From the Walls of Factories to the Poetry of the Street: Inscriptions ...

© Caroline Levitt, 2011
Writing in 1967, Philippe Soupault recalled the impulses that drove his and Breton‟s early
collaborations and experiments with dreams, notably Les Champs magnétiques (1920):
We were struck by the remarkable importance of images and compared those with which
popular language is punctuated to those which the poets worthy of that name had created
and to those which illuminated our dreams … These experiments led us to consider poetry as
a liberation, as the unique possibility of giving to the spirit a freedom that we had neither
known nor hoped to know except in our dreams and of delivering us from all logical devices. 9
Soupault draws a connection between two pertinent themes: firstly, that of imprisonment, describing
dreams and the poetry that is inspired by them as a means of liberation; secondly, the relationships
between high and low culture, between „langage populaire‟ and poetry, that are so essential to the
unconventional poet‟s interest in graffiti. A little later in the same text, Soupault commented that it was
„in memory of Apollinaire‟s poem, “Onirocritique,” that we wanted to pay him homage in adopting the
term surrealism,‟ and that the term had little to do with Apollinaire‟s 1917 „Drame surréaliste,‟ Les
Mamelles de Tirésias. 10 The term „onirocritique‟ translates roughly as „dream analysis,‟ or alternatively
„dream analyser.‟ Apollinaire‟s poem of this title was first published in La Phalange, no. 20, 15
February 1908 and then as the epilogue to the 1909 edition of his L’Enchanteur pourrissant.
The poem includes intense, detailed descriptions of impossible scenarios and natural
phenomena, and whilst it has been recognized that it is too carefully structured to be a genuine récit
de rêve („description of dreams‟), 11 its intense yet mystical tone, which epitomises what Apollinaire
referred to as „surnaturalisme,‟ would later characterise much of Breton and Soupault‟s automatic
writing, in particular Les Champs magnétiques. 12
When it appears at the end of L’Enchanteur,
„Onirocritique‟ represents the victory of imagination over the inconsistencies of mortal existence.
L’Enchanteur narrates the imprisonment of Merlin (the son of a devil and a virgin) in a tomb, his dead
body rotting but his immortal spirit living on. In the fantasy described in „Onirocritique,‟ the narrative
fluidly passes from place to place and image to image, resembling the manipulation of the plausible
that can be achieved, as Breton would later stress, through the dream state. As night falls, we read
that „A hundred seamen met me and having led me into a palace, they killed me there ninety-nine
times. I burst out laughing at that point and danced while they cried. I danced on all fours.‟ 13 Not only
has the narrator (perhaps Merlin, or perhaps the poet) reached a state of such intense imagination
that plausibility and even death no longer have any power, but the primitive, bestial state represented
by being on all fours is triumphant over those supposedly in authority. It is now the prisoner who
dances, whereas before the „lady of the lake,‟ holding Merlin captive, had danced on his tomb.
When Breton writes of the absence of convention and restriction at the start of his 1924
Manifeste du surréalisme, he attributes to the shedding of such regulations the ability, through the
freedom of imagination, to live several lives at once, overcoming, in fact, both mortal existence and,
ultimately death. 14 The child, or the primitive, holds more power than those who have been weighed
down by the codes of civilisation. Through the practices that Breton goes on to describe in the
manifesto, he reaches a state in which, he claims: „The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as
little impression on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions.
Existence is elsewhere.‟ 15 Similarly, Breton comments of Nadja that for her, „I don‟t think there can
have been much difference between the interior of an asylum and the exterior.‟ 16 Despite the freedom
of Nadja‟s imagination, Breton is nonetheless forced to confess that „there must, unfortunately, be a
Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9, Summer 2011 4