Surrealism in Britain: from the subversion of the déjà vu to the impossible authentic
Michel Remy�
O urrealism is what will be,” André Breton’s peremptory declaration demands Othat we should see in a surrealist painting or in a surrealist poem what is not, what is not yet already there, what is not “ déjà vu” or “déjà lu.” Surrealism is an across-the-board stigmatization of the déjà-vu on account of the latter’s capacity of deadening imaginative powers. However paradoxical it might be, from a surrealist point of view, the authentic -which one would expect to be the reverse of the déjà vu -imposes the same kind of closure and a logic which creates artificial and superficial dualistic categories. The same approach is also lodged at the centre of Breton’s conception of surrealist beauty. “Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be,” he writes at the end of Nadja. In other words, no existing critérium, no element which composes a work of art can be resorted to in order to qualify or disqualify its beauty. The convulsion -a term borrowed from clinical Freudianism -takes place between the viewer and the object at the very moment when the viewer sees the object or painting, and precipitates object and subject, the one and the other, the conscious and the subconscious together. If need be, we could also refer to Marcel Duchamp’s famous phrase, “the work of art is made half by the artist and half by the viewer.” The status of a work, then, is totally dependent on a viewer-to-come, suspended, so to speak, outside time and space, in expectation of that viewer. If that is so, if the past and present are always superseded by the future, what happens to the déjà vu as a category? Is it a category to be deleted? The same goes for the authentic: how can it be defined if we have no point of reference provided by a déjà vu ? How can it be pinpointed? Is it somewhere, already, waiting to be spotted? How can it be identified if the work refuses to be, right now, or simply, if the work is not because it is not yet7. It is clear that surrealism asks most urgently for the revision of these two notions.
Tanam n°47/20i4