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Replies to questions from Guy Dumur: We are all surrealists

[Interview for Le Nouvel Observateur]

Manuscript

Author

Authors Guy Dumur, André Breton
People cited Anna Balakian, Yosip Brodsky, Delescluze, Charles Fourier, Fulcanelli, David Hume, Alain Jouffroy, Lotus de Païni, Robert Rauschenberg, Rigault, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maximilien Robespierre, Clément Rosset, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philippe Joyaux, dit Philippe Sollers, Frédéric Tristan, Jean-Louis Bédouin, Eugène Canseliet, Daniel Cordier, Alfred Jarry, Benjamin Péret

Description

Published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 10 December 1964, draft typescripts and manuscripts of the interview between Guy Dumur and André Breton.

Published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 10 December 1964, the interview whose drafts we have here return to the theme of a supposed ‘vogue’ for surrealism that notably relates to is ability to ‘come across’, in other words to meet the aspirations of young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain in a more focused and aggressive way than art movements such as Pop Art, for example. From there Breton comes to the French political situation, notably a Left that is still enmired in its compromises with Stalinism. 

Signed handwritten manuscripts, Paris, 1^st December 1964
- 1 in-4° page of a typescript text of Guy Dumur’s questions.
- 4 numbered in-4° pages of a signed and dated manuscript in ink by Breton of the first draft of replies by Breton to Guy Dumur’s questions destined for publication in Le Nouvel Observateur issue of 10 December 1964, with many deletions and corrections.
- 7 numbered in-4° pages of manuscript signed in ink by André Breton of the definitive state of this text, in which Breton confirms the interest sparked by surrealism in France as much as in the USA, Czechoslovakia or Hungary. After expressing some reservations about the maturity of trends such as happenings or the nouveau roman and pointing out the limits of metaphysics, Breton returns once more to the historic and current shortcomings of sexual education.
‘Among the deeper causes of a renewed interest in surrealism, I think one should focus particularly on the rather marked affective scarcity we are currently experiencing. Whatever scope it assumed, existentialism above all tended to reconstitute the ‘civic’ person that the events during and around the Second World War had left in an impoverished state. [...] Sexual physiology presents such hazards that a specialist doctor whose name I forget, a renowned professor in the time of my youth, was very clear about this: had any student taken it upon himself to show him as something in a passably working state and, all in all, viable the array made up of the male and female genital apparatus, then he would have mercilessly rebuffed it.’
Published in Le Nouvel Observateur of 10 December 1964. [Auction catalogue, 2003]

Transcription sur le site Philippe Sollers/Pileface