Cavalier Perspective

Auteur

Founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the surrealist movement, the poet André Breton was born in Normandy in 1896. A medical student at the outset of the First World War, Breton served in the army at a neurological ward, where he treated patients for post-traumatic stress, including Jacques Vaché, whose iconoclastic views influenced him considerably. In post-war Paris, Breton sought out writers like Apollinaire and Reverdy, began a periodical Littérature with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and helped form a French contingent of Dada under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. But already Breton and his friends were moving beyond the absolute negation of Dada to Surrealism, a movement rooted in pure psychic automatism, desire, chance, poetry, and the marvelous. Under Breton’s leadership, Surrealism became the most vital European avant-garde of interwar high modernism, its influence extending to Egypt, Japan, and the Caribbean. Exiled to the United States during the Second World War, due to the Nazi occupation, Breton would return to Paris in 1945 and continue to lead the movement until his death in 1966.

Texte du rabat

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time.

"For many ill-informed people, the name 'André Breton' is synonymous with surrealism. They are right. Without Breton, surrealism, even assuming it existed, would have been nothing more than a literary school. With him, it was a way of life."—Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the Metro

As leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.

Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.

More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

Contenu

Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952–1966
André Breton

Translated by Austin Carder
Introduction by Garrett Caples

Link
"You have the floor, young seer of things…"
On André Gide
Stalin in History
At the Right Time
Farewell, If I May
Shadow Not of a Serpent, but of a Flowering Tree
Letter to Robert Amadou
On Astrology
One in the Other

Examples of Definitions of the Game "One in the Other"
Implications of "One in the Other"
Appendix
New Elements of the Combined Dictionary "One in the Other"
I. — General Repertoire
II. — Historical and Geographical Section
Position of Melmoth
Suspension Bridge
Initial Small Talk
Darien the Damned
Everyday Magic
Forward to Ultramarines
Speech at the Meeting "In Defense of Freedom"
Surrealism and Tradition
Embers at Ceridwen's Cauldron
Response to a Survey: "Is sublime love the only one?"
On Magic Art
The Language of Stones
Flora Tristan
Too Much for Us?
Letter to Guy Chambelland Regarding Xavier Forneret
Speech at the "Conscientious Objectors Relief Gala"
On Robert Desnos
On Antonin Artaud
Far from Orly
Preface to Oscar Panizza's The Council of Love
Phoenix of the Mask
Response to a Survey on Space Exploration
Tribute
Drawbridge
Interview with Madeleine Chapsal
Belvedere
First Hand
Cavalier Perspective
Interview with Guy Dumur
Acknowledgements