"The spirit of contradiction" has always been a part of surrealism,
both as a precept in its own right and as an instance of the
contradictions within the theories of the surrealists themselves.
So it is good to have a new and updated edition of Anna Balakian's
standard work which presents as cogent and persuasive an account of
this troublesome subject as we are likely to get. Most commentators
think of surrealism as the revelation of le merveilleux, the
autonomous appropriation of the imagination where lucidity is "the
great enemy," but Miss Balakian is surely closer to the matter when
she insists that "the surrealists on their road to the absolute
were in search of new myths to symbolize the new visions." They
were, in effect, above and beyond their quarrel with traditional
culture, specifically Western rationalism, attempting to change
man's apprehension of himself and his world, creating a revolution
in consciousness, integrating art and philosophy, art and science,
which would occur within society and history, not in a vacuum of
mere subjectivity. Miss Balakian is concerned primarily with the
achievement of poets such as Apollinaire, Crevel, Desnos, Reverdy,
and Breton, and her chapters on linguistic experimentation or
personal psychology are beautifully rendered. She is less
fortunate, however, when dealing with the movement's tricky
intellectual underpinnings, the whole series of cloudy doctrines,
spearheaded by Breton, which still, because of their inherent
ambiguity, give surrealism a bad name in Anglo-Saxon circles. Her
survey, nevertheless, is in every other way admirable and quite to
the point. (Kirkus Reviews)
First published in 1959, "Surrealism" remains the most readable
introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton,
Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of
the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of
early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to
symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and
industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent
history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of
the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and
her interviews with Reverdy and Breton. In a new introduction,
Balakian discusses the influence of surrealism on contemporary
poetry.
This volume includes photographs of the poets and reproductions of
paintings by Ernst, Dali, Tanguy, and others.
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