Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952-1966

by AndrT Breton, Austin Carder (Translator), Garrett Caples (Introduction)

Overview

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time.

"Cavalier Perspective shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s."—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

As leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.

Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.

More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872869394
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the surrealist movement, the poet André Breton was born in Normandy in 1896. A medical student at the outset of the First World War, Breton served in the army at a neurological ward, where he treated patients for post-traumatic stress, including Jacques Vaché, whose iconoclastic views influenced him considerably. In post-war Paris, Breton sought out writers like Apollinaire and Reverdy, began a periodical Littérature with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and helped form a French contingent of Dada under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. But already Breton and his friends were moving beyond the absolute negation of Dada to Surrealism, a movement rooted in pure psychic automatism, desire, chance, poetry, and the marvelous. Under Breton’s leadership, Surrealism became the most vital European avant-garde of interwar high modernism, its influence extending to Egypt, Japan, and the Caribbean. Exiled to the United States during the Second World War, due to the Nazi occupation, Breton would return to Paris in 1945 and continue to lead the movement until his death in 1966.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from the Introduction to André Breton's Cavalier Perspective

by Garrett Caples

Periodically, throughout his lifetime, André Breton (1896–1966)—poet, founder, and chief theoretician of the Surrealist Movement—would gather his shorter essays into a single volume, beginning with The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus) in 1924, and continuing with Break of Day (Point du jour) in 1934 and Free Rein (La Clé des champs) in 1953. These books largely exclude his writings on visual art, which were collected in successively expanding editions of Surrealism and Painting (1928, 1945, 1965), but include many major statements, like "The Automatic Message" and "The Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars." The present volume, Cavalier Perspective (Perspective Cavalière), was published posthumously in 1970 under the editorship of Marguerite Bonnet and collects Breton's prose writings, along with assorted interviews, survey responses, radio broadcasts, and film transcriptions, from 1952 until his death in 1966. Necessarily imperfect, lacking the poet's hand in its assembly, Cavalier Perspective nonetheless shares the basic principles of construction as its three predecessors and is rightly considered Breton's final book.

Though individual pieces have been translated, and the book is over 50 years old, Cavalier Perspective has never previously appeared in English. This would be surprising for a major world figure like Breton, were it not for the fact that, historically, he wasn't well favored with English translation. Most of his work, including the earlier books of short essays, didn't begin appearing in full in English until the 1990s. And Breton has further suffered from his treatment by art history, which tends to reduce Surrealism to an interwar avant-garde art movement, ignoring both its revolutionary aspiration to "change life" and the continued activities of Breton's group through 1969, three years after his death. Various groups have constituted and reconstituted themselves since through the present day, though without Breton, Surrealism has grown amorphous and decentralized, less a movement than a field of concerns that continues to gain new adherents. But even if we limit consideration to Breton's lifespan, there's over two decades of Surrealism that remain ignored or discounted in English language accounts of the movement.

That Breton's group after World War II is diminished in comparison with its modernist heyday—when it had the likes of Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, and Man Ray all sitting around the same table—is undeniable. Between the near-impossibility of meeting the standard set by the group itself in its prime and the sheer passage of time, Breton's move from the center to the periphery of French intellectual life is perhaps inevitable. At the same time, the impact of Surrealism proved to be so central—if it didn't succeed in changing life, it certainly changed aspects of our culture on a fundamental level—that Breton couldn't help retaining an outsized presence. Very few people contribute a word/concept to multiple languages; Apollinaire may have coined it, but Breton invented the surreal as a distinct category of anti-rational experience, defining it through the activities and interests of himself and the group. If he was ill at ease with the degraded or glib usage of his hard-won concept, the very fact that the word became part of the popular lexicon in a way independent from him testifies to the extent to which Breton was truly an inaugurator of discourse, one of the key figures of 20th century thought.

After the Second World War, Breton and Surrealism are as much up against their own legacy as they are against the succeeding waves of Existentialists, Situationists, and Poststructuralists, as well as the enduring Stalinism of the French Communist Party. If the postwar group is diminished, however, Breton continues to attract the allegiance of high-caliber writers and artists, be it the exiled-from-Egypt poet Joyce Mansour or the transgender painter/photographer Pierre Molinier or the fakir-like performance artist and sculptor Jean Bênoit or the Prix Goncourt-refusing novelist Julien Gracq. And while age and increasing ill-heath take their toll and attenuate his output, Breton himself remains formidable, a lion in winter, stubbornly refusing to rest on his illustrious past in favor of plotting Surrealism's still-potent present. "Its vitality stems not only from the deepening of its initial views and intentions but more from the degree of effervescence kept up in relation to the problems that pose themselves as time goes on," he writes in 1963, in the brisk, manifesto-like title piece of Cavalier Perspective. "Surrealism is a dynamic whose vector today is not to be found in [the group’s first magazine] La Révolution surréaliste but in [its then-current magazine] La Brèche."

That the above statement was published one month before the Beatles release their second album and two months before John F. Kennedy is assassinated is part of what makes Cavalier Perspective so fascinating a volume. Breton is writing here in the age of atomic weapons and space exploration, of increased environmental awareness and decolonization, of television, computers, and the dawn of the information superhighway. Such topics are seldom the focus but they noticeably appear as the backdrop against which he writes; no less than five pieces—"Link," "Embers at Ceridwen’s Cauldron," "On Magic Art," "Speech at the 'Conscientious Objectors Relief Gala,'" and "First Hand"—allude, for example, to the prospect of annihilation by weapons of mass destruction. Compared to 100 years ago, when he first published the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), the world Breton inhabits in Cavalier Perspective, while quite distant, is nonetheless much closer to our own.

Table of Contents

Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952–1966
André Breton

Translated by Austin Carder
Introduction by Garrett Caples

Link
"You have the floor, young seer of things…"
On André Gide
Stalin in History
At the Right Time
Farewell, If I May
Shadow Not of a Serpent, but of a Flowering Tree
Letter to Robert Amadou
On Astrology
One in the Other

Examples of Definitions of the Game "One in the Other"
Implications of "One in the Other"
Appendix
New Elements of the Combined Dictionary "One in the Other"
I. — General Repertoire
II. — Historical and Geographical Section
Position of Melmoth
Suspension Bridge
Initial Small Talk
Darien the Damned
Everyday Magic
Forward to Ultramarines
Speech at the Meeting "In Defense of Freedom"
Surrealism and Tradition
Embers at Ceridwen's Cauldron
Response to a Survey: "Is sublime love the only one?"
On Magic Art
The Language of Stones
Flora Tristan
Too Much for Us?
Letter to Guy Chambelland Regarding Xavier Forneret
Speech at the "Conscientious Objectors Relief Gala"
On Robert Desnos
On Antonin Artaud
Far from Orly
Preface to Oscar Panizza's The Council of Love
Phoenix of the Mask
Response to a Survey on Space Exploration
Tribute
Drawbridge
Interview with Madeleine Chapsal
Belvedere
First Hand
Cavalier Perspective
Interview with Guy Dumur
Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"Forty essays are shared here, wildly ranging in subject and theme, from prefaces to books by friends, lectures presented at symposiums, ruminations on magic, communism, astrology, the language of stones, the feverish visions of Robert Desnos and Antonin Artaud and everything else in between. Anyone interested in understanding how Dada morphed into Surrealism and how Surrealism morphed into Fluxus, then into pop art, then into conceptual art, and beyond, would be well served by picking up Monsieur Breton's fabulous guided tour to the avant-garde cultural map of the last century."—Donald Brackett, Embodied Meanings: The Brackett Newsletter

"Breton died two years short of May '68 but his principles were under every paving stone. Whether he is citing Aime Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism as a 'pure source' in the struggle against empire, or reasserting his faith that dreams are 'guiding instructions,' Breton is clearer than ever here. Cavalier Perspective also contains my favorite Breton quote about writing: 'in relation to everything that could be considered aberrant and unbearable, it should from the outset demonstrate a desire to intervene.'"—Sasha Frere-Jones, author of Earlier

"Cavalier Perspective is André Breton's last book, sensitively assembled by his friend Marguerite Bonnet from occasional texts written during the final decade and a half of his life. It shows him as a significant chronicler of his age, one who was fully engaged with the issues of his time, many of which are still of relevance and vital importance for us today."—Michael Richardson, general editor of The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism

"Addressing all the major themes that preoccupied Breton throughout his career—from Trotskyism and anti-colonialism to anti-rationalism, the role of the marvelous, and the 'complete liberation of poetry and, through it, of life'—these late essays amount to the last word of one of the most influential aesthetic minds of the 20th century. They also give us a vivid portrait of an age drawn through the arts and artists that so profoundly marked it. Austin Carder has performed a monster feat of translation here, catching every nuance of Breton's sinuous, faceted thinking, and Garrett Caples' substantial introduction draws on his extensive scholarship to give the reader the historical, political, and social background necessary to grasp its intricacies and impact." —Cole Swensen, author of And And And

"André Breton within his penultimate range of living issued fumes from a monument of orchids sans Metropolitan concrete and anguish. Via Cavalier Perspective (this belatedly translated voltage) he thrives within waves of his immeasurable aural spell. The latter by means of a blinding convoluted majestic that simultaneously transmutes by means of interior eddy. Within this mesmeric conjointment he powerfully witnesses Artaud, magnifying their mutually thriving poetic identity not unlike magically etched lightning by psychically seeded weather. This interior tenor pervades Cavalier Perspective as it persists by inner lingual leap, always hailing beyond tendentious rationality, the latter charred by delimited lingual essence. Within its refracted state of fractional detritus, its intent is infected by fossilized tenor weighed as it is by linear clotting. Thus the latter state attempts to retain its lostness vis-á-vis instillment by magnification as history."—Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane)

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