The world has gone mad: the politicians are insane, the icebergs are melting, environmental disasters and religious fanatics are creeping out of every corner. Pandemics have erupted. Nature is quite reasonably standing up for itself. From time to time, it is good to have a bit of relief with Surrealism.
It was a hundred years ago that Surrealists discovered the truth: that many of the modern world’s calamities have their roots in an attachment to conventions and traditions, in a conviction that the rules of the game, as we have identified them, cannot be broken. That’s why they invented techniques to slightly rearrange the stale structures moldering in people’s heads. To let a bit of air into their brains.
Surrealist techniques have one great advantage: anyone can try them. They require neither talent nor diplomas. There are, of course, far more of them than the selection provided in this Handbook. But you’ve got to start somewhere.
While reading this Handbook, let yourself take a trip away from reality. Suppose that everything, or almost everything, is possible. Try out as many of the Handbook’s tips as you can. If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying. The results will exceed your wildest expectations!
How to Soar Above Reality: Fifty-Six Pointers
Automatic WritingSit by a table with a piece of paper and a pencil or pen. A computer makes a decent substitute. Clear your mind of all thoughts. Begin writing. Write as fast as you can; don’t think about what you write. If you get stuck, leave a space and keep writing. If you need some help getting started, choose a letter you’ll use to begin the first word after a moment’s pause. Don’t change anything; don’t fix any mistakes or stylistic errors. The work you produce might serve as a starting point for more structured pieces.
The Surrealists saw Lautréamont as a precursor to subconscious writing. In his first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
Trained as a medic, Breton tended to soldiers retreating from the front lines during World War I, and dabbled in pulling memories from their subconscious. Upon returning to Paris, he decided to test his method on himself. He conducted experiments with Philippe Soupault at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes. This was where The Magnetic Fields (1920) was written, the first piece of automatic writing and the first artistic text of Surrealism, which Aragon said was the work of a “two-headed author.” Though born of a creative fever, Fields required discipline from its authors: they spent nearly ten hours a day scribbling on paper. Sometimes Breton and Soupault alternated sentences, sometimes pages. Facsimiles of the manuscript confirm the legend:
Prisoners of drops of water, we are but everlasting animals. We run about the noiseless towns and the enchanted posters no longer touch us. What’s the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joy? We know nothing any more but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are as dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remain are these cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the tables are stickier than the pavements where our shadows of the day before have fallen.
Sometimes, the wind surrounds us with its great cold hands and ties us to the trees denticulated by the sun. All of us laugh, all of us sing, but nobody feels his heart beat any longer. Fever abandons us. The marvelous railway stations never afford us shelter any more: the long passages terrify us. So in order to go on living these monotonous minutes must be stifled, these scraps of centuries. Once we loved the year’s last sunny days, the narrow plains where our eyes’ gaze flowed like those impetuous rivers of our childhood. There remain nothing but reflections now in the woods repopulated with absurd animals, with well-known plants.
The towns we no longer wish to love are dead. Look around you. There’s nothing left now but the sky and these waste plots that we shall soon end up detesting. We touch with our fingers those tender stars which filled our dreams. Yonder, they told us that there were prodigious valleys: horse-rides forever lost in that Far West as boring as a museum.
Many writers, including Anaïs Nin, appreciated the associations generated in automatic poetry, which steered clear of truisms, mundanities, and pat phrases.
How Not to Commit Suicide
If by chance you should desire to end it all, take your time! Think of your loves and your friendships, the animals awaiting your help, the charms of nature, exquisite cuisine, and the galaxy of drinks, concerts, masterpieces of cinema and unread books that you’ve put aside for later. Take a look at the map of the world to see all the lands you’ve yet to visit. Recall those sweet times spent with your family, friends, and strangers on trains. At all costs keep far away from knives, ropes, weapons, razors, pills, pools of water, tall buildings, busy streets, subways, railway tracks, and bathtubs. Try not to block out morbid thoughts entirely (this is impossible anyway), but make your self-destructive urges serve creative ends. Pass them on to someone else by writing a story about a doppelgänger. Make a drawing that reflects a dreary mood. Snap your self-portrait with a noose, a fake revolver, or a cup of poison. Prepare an ambiguous response to journalists, who are always eager to tackle questions of mortality. Your darkest thoughts will produce strange artistic fruit. Put them on YouTube or wait until others do. But if you simply must commit suicide, at least spare some thought for the aesthetics.
In the 1920s, Parisian receptionists cast a wary eye over solitary guests with no baggage; one hotel became known as “Suicide Hotel,” while a bridge in Buttes Chaumont Park was “Suicide Bridge.” Newspapers were filled with detailed reports of suicides, both successful and failed.
The first issue of La Révolution surréaliste reprinted two dozen descriptions like this:
A DESPERATE WOMAN WITH AN UMBRELLA
Compiègne, 5 November. In Margny-aux-Cerises, Madame Biliard, née Marie Thiroux, fifty-three years of age, rose from bed at night, and then, taking a flashlight and an umbrella, threw herself into the well belonging to her neighbor, Madame Villette, from which her body was retrieved.
HE COMMITTED SUICIDE UNDER SUGGESTION
Stockbroker Henri Durand, Miss Hélène Delacroix, and her friend, Lucienne Bonnot, spent the night from September 3 to 4 raising the roof at a party on Avenue Jean-Jaurès. At around three in the morning, giving vent to a sudden surge of the blackest thoughts, the stockbroker cried:
“Lord! What a foolish life! What if the three of us were to commit suicide? . . . ” With those words, he pulled out a revolver and made a gesture as though he were about to shoot himself in the head. Yet his hand fell and he whispered:
“I haven’t the courage.”
“Coward!” Hélène shouted.
Upon which she grabbed the revolver and shot the stockbroker, who died on the spot. After this tragic event she immediately sobered up and handed herself over to the police. M. Lacomblez placed her before the court on charges of first-degree murder.
A DESPERATE MAN
M. Lemaire, age 26, lay down on the tracks near La Rapée–Bercy Station and a train severed him in half.
STRANGE SUICIDE
Brigadier Bessieux of the 10th Artillery Regiment in Nîmes lit three candles in the canteen, telling his friends there to stay with him. When the candles burned out, he asked them to leave at once, which they did. The brigadier went out after them, then shot himself in the head. Investigations are underway to find the cause of this strange suicide.
CRUEL SUICIDE OF A MOTHER AND TWO CHILDREN
Limoges, 9 June. In the village of des Faynes in Roche-l’Abeille county, Mme. Longuequeue, a widow aged forty-four, with her son, aged twenty-four, and daughter, aged seventeen, killed themselves with mole poison. When death was too slow in coming, the son tried to cut his sister’s throat, then he put a rifle to his head. The two women are in grave condition.
The Surrealists were, of course, fascinated by the abundance of irrational details in these reports.
When Paul Éluard vanished from Paris for half a year (see the section “Where to Travel” of the Handbook), friends whispered of suicide, especially given that the day before he disappeared off the face of the earth, he had signed a contract for what he declared would be his last volume of poems, titled Mourir de ne pas mourir. It was no accident that the poet’s return to Paris coincided with a Surrealist questionnaire, Is Suicide a Solution?, published in the second issue of La Révolution surréaliste in January 1925. “We live, we die,” we read in the introduction to the questionnaire. “What role does free will play in it all? It seems that suicides are drifting through a dream. We won’t explore the moral aspect. Is suicide a solution?”
Almost all the respondents decided that suicide was a viable solution, though not necessarily in their own case. Artaud made reference to his theory of social suicides: “I haven’t lived for a long time, I’m already a suicide. I mean, suicide’s been committed on me.” In suicide what he saw was “only a guess for the time being,” though he confessed that his life was an unbearable torment.
The questionnaire prompted a wave of indignation that did Surrealism no favors; from then on, some critics were all the more encouraged to pair it with nihilism. Meanwhile, only the poet René Crevel answered in the affirmative: “Death, which has tempted me on many occasions, was more beautiful even than fear of death . . . I wanted to open the door, but dared not . . . unable to find meaning in life, would I find the strength to seek it further, if I did not see the solution in a final, irreversible gesture?”
The notion of ending it all winds through Crevel’s work in its entirety, seeming to take the form of a conspiracy the writer plots against himself. “People who are intelligent—too intelligent (for it is the critical vein, the enemy of potential, that kills us)—are right to turn to the rope, the poison, or the revolver . . . Intelligence drives us to suicide . . . But is a suicidal obsession not the best weapon against it?” he asked ten years before he gave an unequivocal answer. His suicide had allegedly been read in the cards by Gala Dalí.
Crevel killed himself in 1935, the day before the opening of the International Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture (to which—owing to the scandal of Breton slapping Ehrenburg in the face—the Communist Party denied the Surrealists entry). Living out a scenario described in his first book, Détours—whose protagonist “forgot to put a match” to the stove after turning on the gas—he died after pinning a piece of paper to his jacket: “Please cremate my body. Loathing.”
Other Surrealists who killed themselves were Óscar Domínguez, Ghérasim Luca, Pierre Molinier, Jacques Rigaut, Kurt Seligmann, Unica Zürn, Wolfgang Paalen, and André Gaillard, a young poet infatuated with Gala.
In 1929, at thirty-one years of age, poet and dandy Jacques Rigaut, the tireless collector of matchboxes and author of Agence Générale du Suicide, known for the habit of destroying his own poems, took his own life. Before making his final step, he set up a color-coordinated composition of pillows around him. Eager not to bungle it, he measured the path of the bullet to his heart with a ruler. He spent a long time preparing his death, looking for the perfect moment and devoting the lion’s share of his literary output—amounting to not more than two hundred and fifty pages—to this very theme. “I will make a great corpse.” “Try, if you can, to arrest a man who travels wearing suicide in his lapel.” “The first time I killed myself, it was to get back at my mistress . . . The second time I killed myself was out of laziness . . . The third time . . . Suicide is very convenient . . . I would like to take Notre-Dame, love, or the Republic along with me. Suicide must be a vocation.” Man Ray turned out to be prophetic; he took Rigaut’s portrait in a crucified pose six years before his death. Four years after the publication of the questionnaire results, a posthumous article by Rigaut was released, containing the sentence: “Suicide must be a calling.”
The painter Óscar Domínguez predicted his own death in a self-portrait with slashed wrists. Twenty-seven years later, on New Year’s Eve of 1957, the macabre vision came true.
Two years later, Wolfgang Paalen followed him, shooting himself in the head. He chose the picturesque hills outside of Mexico City as a backdrop. His body was devoured by wild boars. This artist, whom Pollock so admired, spent the first part of his life in luxury, enjoying the riches his father earned from inventing the thermos. The latter part was overshadowed by his mother’s psychosis and the suicide of his two brothers.
Before taking her final step, Unica Zürn, a writer and painter whose sensitivity would have been too frail for any epoch, a psychiatric patient and the life partner and model of Hans Bellmer, sought “real meaning” in Kabbalah, the numbers six and nine, cloud symbolism, and the coincidence of apparently isolated events. She became a master of anagrams, but “real meaning” kept eluding her. In The Man of Jasmine, she described the process of drifting into madness with scientific precision, dulcified by an awareness of a possible flight into nothingness:
One morning when she is alone in this flat she discovers a firm hook in the wall above the kitchen door and a length of rope in the bathroom.
The small drop of courage, the short flicker of joy—gone. As she steps on to the chair in order to place her neck in the noose, she sees two cats directing their large, beautiful eyes at her and studying her. The cats yawn and stretch in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.
Fascinated by the leap into the darkness, she told the stories of the patients she met in psychiatric clinics—the unsuccessful or deceased suicides. The story of an insane girl who liked to draw, and who pulled her mother after her when she jumped out the window. The adventure of a fat madwoman who—leaping from the fourth floor with an infant in her arms—had such a lucky fall that the child was unharmed. A girl’s ill-fated attempt to cut her wrists, wherein she called for help at the last moment and had to pay to clean the blood-stained furniture. The successful suicide of a patient’s brother who left the clinic and no longer felt the desire to live.
Immersed in her desperate thoughts, the book’s protagonist and alter ego of the author was able to fool the doctors who tested her response to a photograph of a woman leaning over the railing of a bridge. She failed to kill herself by cutting her wrists at the hospital in Wittenau. During an attack of hallucinations, she saw herself as a scorpion stinging itself to death. Like Leonora Carrington, she tied her obsessions to political events, seeing another patient as a suicide who had come to Paris to set herself on fire in protest against the Vietnam War.
In Dark Spring, she depicted the Surrealists’ idealized motif of mad love à rebours. The epilogue forecast her suicide in 1970:
The sun is still shining, and the birds are singing. She has fallen into deep despair. The prohibition of the pool makes it impossible for her to see him again . . . Not to see him again means death to her . . . She is surrounded by enemies. Nothing but fences and obstacles. She looks out the window and thinks about her approaching death. She has decided to jump out of the window. If she jumped far enough, her body would gain enough momentum so that she could “die on foreign soil.” She would fall into her neighbor’s garden . . .
Her father keeps a loaded pistol on his bedside table. Has there been a time when he, too, has thought about killing himself? She has a foreboding that there is not a single person who has not already contemplated his or her own death . . .
Do happy people even exist? Right now, how many people on earth are standing at their windows, considering whether they should jump? She is flooded by a wave of pity for people, animals, and herself . . .
From the closet she takes her most beautiful pajamas and puts them on. One last time, she admires herself in the mirror. She imagines how her body will hit the ground, and how these beautiful pajamas will be covered with blood and earth.
There will be a deadly silence at the cemetery. People will look at each other conscious of their guilt: Do you not realize that this child has killed herself because of love? From that day on, parents will treat their children much more gently and lovingly, so the same fate will not befall them. And she thinks of the narrow hard coffin in which she cannot stretch out as in her soft bed. She has to lie in it as straight and rigid as a soldier. And what if the fall only injures her and she is saved?
Perhaps she will remain paralyzed for the rest of her life? . . .
She wants to look beautiful after she is dead. She wants people to admire her: Never has there been a more beautiful dead child.
Now her room is almost dark. Only a distant street lamp glows faintly through the window. Now she no longer cares whether she dies “on foreign soil” or in her own garden. She steps into the windowsill, holds herself fast to the cord of the shutter, and examines her shadowlike reflection in the mirror one last time. She finds herself lovely. A trace of regret mingles with her determination. “It’s over,” she says, quietly, and feels dead already, even before her feet leave the windowsill. She falls on her head and breaks her neck. Strangely contorted, her small body lies in the grass. The first one to find her is the dog. He sticks his head between her legs and begins licking her. When she does not move at all, he begins whimpering quietly and lies down beside her on the grass.
How did the Surrealists’ approach to suicide differ from their contemporaries’? Above all—as with other taboo subjects, like sex or phenomena that were not yet considered worth discussing, such as dreams—the Surrealists talked about suicide. They did not think it went beyond the moral code, nor were they interested in anecdotes or gossip about it. In the outcasts of society, in the madmen, naive artists, potential and actual suicides, they saw a sensitivity that was impenetrable to the guardians of normalcy. Antonin Artaud’s theory of “social suicides” (among which he counted Nerval, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Poe), condemned by those around them to alienation, insanity, and death, fit this vision of lunatics and suicides as outstanding individuals. They read the choice between life and death as the fullest embodiment of freedom. “Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose,” Breton wrote of Jacques Rigaut in the Anthology of Black Humor.
Most of the Surrealists, however, only spun fantasies of suicide; in Gisèle Prassinos’ short novel Le visage effleuré de peine, as many as seven people (attempt to) commit suicide. Man Ray had mastered the art of therapy. When Lee Miller left him, instead of mournfully hanging, shooting, or poisoning himself, he did all three at once. In a self-portrait of 1932, he gazes gloomily at a pistol loaded with a cigarette, a noose around his neck, and a fatal drink before him. He warmed up for this photograph with a portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse, his muse and lover, lying on the floor, pretending she had taken her own life with the contents of a shattered vial.
In the 1970s, Christian Zeimert staged his suicide in a similar spirit, dedicating the act to Roland Topor. He photographed himself with a noose around his neck and a gigantic fake tongue lolling from his mouth, about to desperately cut it off with a huge pair of scissors. Topor, for his part, killed not himself but his doppelgänger, in the short story “The Corpse in My Bed.”
Leonora Carrington had quite a firm opinion when it came to taking her own life. She rejected the idea for a simple reason: she was too curious to know what tomorrow might bring.
