The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Free Rein (La Clé des champs) by André BretonIrving Malin
André Breton. Free Rein (La Clé des champs). Trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996. 291 pp. $35.00.
This collection of prefaces, manifestos, and meditations written by Breton in the years 1936-1952 is required reading for an understanding of principles that continue to dominate writers who have probably never read his fantastic, oblique, and hallucinatory prose. His essays on “primitive art,” the “occult,” and dream-work have become so central to contemporary literature—to Wallace, Daitch, Scott—that we cannot realize how perverse they must have seemed when they were written. The essays contain wonderfully mad sentences, not completely reasoned aesthetic statements. He gives “free rein” to his love of language.
I offer a few examples. In “Caught in the Act” Breton writes about the strange second act of Faust: “In that virgin forest of the mind, which stretches on all sides beyond the region where man has succeeded in putting up signposts, beasts and monsters, barely less awe inspiring in their apocalyptic roles, keep on prowling. This goes to show how anxious we may be to see Gnosticism put back in its rightful place, after it has been so long decried as a Christian heresy.” (These sentences, in effect, are echoed in Harold Bloom’s wonderful reading of Faust II in The Western Canon.) Breton views perception as a virgin act, an act that forces us to see the apocalyptic forces of our own minds; he demands that we allow them to roam freely. He flirts with the devil, with doom, with finality. And isn’t his flirtation seen in much of our recent prose, film, art?
Breton is one of the new worshipers of primitive art, of insane art, of chil-dren’s art. He recognizes that they are all revelations; that they allow us to explore the unconscious (or preconscious) archetypes of the mind. He hails magic; he opposes it to the intellect: “Beauty demands that we enjoy most often before we understand, and its links with clarity are only tenuous and secondary.” And he discovers beauty in the cryptic, coded places we least expect to find them. He quotes from Swedenborg: “I saw a gathering of spirits. They wore hats on their heads.” He quotes from the Song of Songs: “Your teeth are like a flock of sheep even-shorn, coming back up from the washpen.” He quotes Basho: “A pepper / Give it wings / A red firefly.”
Although we usually think of Breton in conjunction with his contemporaries—with Cocteau, Max Jacob, Dalí—we have to see him as the explorer of all juxtapositions. And these explorations are remarkable; they demonstrate complex reevaluations of the Gothic novels, the hermetic texts of ancient Greece. He seeks salvation in beauty and although he is somewhat obsessive, he remains a brilliant observer of the creative process. He asks: “How are we to bring the Word back to the Beginning?” [Irving Malin]