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Interview by Dominique Arban

Manuscript

Author

Authors Dominique Arban, André Breton
People cited Charles Baudelaire, Paul Cézanne, Friedrich Hölderlin, Karl Jaspers, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Henri Beyle, dit Stendhal, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Bataille

Description

Manuscript of an interview with André Breton by Dominique Arban for Combat, May 1947.

This interview by Dominique Arban for Combat was published in May 1947. It would be reprinted in volume III of the Complete Works, p.599. Asked about the continuation of certain practices such as automatism, here Breton once again takes on ‘committed poetry’ and the Resistance poets, led by Éluard and Aragon, who were in the ascendent at that time in France. Dominique Arban’s questions, which went so far as to talk of failure, are telling of the way in which a certain section of the literary world of that era tended to view surrealism as moribund. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005] 

Signed handwritten manuscript, Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, 24 May 1947. 
2 in-4° manuscript pages, signed and dated in blue ink and titled in pencil by Breton, in response to the interview for the journal Combat: 
‘It is true that Hegelianism and Marxism have overturned traditional morality, and that many have taken advantage of this so as to grant themselves full license, for instance to lie, to demean, to kill… Just now we were talking about renunciation: isn’t it precisely Jaspers who says that this is the equivalent of an actual spiritual suicide?’
Numerous deletions and corrections. [Auction catalogue, 2003]

The interview was published in the 31 May issue of the journal Combat. [Atelier André Breton website, 2020]

Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski

Bibliography

André Breton, « La passion reste la constante du mouvement surréaliste », enquête Chemins de la poésie de Dominique Arban, in Combat, 31 mai 1947.

André Breton (Édition de Marguerite Bonnet avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre), Alentours I, Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, page 599.

Combat du 31 mai 1947, sur Gallica BnF