Blaggers unite! Unite under the banner of Surrealism! Embrace the irrational, and heed Breton’s call ‘to burst the drum of reasoning reason and contemplate the hole’.

According to the Surrealists, it was by marching to the ‘drum of reasoning reason’ that man met devastation in WWI. Led by Breton, Surrealism thus aimed for a life ruled by rationalism’s absence: the First Surrealist Manifesto defines ‘SURREALISM, n.’ as ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought.’ All artistic mediums were employed – automatic writing, poetry, painting, collage and film – to realise Breton’s belief in ‘a future resolution of (...) dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality’.

Blaggers should therefore laud the results of an avant-garde rebellion which harnessed chance and delighted in the unpredictable: inspiration came from Lautréamont, whose famous juxtaposition of objects as distantly derived as an ‘umbrella and sewing machine’ produced a surreal sense of ‘le merveilleux’. The International Surrealist Exhibitions of 1938, 1947, 1959, and 1965 attacked stifling convention, transforming gallery spaces into celebrations of eroticism, madness and black humour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Breton’s horror, the movement eventually found itself commercialised by Salvador Dalí, who Breton nicknamed ‘Avida Dollars’ - an anagram denouncing his mercenary ambition. Yet some bluffers may find fault with Breton himself: the dogmatic control he exerted over the qualification of Surrealist art saw the expulsion of Bataille and Artaud when they refused to pledge allegiance to the French Communist Party. This led to the formation of a dissident group whose pamphlet Un Cadavre, scorned Breton as the ‘Surrealist Pope’. Artaud did not join the disaffected, but his attempt to justify his refusal might make bluffers equally uncomfortable. His 1927 text À la grande nuit ou le bluff surréaliste claimed that the Surrealist project of unreason was being thwarted by bluffing itself: it decried ‘the logical development of Surrealism’, entailing a loss of ‘magic’ at the expense of party politics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A blagger's delight nonetheless: Bataille and Breton made peace in 1960 as mutual supporters of the Manifeste de 121- a petition signed by 121 Left wing anti-colonialist intellectuals calling for the French government to recognise the Algerian War as a legitimate struggle for independence.

 

Therefore Surrealist blaggers, remember this: Surrealism is synonymous with freedom!

See more in this series: A bluffer's guide to writing love poetry