Snakecharmers and Nascent Oxygen: André Breton and the American Marvelous

Abstract

As André Breton and his fellow surrealists never tired of affirming, the transformative surrealizing impulse long antedated the surrealist moment (hence the movement's interest in developing and reconfiguring a force-field of multiple traditions or anti-canons). To some degree, surrealism's truth lay outside the movement proper, and a fortiori outside individual creative works, which while they could approximate certain dreams, obsessions, or lived moments, were but intimations of a greater revelation. Surrealism can best be described in terms of its constant search, articulated from Breton's 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme onward, for the marvelous, that gold of time that dwelled, no longer in the philosopher's stone, but in the unexpected turning points and encounters of daily life.