Andre Breton

The expression "wireless" has found its place too recently in our vocabulary, has had too rapid a career for much of the dream of our epoch not to go along with it, for it not to afford me one of those very rare and specifically new orientations of the mind. Faint signs like this sometimes give me the illusion of embarking upon the great adventure, of being somewhat like a prospector, mining the gold of time. But what do they evoke, these words I choose? Hardly the sands of the shore, a few field-spiders tangled in the hollow of a willow, — of a willow or of the sky, for the latter is only an antenna with a wide range — then islands, nothing but islands . . . Crete, where I am to be Theseus, shut up forever in his crystal labyrinth.

They talk about wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination. This is an easy induction, but in my opinion, is permissible. Invention, human discovery, — that faculty we have possessed so meagrely throughout the ages; — to have that which no one before us dreamed of, — all this is likely to throw us into tremendous perplexity. Originating in truth, that shameful feeling would trouble us less if it did not, now and then, seem to yield to us, to turn over the most meaningless of its secrets to us only to return quickly to its reticence. The ill nature of most men who finally have refused to be the dupes of these ridiculous revelations, who have insisted once and for all upon invariable postulates, just as one regards mountains or the sea, — in other words, the classic mind, — makes it impossible for them to get anything from life essentially different from all past lives, which have been aptly designated like this: Andre Breton (1896-19..).

I stand in the vestibule of a chateau, lantern in hand, illuminating one after another the gleaming suits of mail. Don't think I mean any harm by this. one of these suits seems almost my size. If only I could buckle it on and thus recapture a little of the feeling of a man of the fourteenth century. O eternal theatre, you require us in order not only to play another's role but also to prompt it, to mask ourselves in his likeness so that the looking-glass before which we pose will reflect a strange image. Imagination has all powers except that of identifying us, in spite of our appearance, with a character other than ourselves. Literary speculation becomes outlawed as soon as it places before an author characters about whom he takes sides, after having cut them out of whole cloth. "Speak for yourself," I say to him. "Speak of yourself, and you will teach me much more. I do not recognize your right of life and death over pseudo-human beings who have emerged armed or disarmed from your caprice. Limit yourselves to leaving your memoirs. Hand me the real names. Prove to me that you have in no way tampered with your heroes."

I do not like equivocation nor evasion. I stand in the vestibule of the chateau, lantern in hand, and throw the light upon one after another of the gleaming suits of armor. Who knows but that later on, in this same vestibule, someone will put on my own without thinking about it. From pedestal to pedestal a great mute colloquy goes on:

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Breton's essay is taken from the fifth issue of transition, edited by Eugene Jolas.

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