And this possession is only possible in reciprocal love, carnal love, of course. “The portrait of the woman one loves must be not only an image one smiles at but even more an oracle one questions”; but oracle only if this very woman is something other than an idea or an image; she must be the “keystone of the material world”; for the seer this is the same world as Poetry, and in this world he has to really possess Beatrice. “Reciprocal love alone is what conditions total magnetic attraction which nothing can affect, which makes flesh sun and splendid impression on the flesh, which makes spirit a forever-flowing stream, inalterable and alive whose water moves once and for all between marigold and wild thyme.”
This indestructible love can only be unique. It is the paradox of Breton’s attitude that from Communicating Vessels to Arcanum 17, he is determined to promise love both unique and eternal to different women. But according to him, it is social circumstances, thwarting the freedom of his choice, that lead man into erroneous choices; in fact, through these errors, he is really looking for one woman. And if he remembers the faces he has loved, he “will discover at the same time in all these women’s faces one face only: the last face loved.117 How many times, moreover, have I noticed that under extremely dissimilar appearances one exceptional trait was developing.” He asks Ondine in Mad Love: “Are you at last this woman, is it only today you were to come?” But in Arcanum 17: “You know very well that when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation.” In a completed, renewed world, the couple would be indissoluble, through an absolute and reciprocal gift: Since the beloved is all, how could there be any room for another? She is also this other; and all the more fully as she is more her self. “The unusual is inseparable from love. Because you are unique you can’t help being for me always another, another you. Across the diversity of these inconceivable flowers over there, it is you over there changing whom I love in a red blouse, naked, in a gray blouse.” And about a different but equally unique woman, Breton wrote: “Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life.”
This unique woman, both carnal and artificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal objects loved by the surrealists: she is like the spoon-shoe, the table-magnifying glass, the sugar cube of marble that the poet discovers at the flea market or invents in a dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly discovered in their truth, and the secret of plants and stones. She is all things:
My love whose hair is woodfire
Her thoughts heat lightning
Her hourglass waist …
My love whose sex is
Algae and sweets of yore …
My love of savannah eyes.
But she is Beauty, above and beyond every other thing. Beauty for Breton is not an idea one contemplates but a reality that reveals itself—and therefore exists—only through passion; only through woman does beauty exist in the world.
“And it is there—right in the depths of the human crucible, in this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where, however, loneliness rages also, in one of nature’s fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow—it is there that years ago I asked that we look for a new beauty, a beauty ‘envisaged exclusively to produce passion.’ ”
“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”
It is from woman that everything that is derives meaning. “Love and love alone is precisely what the fusion of essence and existence realizes to the highest degree.” It is accomplished for lovers and thus throughout the whole world. “The recreation, the perpetual recoloration of the world in a single being, such as they are accomplished through love, light up with a thousand rays the advance of the earth ahead.” For all poets—or almost all—woman embodies nature; but for Breton, she not only expresses it: she delivers it. Because nature does not speak in a clear language, its mysteries have to be penetrated in order to grasp its truth, which is the same thing as its beauty: poetry is not simply the reflection of it but rather its key; and woman here cannot be differentiated from poetry. That is why she is the indispensable mediator without whom the whole earth would be silenced: “Nature is likely to light up and to fade out, to serve and not to serve me, only to the extent that I feel the rise and the fall of the fire of a hearth which is love, the only love, that for a single being … It was only lacking for a great iris of fire to emerge from me to give its value to what exists … I contemplate to the point of dizziness your hands opened above the fire of twigs which we just kindled and which is now raging, your enchanting hands, your transparent hands hovering over the fire of my life.” Every woman loved is a natural wonder for Breton: “a tiny, unforgettable fern climbing the inside wall of an ancient well.” “Something so blinding and serious that she could not but bring to mind … the great natural physical necessity while at the same time tenderly dreaming of the nonchalance of some tall flowers beginning to blossom.” But inversely: every natural wonder merges with the beloved; he exalts her when he waxes emotional about a grotto, a flower, a mountain. Between the woman who warms his hands on a landing of Teide and Teide itself, all distance is abolished. The poet invokes both in one prayer: “Wonderful Teide, take my life! Mouth of the heavens and yet mouth of hell, I prefer you thus in your enigma, able to send natural beauty to the skies and to swallow up everything.”
Beauty is even more than beauty; it fuses with “the deep night of knowledge”; it is truth and eternity, the absolute; woman does not deliver a temporal and contingent aspect of the world, she is the necessary essence of it, not a fixed essence as Plato imagined it, but a “fixed-explosive” one. “The only treasure I find in myself is the key that opens this limitless field since I have known you, this field made of the repetition of one plant, taller and taller, swinging in a wider and wider arc and leading me to death … Because one woman and one man, who until the end of time must be you and me, will drift in their turn without ever turning back as far as the path goes, in the optical glow, at the edges of life and of the oblivion of life … The greatest hope, I mean the one encompassing all the others, is that this be for all people, and that for all people this lasts, that the absolute gift of one being to another who cannot exist without his reciprocity be in the eyes of all the only natural and supernatural bridge spanning life.”
Through the love she inspires and shares, woman is thus the only possible salvation for each man. In Arcanum 17, her mission spreads and takes shape: she has to save humanity. Breton has always been part of the Fourier tradition that, demanding rehabilitation of the flesh, exalts woman as erotic object; it is logical that he should come to the Saint-Simonian idea of the regenerating woman. In today’s society, the male dominates to such an extent that it is an insult for someone like Gourmont to say of Rimbaud: “a girl’s temperament.” However, “the time has come to value the ideas of woman at the expense of those of man, whose bankruptcy is coming to pass fairly tumultuously today.” “Yes, it is always the lost woman, she who sings in man’s imagination, but after such trials for her and for him, it must also be the woman retrieved. And first of all, woman has to retrieve herself; she has to learn to recognize herself through the hells she is destined to by the more than problematic view that man, in general, carries of her.”
The role she should fill is above all that of pacifier. “I’ve always been stupefied that she didn’t make her voice heard, that she didn’t think of taking every possible advantage, the immense advantage of the two irresistible and priceless inflexions given to her, one for talking to men during love, the other that commands all of a child’s trust … What clout, what future would this great cry of warn
ing and refusal from woman have had … When will we see a woman simply as woman perform quite a different miracle of extending her arms between those who are about to grapple to say: You are brothers.” If woman today looks ill adapted or off balance, it is due to the treatment masculine tyranny has inflicted on her; but she maintains a miraculous power because her roots plunge deep into the wellspring of life whose secrets males have lost. “Melusina, half reclaimed by panic-stricken life, Melusina with lower joints of broken stones, aquatic plants or the down of a nest, she’s the one I invoke, she’s the only one I can see who could redeem this savage epoch. She’s all of woman and yet woman as she exists today, woman deprived of her human base, prisoner of her mobile roots, if you will, but also through them in providential communication with nature’s elemental forces. Woman deprived of her human base, legend has it, by the impatience and jealousy of man.”
So today one has to be on woman’s side; while waiting for her real worth to be restored to her, “Those of us in the arts must pronounce ourselves unequivocally against man and for woman.” “The child-woman. Systematically art must prepare her advent into the empire of tangible things.” Why child-woman? Breton explains: “I choose the child-woman not in order to oppose her to other women, but because it seems to me that in her and in her alone exists in a state of absolute transparency the other prism of vision.”118
Insofar as woman is merely assimilated to a human being, she will be as unable as male human beings to save the doomed world; it is femininity as such that introduces this other element—the truth of life and poetry—into civilization, and that alone can free humanity.
As Breton’s view is exclusively poetic, it is exclusively as poetry and thus as Other that woman is envisaged. If one were to ask about her own destiny, the response would be implied in the ideal of reciprocal love: her only vocation is love; this is in no way inferiority, since man’s vocation is also love. However, one would like to know whether for her as well, love is the key to the world, the revelation of beauty; will she find this beauty in her lover? Or in her own image? Will she be capable of the poetic activity that makes poetry happen through a sentient being: or will she be limited to approving her male’s work? She is poetry itself, in the immediate that is, for man; we are not told whether she is poetry for herself too. Breton does not speak of woman as subject. Nor does he ever evoke the image of the bad woman. In his work as a whole—in spite of a few manifestos and pamphlets in which he vilifies the human herd—he focuses not on categorizing the world’s superficial resistances but on revealing the secret truth: woman interests him only because she is a privileged “mouth.” Deeply anchored in nature, very close to the earth, she also appears to be the key to the beyond. One finds in Breton the same esoteric naturalism as in the Gnostics who saw in Sophia the principle of redemption and even of creation, as in Dante choosing Beatrice for guide, or Petrarch illuminated by Laura’s love. That is why the being most rooted in nature, the closest to the earth, is also the key to the beyond. Truth, Beauty, Poetry, she is All: once more all in the figure of the other, All except herself.
V. STENDHAL OR ROMANCING THE REAL
If now, leaving the present period, I return to Stendhal, it is because, leaving behind these carnivals where Woman is disguised as shrew, nymph, morning star, or mermaid, I find it reassuring to approach a man who lives among flesh-and-blood women.
Stendhal loved women sensually from childhood; he projected the hopes of his adolescence onto them: he readily imagined himself saving a beautiful stranger and winning her love. Once he was in Paris, what he wanted the most ardently was a “charming wife; we will adore each other, she will know my soul.” Grown old, he writes the initials of the women he loved the most in the dust. “I believe that dreaming was what I preferred above all,” he admits. And his dreams are nourished by images of women; his memories of them enliven the countryside. “The line of rocks when approaching Arbois and coming from Dole by the main road was, I believe, a touching and clear image for me of Métilde’s soul.” Music, painting, architecture, everything he cherished, he cherished it with an unlucky lover’s soul; while he is walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn of the page; by the regrets, desires, sadnesses, and joys women awakened in him, he came to know the nature of his own heart; it is women he wants as judges: he frequents their salons, he wants to shine; he owes them his greatest joys, his greatest pain, they were his main occupation; he prefers their love to any friendship, their friendship to that of men; women inspire his books, female figures populate them; he writes in great part for them. “I might be lucky enough to be read in 1900 by the souls I love, the Mme Rolands, the Mélanie Guilberts …” They were the very substance of his life. Where did this privilege come from?
This tender friend of women—and precisely because he loves them in their truth—does not believe in feminine mystery; there is no essence that defines woman once and for all; the idea of an eternal feminine seems pedantic and ridiculous to him. “Pedants have been repeating for two thousand years that women have quicker minds and men more solidity; that women have more subtlety in ideas and men more attention span. A Parisian passerby walking around the Versailles gardens once concluded that from everything he saw, the trees are born pruned.” The differences that one notices between men and women reflect those of their situation. For example, how could women not be more romantic than their lovers? “A woman at her embroidery frame, insipid work that only involves her hands, dreams of her lover, who, galloping around the countryside with his troop, is put under arrest if he makes one false move.” Likewise, women are accused of lacking common sense. “Women prefer emotions to reason; this is so simple: as they are not given responsibility for any family affair by virtue of our pedestrian customs, reason is never useful to them … Let your wife settle your affairs with the farmers on two of your lands, and I wager that the books are better kept than by you.” If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression. “All the geniuses who are born women are lost for the public good; when chance offers them the means to prove themselves, watch them attain the most difficult skills.”119
The worst handicap they have to bear is the deadening education they are given; the oppressor always attempts to diminish those he oppresses; man intentionally refuses women their chances. “We allow their most brilliant qualities and the ones richest in happiness for themselves and for us to remain idle.” At ten years of age, the girl is quicker, subtler than her brother; at twenty, the scamp is a quick-witted adult and the girl “a big awkward idiot, shy and afraid of a spider”; at fault is the training she has received. Women should be given exactly as much education as boys. Antifeminists object that cultured and intelligent women are monsters: the whole problem comes from the fact that they are still exceptional; if all women had equal access to culture as naturally as men, they would just as naturally take advantage of it. After having been mutilated, they are then subjected to laws against nature: married against their hearts, they are supposed to be faithful, and even divorce is reproached as wild behavior. A great number of them are destined to idleness when the fact is that there is no happiness without work. This condition scandalizes Stendhal, and therein he finds the source of all the faults blamed on women. They are neither angels nor demons nor sphinx: but human beings reduced to semi-slavery by idiotic customs.
It is precisely because they are oppressed that the best of them will avoid the faults that tarnish their oppressors; in themselves they are neither inferior nor superior to man: but by a curious reversal, their unfortunate situation works in their favor. It is well-known that Stendhal hates the spirit of seriousness:* money, honors, rank, and power are the saddest of idols to him; the immense majority of men alienate themselves in their pursuit; the pedant, the self-important man, the bourgeois, and the husband stifle in themselves any spark of life and truth; armed with preconceived ideas and learned feelings, obeying social routines, they are inhabited only by e
mptiness; a world populated with these creatures without a soul is a desert of boredom. There are unfortunately many women who stagnate in these dismal swamps; they are dolls with “narrow and Parisian ideas” or else self-righteous hypocrites; Stendhal experiences “a mortal disgust for decent women and the hypocrisy that is indispensable to them”; they bring to their frivolous occupations the same seriousness that represses their husbands; stupid through education, envious, vain, talkative, mean through idleness, cold, emotionless, pretentious, harmful, they populate Paris and the provinces; they can be seen swarming about behind the noble figure of a Mme de Rênal or a Mme de Chasteller. The one Stendhal depicted with the most bitter care is undoubtedly Mme Grandet, the exact negative of a Mme Roland or a Métilde. Beautiful but expressionless, condescending and without charm, she intimidates by her “famous virtue” but does not know real modesty, which comes from the soul; full of admiration for self, imbued with her own personage, she only knows how to copy grandeur from the outside; deep down inside she is vulgar and inferior; “she has no character … she bores me,” thinks M. Leuwen. “Perfectly reasonable, concerned by the success of her projects,” she focuses all of her ambition on making her husband a minister; “her mind was arid”; careful and conformist, she always kept herself from love, she is incapable of a generous movement; when passion sets into this dry soul, it burns without illuminating her.