Roger CAILLOIS informs BRETON of his break with the surrealists.

Roger CAILLOIS (1913.1978)

Autograph letter signed to André Breton.

Three pages ½ large in-4°.

Without place. December 27, 1934.

“If surrealism can encompass such an attitude alongside others so radically opposed, it is because it is only a word. »

Important letter from Roger Caillois detailing to André Breton all of his differences with the surrealist movement and thus definitively establishing his break with the said movement.

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“ My dear Breton, I hoped that the divergence in our attitudes was not so profound as it appeared during our conversation last night. Certainly, given my particular position, I found your activity to be take-it-and-leave-it. I could not subscribe without embarrassment to one of its areas but I found compensation in the other which allowed me to make this sacrifice. Recently, the satisfactions I encountered while reading Point du Jour invited me to resign myself definitively to seeing you play both sides; investigation and poetry (it is understood that I speak roughly here, without concern for nuances or overlaps). After all it was explainable – I am tempted to write while thinking of the process of your thought since its origin: it was only too explainable ( by which I mean that surrealism comes from a literary medium ) – that you be inclined to keep the equal balance between the satisfactions which brings one and the enjoyments which the other procures, to use the two words which came almost simultaneously to your lips last evening.

After our conversation, I have to think that there has never been and that there will probably never be a balance between the two areas […] You are therefore definitely on the side of intuition, poetry, art, – and their privileges. Needless to say, I prefer this bias to ambiguity? But you know that I have adopted the opposite bias, almost alone of my kind in fact, because, surprisingly, the superstitious respect for these inadequacies is never so strong as among those who, not using them, only knowing them from the outside; so this is only an effect of naivety […]

When I compare this great game with the attitude of Gérard de Nerval refusing to enter Palmyra so as not to spoil the idea he had of it or with yours refusing to open a seed agitated by moments of jumps so as not to discover an insect or a worm there, because, you said, the mystery would have been destroyed, – my choice is made […]

If surrealism can encompass such an attitude alongside others so radically opposed, it is because it is only a word and I still want it not to be that, even if it is at my expense. […] For my part, it is at least equally unbearable for me to be compromised by the activity of Victor Brauner or Georges Hugnet for example, or by biographical poetry which is taking up an increasingly larger place in surrealist production (poems by Maurice Heine on Sade, by Hugnet on Onan, by you, by Éluard and various others on Violette Nozières, finally by Bosey's epic poem about you). Until now, I have had a strong enough feeling of solidarity to cover all this, reluctantly, in the face of external attacks, however well-founded they may have been. So I had accepted without hesitation the clan morality of surrealism. It is no longer possible for me to do so again, since I too openly disagree with the very principle of the agreement. […]

Don't you find that the surrealist understanding lives on too many misunderstandings, mutual concessions, if not repressions? […] Allow me to be nothing more than a sort of correspondent of surrealism. It will be better for him and for me. Don't you believe? »