What does Surrealism, a major art movement in the 20th century, have to do with surrealism, a term often used to describe so many uncanny facets of life in the 21st? The word “surreal” was first used in 1917 to describe a ballet choreographed by Jean Cocteau and composed by Erik Satie, with Cubist costumes by Pablo Picasso. Today, it has been used to describe the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center and the Trump administration’s climate policy. Does the world today merely resemble dreamlike visions by Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí? Or is the American mind reaching for a deeper affinity?
To answer this question, we must turn to André Breton, the architect and apostle of Surrealism. At just 28 years old, Breton established the movement in a 1924 manifesto, where he defined it as manifesting one’s subconscious “in the absence of any control exercised by reason.” His attempt to exert dictatorial powers over this movement would be his undoing, after a caustic Second Surrealist Manifesto in 1929 largely alienated him from his peers for suggesting that he could excommunicate them. But Breton continued to think, write, and speak about Surrealism until his death at age 70.
In Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952–1966, translated by Austin Carter, an elder Breton appears for the first time in English — gentler, wiser, and far more adept at analyzing the ideological underpinnings of a movement that had ballooned into an international sensation. It’s in these late writings that his ideas about the surreal begin to mingle with our own.
While it’s now understood instinctively as shorthand for unreality, one of the ironies of Surrealism is that it has never neatly circumscribed a particular style or technique, the way Fauvism or Impressionism once did. In a 1952 essay titled “Link,” Breton explains that this was by design; Surrealism was never meant to simply define an aesthetic. “When I began searching as early as 1936 for the emotional catalyst for Surrealism,” he wrote, “I discovered it right away in the anxiety inherent to a time when human brotherhood was collapsing more and more each day.” He was referring to the period between World Wars, when the “rational” forces of industrial capitalism, fractious nationalism, and global imperialism continued unabated, with violence looming on the horizon again.
Breton had spent World War I in a neurological ward in Nantes, treating soldiers suffering from what we now understand as PTSD. As poet Garrett Caples writes in his excellent introduction to Cavalier Perspective, Breton “saw firsthand the effects of technologically advanced weaponry on the human psyche” and responded with a system of thought that was both mystical in power and revolutionary in scope. By the 1950s, Breton’s vision of a liberatory anti-rationalism had become fully postcolonial. He hailed France’s Algerian War as “an orgy of crime,” championed the work of Martinican writer Aimé Césaire and Haitian poet Clément Magloire Saint-Aude, and helped foment a student revolution in Haiti.
In Cavalier Perspective, Breton explores this anti-rationalism as inherently accessible and corrosive to systems of logic that demand conformity and deride creativity. His many short essays of the period championed astrology, Medieval alchemy, games of automatic word association, and emotionally expressive art forms dismissed by mainstream Western institutions as “primitive,” from Celtic poetry to African masks. I was particularly struck by “The Language of Stones,” which suggests that certain polished rocks draw sensitive seekers toward them and may even be imprinted with divine messages. Today, the theory reads like a startlingly familiar concoction of new-age natural mysticism poisoned by a terminally online paranoia that “it’s all connected” — Make America Healthy Again, avant la lettre.
Still, Breton’s writing agitates for an openness to the world that counters what he called “the significant emotional poverty that we suffer from today.” Breton identified the ailments as Enlightenment positivism and the modes of industrial civilization that followed in its wake, which reduce people to small, interchangeable parts in a logical, orderly world. Perhaps what we now instinctively define as “surreal” are the instances when the mask of that world falls away, revealing something far stranger, less predictable, and more protean beneath it — the same forces of the unconscious that Breton wanted us to harness.
Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952-1966 (2025) by André Breton, translated by Austin Carder, is published by City Lights Books and available online and through independent booksellers.