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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 168 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
It’s a pity Ian Birchall uses his obituary for Pierre Naville (167 SR) as the occasion for a misleading attack on André Breton. It was Breton, not Naville, who took the exuberant anarchism of Dada and fashioned it into the revolutionary artistic and political current that surrealism became in the 1920s and 1930s. It was Breton who led the surrealists first into the Communist Party and then towards Trotskyism.
Naville split with Breton by insisting that the surrealist movement should dissolve itself into the party and renounce all independent work, posing a crude choice between Marxism and surrealism.
Breton, on the other hand, tried to find a synthesis between engagement in revolutionary politics and surrealism’s assault on the fetters binding the human imagination –n assault which he believed could only succeed once the proletarian revolution had transformed social conditions.
Who was right? Naville seems to have reflected the rigid Stalinist orthodoxy of the time. Breton, on the other hand, tried to build bridges between surrealism and Marxism, believing that surrealism could only flourish in the context of revolutionary politics.
This surely is the spirit of the Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art that Leon Trotsky produced in collaboration with Breton and Diego Rivera in 1938. Here, and in Trotsky’s letter to Breton on the independence of the artist, the mindless inflexibility of the Stalinists is firmly rejected. So too, by implication, is the reductionism of Naville.
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Jay Woolrich |
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