Surrealism/Avant-Garde Novel
Surrealism itself was conceptualized by its founder André Breton as an antidote to the novel. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton described the novel, shaped by realist and positivist conventions (see realism), as hostile to the growth of the reader’s intellect or ethical sense. The realist novel’s informational and descriptive style, epitomized by the phrase “The Marquise went out at five” (7), had all the clarity of “a dog’s life” (6) and fostered characters who represented the repetitive construction of a human type in the context of a prescriptive social logic. In the face of the novel’s ready-made humans, Breton concluded: “The only discretionary power left to me is to close the book” (7). But although the Surrealists consistently aligned themselves against stasis, convention, and the psychosocial character formation that perpetuate them, they were also intrigued by the possibility of using narrative techniques and literary character formation to cultivate alternative experiences of the world in authors and readers. The psychic revelations of the avant-garde novel associated with Surrealism were born of the imagination’s encounter with the technology of narrative, inflected by the fields of psychiatry and neurology in which Breton had been trained.
