Mad Love Prophecy

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Retrospection and Prophecy in theStructure of Mad Love

Roger Bellin

Princeton University

André Breton’s Mad Love deserves more attention both as a literary narrative andas a set of theoretical propositions about art and politics. Tis article studies its narra-tive time-structure and examines its arguments, and asks what each of these aspects ofthe text can tell us about the other. Breton’s theoretical claims are put in conversation

with some key texts of later Marxist thought, and Mad Love’s story of prophecy andself-interpretation is read as a way of thinking about time.

Keywords: André Breton / Mad Love (L’amour fou) / narrative / temporality /Marxism

André Breton’s Mad Love is an intricately constructed book which projects

the initial appearance of a shambles, a book whose structure becomesclear only in retrospect and in rereading. Tough it is sometimes nowcalled Breton’s masterpiece, on first reading this slim 1937 book appears merelyto be a memoir or a self-analysis, a series of reminiscences loosely arranged inchapters and haphazardly interleaved with theoretical proclamations. Bretoncasts a glance back over key moments of his recently concluded affair with

Jacqueline Lamba, and comments on these moments with some of his earlierthoughts about love, revolution, and surrealism; the book gives us his theories ofchance and convulsive beauty, and then recounts in sequence the couple’s initialmeeting, the growth of their love, their marriage, and the birth of their daughterAube Its plot appears episodic and sequential especially when abstracted this


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2 Journal of Modern Literature

is spent in retrospective reinterpretation, and scarcely a sentence is narratedin the simple present or past of a conventional story. Rather than a narrative,

what the text presents is a series of fragments beginning from, and returning to,moments in a narrated life which exists primarily as a point of departure, as an

implicit structure behind them. Te exact structure of this departure varies fromchapter to chapter. In most of the book’s chapters a single episode is repeatedlyreturned to and reinterpreted: it begins with an allegorical dream whose mean-ing is expounded after it is told (Chapter 1); tells the story of an encounter withsuddenly meaningful found objects (Chapter 3); and it crucially reinterprets“Sunflower,” a poem written more than a decade earlier (Chapter 4). But par-allel stories also develop, unrecounted, occluded behind the text’s digressions:over the course of Chapter 5 Breton ascends Mount eide on enerife, and

over the course of Mad Love the life of Breton unfolds along with a structuringmetaphoric movement from night to dawn. Tese stories come to its readersfirst through the book’s self-interpretation. Te prophecy around which MadLove ’s plot centers takes place in interpretive time; the book narrates, in its trueplot, a prophetic structure of interpretation. It departs from narrative “life” toanticipate a future from which it can reflect upon itself in a retrospective glance.Constant self-reflection, then, is the text’s formal method. Te structure of thestory of Mad Love is inseparable from its conceptual work. Tough the book

is, as it claims, a contribution within a tradition of modernist and Marxistthought about time and history, the novelty of its theoretical contribution canonly be assessed by reading that theory through the text’s narrative form. Tetheoretical, aesthetic, and political status of the time-structure of Mad Love , infact, must be the central concern of any reading of this text.

Mad Love ’s formal novelty has produced its symptoms in criticism, mostobviously in critics’ abiding uncertainty over its genre. While there is generalcritical agreement that Mad Love is not a “novel” in any conventional sense(Balakian 107), most criticism has ventured only negative comments about

the genre of Mad Love , noting Breton’s stated anti-aesthetic goal of refusingall genres. Maurice Blanchot summarizes: “In refusing, on the one hand, thegenre of the novel . . . and, on the other hand, refusing every other genre, . . . itis not to an aesthetic concern that André Breton wishes to respond; it is rathera much more decisive mutation he has in view” (412). On Blanchot’s insightfulreading, the text’s radical novelty is located in the structure of the encounter

with the unknown which it diagrams, and in the refusal of existing forms thatthis encounter required. However, this reading takes Breton’s position on form

at its word, and leaves the problem of the text’s genre underspecified.Other critics have generally tended, implicitly, to consider Mad Love either


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Retrospection and Prophecy in the Structure of Mad Love 3

and memoir at once (following the opinion that “the aesthetic of surrealism . . .is in no way separable f rom life” [Ades 183]). But the conclusion that the textis considerably more complex than this — more than a collection of theoreti-cal reflections interwoven with reminiscences — is suggested by its thematic

unity, by its precisely choreographed recurrences of ideas and vocabulary, bythe formal intricacy of each chapter’s structure and the connections betweenthe formally diverse chapters which structure the book as a whole. It is dif-ficult to separate theory from story, argument from plot, even at the level ofthe sentence. Te voice of the text’s narration dwells only briefly, momentarily,in each of its modes before shifting, unremarked, into another; the impersonaltheoretical voice drifts into personal recollection, recounting or analyzing aninterior experience, a memory or a dream, and back into abstraction.

Te narrator himself is elusive; though he is commonly assumed uncom-plicatedly to be Breton, the text’s narrator cannot simply be the man. He mustrather be a voice of Breton’s, an “aspect,” created by selection from the pluralityof his life, just as Mad Love argues the “aspect of the beloved” is chosen “succes-sively” (7–8). Once we note that, even read as biography, Mad Love is composedof a very partial selection from elements of Breton’s life — in particular, that

Jacqueline Lamba had separated from Breton before the composition of thebook’s closing letter, though the text nowhere notes this — the narrator’s status

becomes necessarily more complex. Nor is this question sufficiently addressedby simply reading Breton’s biography into the text, as though it were there, asdo some of its most eminent and sympathetic readers:

[]his is the story of Mad Love , which can be told now. Te first five parts are written . . . Suddenly, on September 6 [1936], there is a blow-up, and Jacquelineleaves Breton . . . When he finishes the last part of Mad Love , . . . he does not know

if she will return. Te grave tone of the letter, its wish for his daughter to be madlyloved , rings all the more solemnly. (Caws 57–58)

Here, the importation of Breton’s life into the narration of the text has led toa complete misrecognition of the tone of its final chapter. Te letter to Aube,

which is suffused with hope for the future, has been distorted into a funerealnote of “graveness” and “solemnity” by a reading which takes Breton’s actual,biographical life as invisibly present in the “story of Mad Love .” But the texthas obviously excluded from its story this part of his life’s story, though it doescontain a love narrative which shares many other features with the biographi-cal romance of Breton and Lamba. Te “story of Mad Love ” is told by Mad

Love , not discovered later as a portion of Breton’s biography. Tere can be noquestion of simply collapsing this text into a story of Breton’s life, or of seeing


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Mexico in order to be with rotsky (Balakian 170), founding an independentrevolutionary artists’ group there in 1938 (Collier 48).¹ In his Literature andRevolution (first published in 1922, more than a decade before Mad Love ),

rotsky criticized the “error” of the “Lef ” group of Russian futurists:

Te error . . . appears to us in its most generalized form, when they make an ulti-matum for the fusion of art with life. . . . [O]ne must have a little historic vision, at

least, to understand that between our present-day economic and cultural povertyand the time of the fusion of art with life, that is, between the time when life

will reach such proportions that it will be entirely formed by art, more than onegeneration will have come and gone. (136–137)

If we accept this critique as one to which Breton would have been sympathetic,²

there can be no question of reading Mad Love as a simply autobiographical work, nor as a diary of a life experienced immediately as though it were art. We must instead consider it as a text — perhaps it is a text whose project is toimagine a new mode of personal experience, perhaps a conjecture of the view-point of this distant future with “a little historic vision,” but it is not a simplerecord of one life. Te text creates its “André Breton,” and does not simplymerge with him.

A new reading of Mad Love might, then, begin here: what is the narrator’s

status in this text? Critics have found the text everything from deeply personaland individual (Caws calls its narrator “André Breton the man” [53]) to purelycollective and universalizing, in its dramatization of the uncanny (Cohen109) or the experience of love.³ But a more complicated relation between thenarrative voice and the character Breton — between the text and its subject inboth senses — is in evidence from the first pages of the text. Even as Mad Love begins, already in a scene of self-interpretation as Breton reflects on a visionor dream, “Breton” is, in his relation to himself, at least as much a third-personcharacter as a first-person narrator:

It’s because I’m absolutely forbidden [ formellement interdit ] to imagine, in sucha case, the behavior of any man at all — as long as he is a coward — this man in

whose place I have so often been, that I can’t think of anything more pathetic. Hescarcely is at all, this living man who would hoist himself up on this treacheroustrapeze of time. He would be unable even to exist without forgetfulness . . . (6)

Te “formal” structure of this dream-drama disjoins “Breton” the narrator; itsinjunction of simultaneity breaks his past selves into an indefinite group of

“nameless” figures whom he confronts as external texts to be interpreted. Te“I” against whom the dream’s formal interdiction is set can only encounter itself


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joy of memory?” (6); but the question’s form itself suggests this lesson can onlybe learned at the price of a self-multiplication into the first person plural. Tatis, memory itself is a self-alienating act of interpretation; one cannot rememberand “exist” at once. Te narrator, in becoming a faithful “human document”

(39), is separated from himself, and Breton from the narrator, by this interpre-tive (and temporal) distance. Te fleeting present of existence, which “scarcelyis,” is not the focus of the text’s descriptive effort, though, so much as theceaseless retrospection of the interpretation of what has passed.

Tis initial dream scene anticipates and figures the text’s design: Mad Love will disjoin and pluralize the putative present of its narration, this “place I haveso often been,” into brief, episodic segments, each of which “scarcely is at all”before it “has been.” Te text will try to assemble “these lovers I shall have

been,” moments which are always already from the past, and recount them inan impossible simultaneous co-presence. Tere will be, as Breton writes, “toomany,” a surplus of, “reasons to mingle into the tale all the tenses of the verbto be ” (51). Still, the future perfect will have been the tense of this book fromthe beginning: it always, “habitually” (5), imagines a retrospective viewpointon its own narration.

Te text’s work will be to conjecture a redemption of this past by remember-ing, by recounting, and by interpreting it; to imagine the time of each moment

from the standpoint of the dawning future (metonymically represented by theabsent addressee of the final chapter, Breton’s daughter Aube [116–119]). Temovement toward a future dawn which is the underlying structure of the textmight even be called a “plot” as much as the half-occluded biographical storyof Breton’s affair with Jacqueline Lamba and the birth of his daughter. Tecoming of the dawn, Breton’s attempt to conjure a future “after me” (116), hisbrand of negative utopianism, all recall Teodor Adorno’s famous passage onthe conjectured, retrospective light of hope:

Te only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is theattempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from thestandpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the worldby redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must befashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts andcrevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light.

o gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects — this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things.. . . But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpointremoved, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence. (247)


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conclusion, in its epiphanic version of enlightenment, calls for a newly objectiveapproach to knowledge which Breton had, in his own way, tried to enact.⁴

Adorno’s unwilled “felt contact with objects,” the “estranging” objectivity which stands with the image against the “abolition of the particular” (140) and

the “death sentence on the subject” (141), is echoed in the revelatory objectivestance of Mad Love . Found objects compel an uncanny objectivity of thoughtto Breton: they “imposed with themselves this abnormally prolonged sensorialcontact, induced us to think ceaselessly of their concrete existence, offering tous certain very unexpected prolongations from their life” (30). Breton returnsmany times to the signal character of this encounter with the object, to itsunexpectedness and its surprise; his later interpretation will try to exhaust thecontent of the encounter, but there may always remain a residue of uninter-

preted fact. Such an objectivity has a revelatory, redemptive quality for bothBreton and Giacometti, once its interpretation is begun:

Te finding of an object serves here exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the

sense that it frees the individual from paralyzing affective scruples, comforts him and

makes him understand that the obstacle he might have thought insurmountable is

cleared . (32)

Breton emphasizes this entire sentence; it has, for Mad Love , the status of a

principle or an axiom, an imposition from the theoretical code (and here againthe principle is formulated in retrospect, after the narration of the encounter with the object). Te prefix of “insur mountable” is significant here: the “insur-mountable” obstacle is precisely the “real” whose transcendence the Surrealisthopes to stage. Uncannily active, objects “impose” freedom on the subjectby their very particularity, by their uniqueness: Breton’s objective contem-plation — which brings the “comfort” of an imagined future, of a solutionto the intractable, the insurmountable — is a kind of love. Te “unique” and“startling uncertainties” (81) of the beloved are precisely alike in this: the sur-

real and transcendent is achieved in Mad Love only through perfect objectivecontemplation of the real object (of description or desire).

But contemplative redemption, which is one of the meanings of the “love”the text works to define, seems at first blush not to sit well with Breton’s avowedmaterialism, nor with his revolutionary politics; there is a residual appearanceof Hegelianism about it, a teleological certainty. Of course, the questions ofteleology and transcendence, viewed through the lenses of subjective experi-ence and the theory of love, are a large part of the explicit content of the book.

And along with its development of a surrealist objectivity and attention to theparticular, the idea of love developed in the text is also an idea of time.


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work: Mad Love is the final part of what can be constructed retrospectivelyas a trilogy of Breton’s works, beginning with Nadja and Communicating Ves-sels (Balakian 102–104). It is a group of texts based not only on formal andthematic homogeneity, but material continuity: Mad Love explicitly revisits

both of the preceding works,⁵ reinterpreting and retrospectively altering theirmaterial in a manner quite unlike its treatment of its other references (apart,of course, from the pivotal rereading of the “Sunflower” poem). Te trilogychronicles what might be called Breton’s philosophy of love. Breton’s is an ideaof love staged in the terms of revolutionary politics, a love which does not somuch combine the personal with the political as ignore any distinction betweenthem. But the degree of Mad Love ’s complicity with — or its use of — the longhistory of the literary love trope is difficult to assess; Breton’s spirited defense

of notions like “forever” (114) and the fairytale (84) leaves itself open, perhapsnecessarily, to a transcendent idealist interpretation. Without question, the text works in close proximity to received ideas of

love which seem frankly to contradict the complex conjectural structure ofBreton’s future. As Anna Balakian writes, “ ‘they lived happily ever after’ is thefiction perpetuated by the fantastic world of idealism, against which these three

volumes are a prolonged protest” (122); but we may wonder whether the textprotests too much. And if we recall the disjunction between the circumstances

of Breton’s actual affair with Jacqueline Lamba during its composition and thetone of the book’s closing letter, the question of happy endings, of their pos-sibility in life and fiction, and of their falsification, becomes prominent.⁶ Tetext is emphatic enough about its distance from fictional, romantic, or idealistnotions of love that it occasionally appears defensive in the Freudian mode ofdenial. Breton’s introductory passage which argues for the experienced unique-ness of the beloved begins with a series of exculpatory disclaimers, of a typeoften repeated in Mad Love, and ends with another:

Making due allowance for the use of any means needed to transform the worldand notably to suppress these social obstacles, it is nevertheless perhaps not use-less to persuade ourselves that this idea of a unique love comes from a mysticattitude — which doesn’t mean it can’t be nourished by contemporary society forits own dubious ends. All the same I think I see a possible synthesis of this ideaand its negation. . . . I am saying that here as elsewhere this notion, being the fruitof a collective judgement tried and proved, appears fortunately to correct anotherone emerging from one of those innumerable idealistic pretensions which haveproved themselves intolerable in the long run. (7–8)

What distinguishes the authentic “collective judgement” from the “idealistic


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idea of the uniqueness of the beloved behind her apparent multiplicity is “mys-tic” and “collective” rather than transcendent and idealist. Te two ideas — theidealist fiction and the “mystic” material fact which Breton says he has perceivedbehind it — are coupled so tightly as to be almost indistinguishable. And the

passage from one to the other conception of the beloved is achieved by “mak-ing due allowance for the use of any means needed to transform the world and. . . suppress these social obstacles.” Te casually, playfully proleptic gestureof “making due allowance” makes his notion a transplant from the imaginedfuture, a conjectured attribute of a utopia whose arrival is by no means certain.It is an anticipation of what may be impossible.

Tis tendency toward “anticipation” was criticized by rotsky (in the samepassage in which he opposed the Futurists’ fusion of art and life) as

Utopian sectarianism. . . . []he theorists of “Lef ” anticipate history and contrasttheir scheme or their prescription with that which is. Tey thus have no bridgeto the future . . .. o tear out of the future that which can only develop as aninseparable part of it, and to hurriedly materialize this partial anticipation in thepresent-day dearth and before the cold footlights, is only to make an impressionof provincial dilettantism. (134–135)

He continues:

Te effort to reason out such a [future] style from the nature of the proletariat,from its collectivism, activism, atheism, and so forth, is the purest idealism, and

will give nothing but an ingenious expression of one’s ego, an arbitrary allegorism,

and the same old provincial dilettantism. (136)

Despite the two men’s later agreement, and despite Breton’s apparent under-standing of rotsky’s critique of the fusion of art and life, these critical passagesbear directly on Breton’s text. Mad Love might, in fact, be seen as attempting tosave the objects of rotsky’s criticism from an excessively pragmatist revolution-

ary aesthetic. We can easily read Breton as a defiant composer of “an ingeniousexpression of one’s ego, an arbitrary allegorism”; Mad Love can even be takenas a reclamation of the revolutionary virtue of these modes. Tis is clearly thegist of Breton’s embrace of Raymond Roussel’s “technical discovery” (80): theuse of the preposition á to link nouns. Breton calls this a “vehicle to transportthe image”:⁷ “it is enough to link in that way no matter what noun to no matterwhat other one for a world of new representations to surge up immediately”(80). Breton’s text, then, is a direct defense of an “arbitrary allegorism” (or what

Octavio Paz has called “universal analogy” [100]) as a means of “reconcilingparticularly well the pleasure principle with the reality principle” by means of


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a morality based on labor and effort, which Breton sees as “Wasted for games, wasted for love” (80). A parallelism which structures the entire book is revealedhere: games and love, chance and desire, are the complementary elements of Mad Love ’s implicit theoretical program, the two intertwined ways of thinking

about the encounter with the future which is at the center of the text. Te spirit of play, the gamesmanship of language, is a key part of the sur-

plus which Breton attributes to love, a surplus which is accessible only throughan anticipation, a conjecture of the future in which he will be free to pursue it.And the conjecture is itself a game, played out in and by Breton’s text:

What is strangest is inseparable from love, presiding over its revelation in individual as well as collective terms. . . . Once the problem of human material life issupposedly resolved, as I am playing at believing it resolved within this framework

[comme je joue à le croire résolu dans ce cadre ], I immediately run into these startlinguncertainties, and for an instant I want to look at them only. My love for you hasonly increased since the first day. . . . Because you are unique, you can’t help beingfor me always another, another you [une autre, une autre toi-même ]. (81)

Utopia here is something which Breton can play at, a notion which can besupposed, conjectured, anticipated in a text, and whose possibilities can beexplored by following the rules of its game. Te “startling uncertainties” and

true uniqueness of the beloved can only be encountered by the indirection ofthis speculative future. Te time of this glance at the unknown, when it takesplace “immediately . . . for an instant” in Breton’s text, is an impossible presenttense. It is an imagined instant, divided by “a hair’s breadth” from any presentof narration, possible only within the game of writing. Not a “Utopian sectari-anism,” in rotsky’s terms, but a utopian “mysticism,” in the play of Breton’sgame, opens the possibility of understanding on the individual subjective levelthe prophecy’s implicit encounter with chance (which would be revolution onthe collective level) and producing an inexhaustible surplus (“My love . . . has

only increased”). As Blanchot describes it:Play : a word designating the only seriousness of any worth. Play is the provocation

by which the unknown, allowing itself to be caught up in the game, can comeinto relation. One plays with the unknown, that is to say, with the unknown asthe stakes. . . . Te aleatory introduces into thought as well as into the world, intothe real of thought as into exterior reality, what is not found, what is encounteredonly through encounter. Automatic writing, then, is the infallibility of the improb-

able: what by definition does not cease coming about and yet comes about onlyexceptionally, in uncertainty and outside every promise: at all times but in a timeimpossible to determine that of surprise (412)


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describe the future as that which is to come. Breton’s defense of Rousselian“arbitrary allegorism” can be seen, through Blanchot’s reading of automatic

writing, as an attempt to understand the unpredictable under the sign of per-fect, infallible prediction: it is a defense of overinterpretation which Breton

once calls “the ‘paranoiac’ way of looking” (87). Tis is the reason behind thetext’s ceaseless retrospection, its repeated self-interpretation: an understandingof time which insists on perfect prophecy must find that prophecy in retrospect.And the only way to think about prediction in such a structure is to conjecturea retrospective glance from a nonexistent, perhaps impossible, conjured future(“One of Breton’s most frequent expressions is ‘until further notice’ or ‘a day

will come,’ a projection of the dream into future events” [Balakian 118]).But the text’s proclaimed certainty in its assessment of the politics of this

way of thinking about time can easily be doubted. Te politics of Nadja ’s futureis the source of Benjamin’s political disappointment with that text, as Adam Woodruff perceives: “if the surrealist movement is to be true to its professedaffinity with historical materialism, it must not place itself at the mercy of aspeculative future but must help shape a revolutionary future latent in its ownpractices” (200). Rather than exploring the problem of Mad Love ’s particularfuturity, criticism has tended instead to take the text at its word on this question.Balakian summarizes the issue pellucidly, without assessing the claim:

Te social revolution cannot, in [Breton’s] opinion, be effective unless the dream isspelled into action; and since the dream has by its nature an individual character,the whole problem of the individual’s role in social transformation is put intoquestion. . . . Political revolution, then, is viewed in the context of a new metaphys-

ics; in extricating from the dream the prejudicial element of mystery and unavail-ability, Breton proposes it as an agent of revelation, utilizable in the field of action.

. . . In this way the cult of self takes on social proportions. (117–118)

o look at the issue another way: the novelty of Breton’s “new metaphysics” is

not beyond question. Tere is an unmistakable tinge of Hegelianism, a shadeof historicism, to the text’s complete retrospective confidence in its propheticinterpretation of the past. Mad Love does occasionally slide into an idealist

vocabulary which it has elsewhere disclaimed, as when Breton describes theactually existing social conditions which render absolute love impossible as“error” (92), importing a Hegelian collective subject and causality preciselyin its “political” moment, or in its literalist misunderstanding of innocence as“absolute nonguilt” (93); in its eagerness to reject apparent transcendence, the

text’s call for a salvation through simple inversion ends up simply importing thetranscendent character to the “absolute” negative. But the residue of transcen-


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I have insisted . . . on the fact that self-analysis alone is, in many cases, capable ofexhausting the content of dreams, and that this analysis, if it is thorough enough,leaves none of the residue that might permit us to attribute a transcendental char-acter to oneiric activity. On the other hand, it seems to me that I have cut off all

too quickly when I had to explain that, similarly, self-analysis could sometimesexhaust the content of real events, to the point of making them depend entirelyon the least conscious prior activity of the mind [l’esprit ]. Te concern I had, onthe revolutionary level, for not cutting myself off from practical action, perhapskept me from pushing my thoughts to their limits, given the difficulty of makingmost of the revolutionaries of that period share such a dialectically rigorous pointof view. Not having been able to pass over to practical action, I feel today noscruples in returning to it . . .

I say that there isn’t anything in this poem of 1923 that did not announce themost important thing to happen to me in 1934. Were there to be any doubt aboutthe future necessity of the dedication of the poem, that doubt [would] evaporate[s’évanouirait ], as we will see. (64–65)

Tis is the central statement of Mad Love ’s theory of interpretation, and anextremely complex passage in tone and tense as well as argument. It passes froma retrospective “return” in self-interpretation to a future promise of revelation,through the single present of the “I say,” which itself asserts the prophetic

character of the sunflower poem. Among its defensive claims of “dialecticalrigor” and revolutionary virtue and its protestations of self-doubt (includingthe dissimulated hesitancy, the apparent overcoming of past obstacles to thepresent — and again retrospective — revelation), it works toward a materialist,antitranscendent notion of prophecy. Te word “exhaustion,” representing thegoal and completion of interpretation, recurs elsewhere in the text; here it car-ries the implication that an uninterpretable residue would necessarily require atranscendental explanation (this is a controvertible assumption in itself, but we

can leave this concern aside for the moment). A prophecy or premonition, then, would remain unexhausted, apparently bearing a transcendental, inexplicableresidue, until its fulfillment; then its interpretation could be completed. Onthis account, the retrospective vantage of a “future necessity” is a requisite forcomplete interpretation.

Again, apart from Breton’s claim of “dialectical rigor” (which is notablyambiguous, as Hegel, too, had a dialectic⁹), it is difficult to see how this theoryof prophecy is antitranscendent. Tis structure of interpretive time appearsalmost classically Hegelian: the truth of a moment is only achieved in its tran-scendence, the “exhaustion” of its essential truth, by the future. Making realevents “depend entirely on the least conscious prior activity of the spirit” does


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contradictory though the glaring Hegelianism of “spirit” has disappeared intranslation). And indeed, Breton’s aesthetic and political project in Mad Love has often been critically described in terms better suited for Feuerbach, or aleft-Hegelian humanism, than for Marx: he works, we are told, “to show . . .

that indeed psychic reality is a part, and the better part, of material reality, thatit is the inherent reservoir of magic. . . . [to] resituate the notion of the ‘sacred’

within the scope of human experience. . . . the enormous task of giving backto man what man has for so long attributed to God” (Balakian 104–105). Ifthis were an accurate and exhaustive description of the project of Mad Love ,its readers would be justified in ignoring the text’s protestations to the con-trary and treating its prophetic structure as an outgrowth of a transcendental-idealist conception of time. We could then see Breton’s preoccupation with

the retrospective interpretation of prophecy as an ultimately fruitless para-dox, itself belatedly patterned after Hegel’s difficulty accounting for the pro-phetic character of the “great men.” For on the Hegelian model anticipation isimpossible, as

nothing can run ahead of its time . . . . However far philosophy goes it can neverescape the bounds of this absolute horizon: even if it takes wing at dusk, it stillbelongs to the day, to the today, it is still merely the present reflecting on itself,reflecting on the presence of the concept with itself — tomorrow is in essence

forbidden it. And that is why the ontological category of the present prevents any anticipa-tion of historical time, any conscious anticipation of the future development ofthe concept, any knowledge of the future . Tis explains the theoretical difficultyHegel experienced in dealing with the existence of “great men,” whose role in hisreflection is therefore that of paradoxical witnesses to an impossible conscioushistorical forecast. Great men neither perceive nor know the future: they divineit as a presentiment. Great men are only clairvoyants who have a presentiment

of but can never know the imminence of tomorrow’s essence. . . . Tat is why noHegelian politics is possible strictly speaking. (Althusser 95)

It is easy to recognize a description of Mad Love in this: the text’s time-structurecan be seen in the concern with writing a dawning “tomorrow” into a nocturnalpresent which cannot yet see it, and the figure of Breton can be recognized

writing himself into the role of the “great man” as “paradoxical,” “clairvoyant” witness to an “impossible conscious historical forecast.” And there may be nobetter explanation than this one for the drift away from concrete revolutionary

politics which many critics have perceived in Breton’s later work.However, a residue of uncertainty remains; the interpretation of Mad Love


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of the existence of disjoint but articulated historical times in each moment,proposing that there exist a philosophical time, a political time, an aesthetictime, a scientific time, each with its own internal structure and laws, each

wedded structurally to the others but acting with relative independence. It is,

at the least, possible to read Breton’s text as complementary to this materialistprogram. Such a reading would recall, first, the persistence of an element of thealeatory, of surprise, as a central component of its materialism; then it wouldcomplicate the Hegelian interpretation of the text’s time-structure, seeingBreton’s mode of self-interpretation as an attempt to think the conjunction ofthese different temporal chains. Such a model of the time of Mad Love can beread, obscurely, in Breton’s protest on the utopian character of fairy stories:

[Anti-Surrealists] are saying . . . that the world has nothing strange to offer where

we are, are claiming it just changed like the voice of a young boy; they object lugu-briously that the time of fairy stories is over. Over for them! If I want the worldto change, if I even mean to consecrate part of my own life to its changing in itssocial aspect, it is not in the vain hope of returning to the time of these stories,but of course, in the hope of helping the time to come when they will no longer

just be stories. Surprise must be sought for itself, unconditionally. It exists only inthe interweaving in a single object of the natural and the supernatural. . . . o seenatural necessity opposing human or logical necessity, no longer to try desperately

to reconcile them, to deny in love the persistence of falling in love and, in life, theperfect continuity of the impossible and the possible — these are tantamount toacknowledging the loss of what I maintain is the only state of grace. (84)

In the first sentence quoted, Breton unambiguously condemns the simplyHegelian version of historical time with which he has elsewhere seemed veryclose to agreeing. He then proposes a different model, and this involves apresent “interweaving” multiple heterogeneous times. Te past “time of fairystories,” which has ended, did not involve any literal truth of their magic: it

was merely caught up in a history of aesthetics, culminating in the presentincredulity toward magic. In contrast, the realm of future possibility — “thetime to come when they will no longer be just stories” — is enchanted: it holdsopen the possibility of their impossible literal enactment, as an example of theunknowable which must be sought as “surprise.” And this “exists” — that is,it can be understood — only as the “interweaving,” the connection and inter-penetration, of heterogeneous chains of “necessity.” Tese strands of causality,connecting past and future, can only be tied to each other in the continuous

attempt to render them continuous, to regain a “state of grace” which mustalways be strived for and never wholly attained.


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foresight; but here it can be read, instead, as a reorientation of human historicalpossibility. Breton would direct possibility toward what must first be imaginedhumanly possible, then thought logically possible, then made natural — towarda conjunction of the heterogeneous causal series he has catalogued, toward

their desperate reconciliation like that of lovers. Only such a future wouldexhaust the meaning of this passage; only then would Breton’s prophecy becompleted. Tis may only be a residue, a trace, of Breton’s revolutionary politics,much of which may be accounted for in a transcendental reading; but the textdoes not yield itself so completely to any idealist interpretation as to explainthe persistent surplus of its love. Te “love” of Mad Love persists exactly in itsinexhaustibility to any present; its future remains incomplete in order that itslove will also remain infinite.

Notes

1. Arturo Schwarz’s André Breton, Leone rotskij gives a useful account of the friendship between thetwo. For more on Breton’s politics and rotsky’s Literature and Revolution, see Peter Collier’s article;Caws also has some discussion of their relationship and Breton’s politics (6–10).

2. Te importance of rotsky’s essay on the “Lef ” ( Novyi Lef ) group’s futurism in thinking about thepolitics of Surrealism was, of course, already recognized in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay of 1929.Some illuminating affinities between Benjamin and Breton are described by Adam Woodruff in a recent

article. It is possible that rotsky’s essay, instead, marks a point of disagreement between Marxist politicsand surrealism, as Octavio Paz reads it: “Certainly, the transformation of Lenin’s worker’s State into animmense and effective bureaucracy precipitated the split [between Surrealism and Communism], butthat was not its cause. With rotsky in power the difficulties would not have been completely differ-ent. It suffices to read Literature and Revolution to see that for rotsky the freedom of art had certainlimits . . . ” (58; my trans.).

3. Benjamin, in his reading of Nadja , inclines to the personal reading, finding it “an intoxication,a moral exhibitionism” and “the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman à clef ”(209). But for Benjamin, this forswearing of privacy is also a political act in much the same way Bretondescribed: “o live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence” (209).

4. Benjamin’s stress on “materialistic . . . inspiration” or “profane illumination” (209), which he believedthe Surrealists fitfully capable of achieving, provides a historical connection between Breton’s futuredawn and Adorno’s, but this is less compelling than the conceptual similarities.

5. Te references tying Mad Love to the earlier texts take a variety of forms. Breton left footnotesinstructing readers “Cf. Les Vases communicants ” (126n4) and “See Nadja ” (127n1). Te text insists oncontinuity of setting with its predecessors, giving us “the Flea Market, described in Nadja (this repetitionof the setting is excused by the constant and deep transformation of the place)” (25–26). And it createsa similar continuity of character across the three texts: “one of these people, whom I lost sight of yearsago, is none other than the one to whom the last pages of Nadja are addressed, and who is designatedby the letter X in Les Vases communicants ” (38). Further, the text’s theoretical voice assumes a continuity

of argument with the preceding volumes: “I have insisted, especially in Les Vases communicants , on thefact that self-analysis alone is, in many cases, capable of exhausting the content of dreams” (64). And,

t bli l th t t ’ lf i t ti k it lf i tl ti ith th f i k


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Paz, Octavio. Estrella de res Puntas: André Breton y el Surrealismo. Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Vuelta,1996.

Roussel, Raymond. How I Wrote Certain of My Books . Trans. Trevor Winkfield. New York: SUN,1977.

Schwarz, Arturo. André Breton, Leone rotskij: Storia di un’amicizia tra arte e rivoluzione . Rome: LaNuova Sinistra/Edizioni Savelli, 1974.

rotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. rans. Rose Strunsky. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1960.

Woodruff, Adam. “ ‘Te Shape of a City’: Recollection in Benjamin’s ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ and Breton’s Nadja .” Journal of Narrative Teory 33:2 (Summer 2003): 184–206.


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Mad Love Prophecy