Friday, February 24, 2006

The Nietzschean Metamorphoses and Surrealism

2006-02-17
The primary texts I draw from in this essay are from the early 20th century Martiniquan literary journal Tropiques. I refer to English translations found in the 1996 anthology, Refusal of the Shadow.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes a parable of metamorphosis. The metamorphosis is not of the body, but of the spirit. The spirit begins as a camel “that would bear much” and transforms into a lion “who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert”. The lion's power is “the creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred ‘No’ even to duty”. Then finally the lion must become a child, “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘yes’”. This description of the development of the human spirit, and likewise, human society, finds an expression in the philosophy of Surrealism.

In Introduction to the Marvellous, René Ménil argues that at any particular point in history, there are certain actions that are appropriate, or powerful. These are those which are in accordance with the “nature” or the “world” (the zeitgeist—this can be taken metaphorically). Human understanding and action develop on a separate but mutually influential course with nature. An era is a period of history in which certain actions and understandings prevail. When nature shifts, humanity follows, but not perfectly nor immediately. “History inevitably turns an era that is drawing to a close into a mockery of history.” During this transitional period, “legend, which is a living people's greatest truth, can no longer be distinguished from news items” (p. 89). When myth no longer correspond to experience, it is reduced to a lifeless and oppressive account; to mortmain. “The great ears of history do not result from the exercise of understanding,” (by which he means agreement), “which is the instrument of human solitude because it is an instrument of appropriation. They are the rewards for mankind’s temporary abandon to life’s powerful shocks. Individuals and peoples, as they integrate with history through their docility to life, thereby cease to restrain their destiny but, on the contrary, advance into their loves and epics with the secret complicity of the world.” (p. 89). It is by expressing the will of the world (as manifest in life’s shocks) that one achieves greatness.

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The reason that people lag behind the progress of nature is that they tend to fall into habits. They put undue faith in the beliefs and conventions of their societies, and do not recognize that they are doing so. They mistake their mores for universal laws and their beliefs for absolute truths. They are uncritical. This is a problem because the beliefs and behaviors that society prescribes and that individuals adhere to tend to be static and thus, even if they were originally appropriate to nature, they quickly become removed from it.

According to Ménil, “we” (meaning the authors of Tropiques) have willfully chosen certain values, namely “Liberty, life and poetry” (p. 174). An uncritical attitude is directly opposed to these values, and opens one up to delusion and exploitation, and historically has lead to imperialism and world war. Thus the impetus for change. Change occurs when individuals have experiences of insight that allow them to realign their beliefs or actions with what is true or appropriate to nature, as opposed to society. These realignments are called “shocks”, and they are precious.

Surrealism
Surrealism is an attempt to systematize the production of shocks so that one can regularly brush away the limitations of thought that would otherwise accrue. Surrealism is thus a kind of mental hygiene.

In the twentieth century, the most destructive mortmain was that of rationalism. It may have been necessary and appropriate to the Enlightenment, but in the modern era, rationalism is an anachronism. Logic stopped being just a useful tool and became a world-view. Logic considered itself, saw clarity and division, and by analogy, took this to be the nature of existence. Through this illogical presumption, those who considered themselves logical started to behave very illogically. This hypocrisy made men into parodies of themselves, and the natural spirit demanded transcendence and integration. “When Breton created Surrealism, the most urgent task was to liberate the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called reason” (Suzanne Césaire, p. 124).
And in Breton’s own words:
Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain mental point from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily. And one would search in vain for a motive in surrealist activity other than the determination of that point.
The rationalistic dichotomizing of reality is the first attitude that Surrealism attacks, but Surrealism is not limited to a critique of rationalism. Nor should it be confused with a mystifying ideology. At another time, that which is accepted as “real” may take a completely different appearance, and to be “sur-real” a person must go beyond that.


And how does Surrealism go about its task?

Humor
The power of humor is negation. Humor is a revolt against the values asserted by society. Humor can be bitter, because it reveals the bitterness of our circumstances, “the chasm separating what we are from what we imagine we should have been.” (p. 162). But although it is painful, it is not hopeless. “Humor is precisely the awareness of our diminished and restrained life as well as a revenge against this diminution and restraint and the triumphant cry of the liberated mind.” (p. 162-163). In the recognition of our failure and delusion, we gain independence, and the possibility of new beginnings. There is a transcendent self, a “critical spirit” which transcends the “circumstantial, everyday ego” (p. 163) and makes the transformation possible. This is the part of the individual that is directly connected with nature. “Poetry – whether surrealist or not – is necessarily, in as much as it achieves a certain sincerity, humorous.” (p. 168). Humor is the mark of sincerity because it is the result of acknowledging the folly and imperfection in ourselves as well as our society. It is the irony of our tendency to reify beliefs, despite an acknowledgment of their transience.

Humor has the power of mockery, which is the power to destroy rhetorically. It is a dangerous weapon. “The age is singularly advantageous for an art of humour: the decline of societies and the accompanying difficulties present ideal conditions for it... It is a matter of demoralizing this society, discrediting it, ridiculing it, and making it feel ashamed of itself. In the final analysis we must cause it to lose consciousness of its rights, among which is its right to exist... Art is capable of this feat of strength.” (p. 174). Dada was an application of total humor, but through its totality, it destroyed itself. “Dada was absolute negation and killed itself according to an implacable logic. It made a short circuit of its humour within which it placed itself and its death resulted from this electrocuting force.” Dada’s weakness was its nihilism. Nihilism is ultimately a weak position because although it can destroy old values, it does not know what to do next. It founders in apathy and doubt.

Ménil intends to learn from Dada and not repeat its mistakes. He seeks to “reinvent Dada but in a dialectical way in order to sublate it.” He wields humor as a “miraculous weapon”1, in service of the new values he asserts. “We are people for whom the external world exists and it is not a matter of generalizing mockery to the point of making a desert of our faith. There are questions about which we have refrained from joking. Liberty, life, poetry.” (p. 174). Humor is like Nietzsche’s lion. It destroys old values through its power of ridicule (which is the power of recognizing the absurd). But Ménil is not satisfied merely to be the lion. He will not stay in a land destroyed, but passes on to a world of new values; he becomes, in the Nietzschean sense, a child. How does one become a child?

The Marvellous
The marvellous is an imaginary world “which (unlike the world of real life) finally responds to our fundamental desires and has been constructed accordingly.” (p. 90). The marvellous is a land where “everything is possible”, that is “governed only by the pleasure principle” (p. 91). “The fundamental properties of the marvellous are the very ones that analytic psychology determines as being characteristic of the feelings. If the tale ignores contradictions, it is because the feeling from which it has sprung in the irreducible unity of this intuition, no more contain contradictions than the life whose every moment contains affirmation or denial.” (p. 92). As Césaire says in Poetry and Knowledge, “In the image, A can be not-A” (p. 142). But the marvellous is not just a fantasy. It is “the most stunning revenge we have... against a world that depresses us to the extent that it is in thrall to practical reason.” (p. 91). It is revenge because it allows us to escape, not in the sense of delusion, but of creation. What are called the inevitable struggles of the world are often the product, not of nature as such, but of the beliefs and consequent actions of man. Thus it is the role of art to liberate the minds of individuals, and to realign reality, piecewise, with the superior futures of their imaginings.

“The marvellous is the image of our absolute liberty. But a symbolic image... a compromise... between our deepest tendencies and external necessities” (p. 92). The marvellous succeeds, but not universally. It effects individuals one at a time. It comes unexpectedly, violently, showing man how he has failed and thus enabling him to succeed. “Marvels appear only at the moment when life, in the emotion felt, truly grasps man so as to throw him unwillingly outside the habitual and common conditions of life into unknown and more profound conditions” (p. 92). That which is marvellous is only so at particular times (when it is in accordance with the zeitgeist) and for particular people, who are open to its shocks.

The marvelous occurs in two main manifestations: stories, which are “those cultural expressions that are determined by the life of a people and not tales deliberately composed by an individual”, and poems, which “represent the individual marvellous” (p. 93). “Everyone within a given society can relate to the world created by the story... the spell effected in society through the poem is generally less stable and of a less general scope.” (p. 93). “Stories are a compromise, on the one hand between our deepest tendencies and the external (especially social) necessities, and on the other between these tendencies themselves.” (p. 92). A story can express an enduring truth of human nature, or it can serve a political or financial agenda. We have tendencies both towards greatness and pettiness, selfishness and generosity. All things that motivate us abstractly (that is, beyond immediate physical happiness) are the result of the marvelous.

“In a divided society, the social marvellous is as oppressive as physical reality is, for instance, for some individuals. In a harmonized society the individual marvellous and the social marvellous, although not interchangeable, are reconciled in the effervescence of an exalted social life.” In a divided society, which Ménil certainly believed he was in (as of 1942, and I would assume still as of today), the divide exists between those who are “in tune with their times” (artists, philosophers, and all those who are creative and critical of the status quo) and those who are alienated from their times (the middle class, the masses). The masses only admire “the marvellous of bygone ages”, which is “ready-made or, more accurately, depleted... a sort of cultural waste product”. Those who are “in tune” are moved by the “lived marvellous, a moment that is unique and cannot be detached from an inspiring becoming”, and “which constitutes the keynote of the age” (p. 93). Those who buy calendars of surrealist paintings. but who disdain contemporary art movements are participating in a depleted marvellous. The stories that the masses subscribe to (i.e. materialistic happiness) are oppressive to “some individuals”, by which he means artists, himself, etc. Because he never experienced it, Ménil’s theory of a “harmonized society” exists really just as a hypothetical of what life would be like in one of the “great eras” of civilization, where “life's powerful shocks” keep us awake and ever vigilant. In our era, an “exalted social life” can only be experienced in small groups, when those that possess a shared sense of the marvellous gather. The production of Tropiques was very likely such an occasion.

The internal experience of the marvellous “lives in the mind with the full force of its emotion and... is consequently inseparable from the human body which actualizes it in time and space.” This experience is “crucial to the being to whom it appears... to whom it is specific... The liberty it represents is the liberty of this being.” (p. 94). The marvellous are the stories believed by people, and also the experiences and actions of people in response to those beliefs.

Conclusion
The metamorphic process that Nietzsche describes occurs both in individuals and in societies. The process is cyclical and ongoing. The camel represents the majority of history, the time when individuals accept the rules and judgments of their society and with all their strength uphold them. This is the normal mode of the human mind, where work is possible. In mental revolution, as in physical, it is hard to provide the necessities of existence. The camel is necessary to live in the world. But in the same way, if one stays a camel, one quickly becomes detached from the world which carried on without him. Surrealism is a method by which one can “keep up” with the movements of the world. Humor is a tool for those who are dissatisfied with the stories they currently have. Humor is the Lion roaring fiercely to silence the myths that are no longer useful or beneficial. The Child inscribes new ones with the power of the marvellous. In the dynamic individual, these metamorphoses continue over and over again. The first task of Surrealism is to continually embrace, overthrow, and recreate one’s values; to operate in alignment with the greater forces of the world; to be free. But freedom of belief is not enough. Mental life is only half of human existence, and one must strive to create an external world conducive to freedom. As Breton says “To illuminate the world, liberty must incarnate itself and to do so needs to reflect and recreate itself ceaselessly in the world.” The second task of Surrealism is to apply one’s new values to life itself, to “integrate the marvellous into real life in such a way as to reach some grandeur”. When we “inscribe [myth] onto every banality” (p. 95), only then will life and meaning be coincident. When all of our labors are directed towards liberty, only then can we call ourselves free. To achieve these goals—that is the surrealist quest.

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