviewed.70 _{She discusses Soupault’s Le nègre in a way that closely}

accords to Blake’s analysis above, by conflating the idealization of the black character by the novel’s white protagonist with the values the author. She too takes Soupault to task for his ambivalent idealisation of the ‘primitive Other’, rather than crediting his writing with any measure of critical perspective by interpreting the ambivalence of his novelistic characterisation of cross-cultural confrontation as strategic. Like Blake, Taoua neither pauses to reflect upon the appropriateness or otherwise of considering Le nègre as an exemplification of Surrealism, nor the obstacle its literary status as a novel might impose for making imputations from it about Surrealist primitivism.

68 _{Phyllis Taoua, ‘Of Natives and Rebels...’, 70.} 69 _{ibid., 69}

70

Taoua quotes the passage I have quoted above, from André Breton’s ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’ (translation of ‘Situation surréaliste de object’), p. 76, in which he refers to the uninhibited imaginations of ‘primitive people and children.’

Elsewhere too, Taoua’s exposition of Surrealist primitivism strains under the pressure of its high level of imputation. She tries to go beyond the explicit textual references to primitivism in Surrealism, which are few, to extract more subtle and implicit indications of primitivism, saying,

Beyond the artist’s desire to find a new skin – “se faire une peau neuve” – which was inspired by an interest in liberating the subject from cultural baggage and reconnecting with a wild, untamed self, other more subtle traces of this cultural field are implicitly operative.71

This approach seems problematic. Certainly, Gauguin could be viewed through this prism. So could the young Leiris, whose ethnographic excursion to Africa can indeed be construed as seeking a new skin, à la Rimbaud, but he quickly came to see the absurdity of this himself, and this realisation forms part of his ethnographic self- critique. The motivation to find a new skin seems to me to apply less well to other Surrealists.72 _{They did not seek to ‘go native’ but, as Taoua asserts herself, to plumb}

the Unconscious. This relates far more closely to Freudian psychoanalysis than with the idealism, say, of Rousseau. It is through an analysis of the First Manifesto that Taoua tries to develop her claim that the unconscious for Surrealism is romanticised and primitivised:

An idealized primitivity representing that which comes before Western education and the process of acculturation links the unconscious and “primitive” cultures for the Surrealists, who approach both terrains as sources of artistic inspiration.73

In her reading of the Manifesto, Taoua imputes the presence of Rousseau’s noble savage, an idea, she says, that ‘undergirds Breton’s social criticism, which values the native instincts in human beings which are ostensibly corrupted by education and the alienating experience of acculturation into the French middle class.’74

By their very nature, Breton’s manifestos of Surrealism are pregnant with latent meaning, meaning not-yet-manifest, and they invite us to read them associatively. Nonetheless, I find Taoua’s evocation of Rousseau’s looming ghostly presence in the Manifesto to be misplaced. The Manifesto makes its own architecture and

scaffolding apparent: it brims with references that genuinely do ‘undergird’ it, but in its pantheon of imaginary forebears and collaborators, we do not find Rousseau.

71 _{ibid., 70.}

72 _{Until the Second World War, few of the French Surrealists travelled extensively, and not in}

a manner of extended immersive journeys. During and after the war this was to change, with several Surrealists taking exile in the United States, most of them returned to France after the War. Max Ernst lived in Arizona, with his wife the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, from 1948 until 1953 when he resumed living in France. See also p. 108, f.n. 5.

73 _{ibid., 76.} 74 _{ibid., 74.}

Moreover, Breton does not argue that human beings are corrupted by education per se, but specifically objects to the prevailing model of French education and its foundational positivist values, which, he argues, atrophy the imagination. Taoua continues to pick through the text of the First Manifesto, imputing necessary links between the concept of the Unconscious and a romanticised ‘primitive Other’. She points to the way Breton refers to ‘human exploration’ into the Unconscious and, in his use of language, she imputes a link with imperialist voyages of discovery. Even if this metaphorical undercurrent were there, it would be difficult to argue that it demonstrates that Breton subscribes to a colonialist ideology. In a similar mode of conflation, Taoua points to the Unconscious being linked to étranges forces – strange or foreign forces – and so she infers in the First Manifesto the familiar overlap between the ‘Dark Continent’ of the Freudian Unconscious. Certainly, Surrealism has at its very basis a concern with Otherness at a psychological and cultural level, and these concerns were cultivated through their interest in psychoanalysis and ethnography, but they responded to ideas on their own terms, seldom in an orthodox fashion. Taoua’s level of analysis and her method of trying to read Surrealist expression against its grain seems forced and reductive, seeking as it does to equate Surrealism to the ideas of its sources and historical influences, to which it was seldom faithful. The same problem besets Louise Tythacott’s Surrealism and the Exotic.

Tythacott’s book has great documentary strength. It marshals data that has not been catalogued before. The archival referencing behind Surrealism and the Exotic is comprehensive, and this thesis is indebted to the bibliographic sources relating to primary texts in this area of study. The powers of the book’s interpretation and critique are less compelling. Its main contribution to the field of enquiry lies in its third chapter, which details the involvement of some of the Surrealists in the acquisition of tribal objects for the Parisian marketplace and their relationships with the leading commercial galleries that dealt in these objects. Tythacott’s account of the various Paris dealerships that traded and exhibited imported cultural objects gives a clear idea of the sheer volume of artefacts being imported to satisfy the growing popularity for exotica. The picture that emerges from her discussion is that a number of notable figures in Paris’s artistic and literary circles supported the dealers. There was a closely interconnected network of artists and writers participating in the business and scholarship attached to the dealing galleries. Presently I will return to Tythacott’s discussion of the dealers to draw out some of the implications of her

study into this aspect of commercial activity. I view other aspects of her approach less favourably, and I will address these now.

Tythacott argues that despite their intentions to disavow nationalism, imperialism, and racial inequality and against their critiques of evolutionary thought, the

Surrealists simply inverted social Darwinist hierarchies and placed ‘the primitive’ at the top of a scale of human creative achievement, rather than at the foot of such a ladder.75 _{She describes Surrealism as ‘torn by contradictory impulses, oscillating}

between modernist and more progressive views’.76 What is more (consistent with the way I understand Taoua’s study) she declares that ‘many Surrealists remained locked within the framework of early twentieth-century Eurocentric primitivist references’.77 However, she praises the Surrealists for being some of the first to challenge ‘the lowly position accorded to non-Western peoples in the West.’78 _{‘Thus’, she writes,}

[W]e encounter a paradox here – that the Surrealists were, on the one hand, progressive and radical, and on the other, fixed within the world-view of their time. Though bounded by prevailing cultural concepts – evolutionism, psychoanalysis, primitivism – they continually problematised them. They turned to the latest

theorists to construct their image of the primitive. They drew on the then progressive ideas of Freud and Lévy-Bruhl. Yet while disavowing the discourses of evolutionism and aesthetic primitivism they constructed in their place equally problematic

discourses of the fantastic, the magical and the mythical. Though their radicalism enabled them to stand outside some of the dominant bourgeois ideologies of European modernist society, they never totally broke free, of the boundaries of their own (largely French) race, language and culture. This book, then, has a double

mission – to expose the Surrealist’s idealization of the primitive, yet also to locate and understand Surrealism within the parameters of its time.79 [My italics]

Tythacott’s ‘double mission’ seems to amount to a single mission: that is, to show that in their idealization of the primitive and their reliance on received ideas, the Surrealists ultimately failed in their avowed intention to reject and subvert the French imperialist values of their day. The scope of her study and the methods she uses do not uphold the bald claims that she makes. For instance, though in the passage above she cites Freud and Lévy-Bruhl as ‘progressive theorists’ who inspired the

Surrealists, she offers no discussion of the ways in which the Surrealists departed from their views.80 _{It is a specious move to fully equate a Surrealist position with that}

75 _{Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.} 76 _{ibid., 11.}

77 _{ibid., 13.} 78 _{ibid., 12.} 79

ibid., 14.

80 _{Again, the interview between Leiris and Jamin is enlightening. Jean Jamin says, ‘I came}

of an influential source. Marx and Freud were Surrealist influences, but it is

commonly acknowledged that the Surrealist’s reception of their theories were partial and questioning. Much the same can be said about the influences of anthropology upon Surrealism. Over time, different Surrealists variously cited Fraser, Lévy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss and other anthropological influences. These are theorists whose

positions are by no means in fully accord with each other, and whose influences on Surrealism are by no means direct.

Tythacott points to the Surrealists’ engagement with procuring and collecting

artefacts as a fundamental contradiction in their ideological stance, and here I think is her strongest argument. She writes,

Surrealists were fervently anti-colonial and anti-capitalistic, intrinsically opposed to the plundering of indigenous cultural wealth for the European market. Nevertheless, they amassed as much as they could from the colonial metropolis. We have seen how [the Parisian art dealer] Guillaume acquired his stock of African objects through his contacts with colonial rubber companies, and from advertisements placed in the colonial press. No doubt the Surrealists too would have been aware of such modes of acquisition. For all their anti-colonial proclamations, the Surrealists’ ethnographic collections blatantly mirrored the geography of French colonial possession. These collections, in other words, were predicated upon the very colonial and capitalist distribution networks they despised.81[My italics]

The Surrealists’ various points of engagement with the fashionable trade in ethnographic objects raise questions about their values, and clearly do not accord with today’s standards. By the 1920s, for many on the left of politics, the colonial rubber trade was ignominious and Tythacott argues that the trade in ethnographic objects was a sideline of the rubber trade. In the case of the dealer Paul Guillaume, the link between the rubber trade and the trade in exotic objects is apparent. Guillaume established his commercial gallery in the 1910s and, before that, he had been an employee in a rubber tyre firm when Joseph Brummer, a collector and dealer, approached him to procure objects for him through Guillaume’s colonial contacts. Guillaume went on to become a highly prestigious dealer between the wars, amassing his own extensive tribal art collection. He was particularly notable because he cultivated scholarly and artistic interest in his business dealings, and published a good many informative catalogues for his exhibitions, which became world-

renowned. Apollinaire, for example, wrote a preface to a publication by his gallery. If we take on board the connection between the rubber trade and the trade in tribal

banned column, as well as Durkheim!’ to which Leiris replies, ‘Yes but Lévy-Bruhl was inspiring to me, not for the surrealists.’ See Jamin, op cit., p. 161.

objects, the practice of collecting these certainly seems at odds with an anti-colonial political stance.

It was Charles Ratton, who began to collect in the 1920s, who forged close links with anthropologists and the Surrealists. He placed advertisements in La Révolution surréaliste from 1927 and worked with Tristan Tzara on an exhibition of nearly three hundred objects. He also organised an auction of objects from Breton and Éluard’s collections in 1931. Tythacott details how the Surrealists’ paths crossed with other dealers too. The collector Doucet employed Breton and Aragon.82 Breton later opened his own commercial gallery, the Gradiva, which sold exotic objects as well as Surrealist art.83 Paul Éluard,84 for his part, travelled as a buyer for Ratton, and Tzara and other Surrealists occasionally worked for various dealers and collectors.85

The Surrealists acquired objects for their own private collections. They used them in public exhibitions, and they sold them for profit. I think it must be conceded that these aspects of their practice do not square with the values that many people hold today. However, I see the need to question whether the Surrealists’ collecting habits nullify their moral stance with regard to colonialism, and according to what moral authority. Few are immune from similar criticism. If we opt to castigate the

Surrealists for buying and selling exotic objects and dismiss their views on the basis of the value position that this trading could imply, as historical actors we should be aware that as individuals our own consumption patterns are implicated in a system of production and trade that has not shaken off the colonial past.

While Tythacott usefully questions the Surrealists’ complicity in the trade of exotic goods, her argument is marred by tendencies for overstatement and selectivity. She maintains, in the passage quoted above, that the Surrealists amassed as much indigenous cultural wealth from the colonial metropolis as they could, as though acquisitiveness was their motivating factor. There is evidence to support the fact that some of the Surrealists were very canny in their collecting and dealing, but they were not greedy or venal. It is hardly the case that they hoarded vast quantities, and many