KATE KHATIBit is surrealist. It is crucial to realize that the decades-long language game that ensued
after the ‘‘discovery’’ of automatism has a practical, everyday application. Breton, Sou-
pault, Aragon, Peret, and later the Rosemonts, following in the footsteps of Lautre ́amont,
realized that poetry—and here we mean something more than the setting down of rhyme
upon a page—had to havepractical truthas its goal: Lautre ́amont charged those who
followed him with the task of expanding poetry in such a way that it could enunciate
the relationships between primary epistemological principles and the secondary truths of
everyday life.^39 If the poetic endeavors that the surrealists undertook had to have practical
truth as their goal, and if, as Penelope Rosemont and others have suggested, surrealism
can be seen as a revolutionary form of community, then meaning must be of the utmost
importance in the surrealist world, rather than something to be overcome or cast away.
Instead, what becomes apparent in surrealism’s engagements with the linguistic field is a
desire to recast language as flexible enough to allow words to cease to be inextricably tied
to justone,historically determinedmeaning. After all, surrealism is as much about leaving
a door always open for novelty as it is about anything else: if one proceeds always accord-
ing to the logic of chance, as the surrealists tried to do, even if they were not always
successful, then anything could happen—would happen, in fact—at any point, and with-
out warning.
Nowhere is this relationship between language, poetry, and surrealism better outlined
than in Breton’s ‘‘An Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality.’’ Written
in 1924 and published in pamphlet form in 1927, this little-known text is one of Breton’s
most prescient investigations into the political position of language in everyday reality.
First explaining, then lamenting the ‘‘immutable reality’’ to which language is doomed to
refer, he writes that words ‘‘deserve to have another decisive function.... I believe it is
not too late to recoil from this deception, inherent in the words we have thus far used so
badly.’’^40 Breton’s intention was to harness the poetic power of automatism—this text
was composed just months before the publication of the first ‘‘Manifesto,’’ where he
would outline the productive process of automatism for the first time—by ‘‘throwing
disorder into this order of words, to attack murderously this obvious aspect of things....
Language can and should be torn from this servitude.’’^41 The desire to rescue language
from its dependency upon an immutable reality did not, however, play out as a movement
away from meaning; rather, as things turned out, rescuing language meant allowing more
and more meanings to develop for the simplest combinations of words. In effect, it meant
leaving behind interpretation in favor of acceptance:
A rather dishonest person one day, in a note contained in an anthology, made a list
of some of the images presented to us in the work of one of our greatest living poets.
It read:
‘‘The next day of the caterpillar dressed for the ball’’... meaning ‘‘butterfly.’’
‘‘Breast of crystal’’... meaning ‘‘carafe.’’PAGE 630630.................16224$ CH31 10-13-06 12:37:24 PS