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Besides a solution is not easy and with a smile Tristan Tzara
remarks “the absence of system is but another system.” But it is
chiefly the lack of power to insist on life without tradition which
condemns us to petty forms of snobism, to petty vices, to the taste
of hysterical women, to sleeping cars and to dynamos, that is to
say, to the worst and most popular type of literature in a century
in which everyone boasts of not being literary. There results an
excessive glory for certain authors (as a matter of fact, I can
think of but one of them, Paul Morand, but the enormity of his
success merits the pain of the plural) who know how to flatter
men and to put into their books such an impersonality that under
the disguise of a false exotism each one thinks that he recognizes
himself, tells his neighbour, who in his turn buys for himself,
at a bargain, that which he finds a flattering portrait of his own
little person. This is “real twentieth century,” people say of
such a work, as if there could possibly be a real twentieth cen
tury brand of work. As for me if anyone would accept the
challenge I should like to wager and to demonstrate that Homer
was Dada, Sainte Cecilia a famous futurist and Tristan Tzara
under the influence of Aeschylus.
But since it is necessary sometimes to speak seriously, that is
with the help of phrases known to us all, we notice that objects
have no other role than to move the subject, rhythm differs ac
cording to individuals; certainly the real individual must not
be confounded with the apparent man whom we see at the thea
tre, on the street; I have said real individual but to avoid all
confusion the better term would be superreal individual.
No one has better described this superreal individual than
Andre Breton. I shall quote from an article of his which ap
peared in La Revue Litterature in which he treats of super
realism. “The word superrealism which is not our invention
and which we should have been so well able to abandon to the
vaguest critical vocabulary, is employed by us in a precise sense.
By it we have agreed to indicate a certain automatism which
corresponds fairly well to a dream state, a state which is today
very difficult to place any limits upon. I beg pardon for adding
a personal observation here. In 1919 my attention was fixed
upon the more or less partial phrases which in complete solitude,
at the approach of slumber, become perceptible to the mind