MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM
BY
ANDRÉ BRETON(1924)
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief
is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing theobjects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned
through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has
not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows
what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or hispoverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that
he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward hischildhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow
charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived
at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, theextreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is nearat hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat
is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination whichknows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of anarbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of thetwentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.
Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow
degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptionalsituation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to animperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be
expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will beseen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive
events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences
are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.
Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.
There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. Thatmadness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number oflegally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as theirfreedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their
imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species
feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to theway in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to
suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy
their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And,
indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. [...]
The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined, following the case against thematerialistic attitude. The latter, more poetic in fact than the former, admittedly implies on the part of mana kind of monstrous pride which, admittedly, is monstrous, but not a new and more complete decay. Itshould above all be viewed as a welcome reaction against certain ridiculous tendencies of spiritualism.
Finally, it is not incompatible with a certain nobility of thought.
By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole
France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it ismade up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous

books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies
both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’slife. The activity of the best minds feels the effects of it; the law of the lowest common denominatorfinally prevails upon them as it does upon the others. [. . .]We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But inthis day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The
absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to ourexperience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has founditself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and moredifficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it isprotected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we havemanaged to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy;
forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was,apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned withany longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this
we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of
opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigationmuch further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary
realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If thedepths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of
waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if
need be, to submit them to the control of our reason. The analysts themselves have everything to gain by
it. But it is worth noting that no means has been designated a priori for carrying out this undertaking, that
until further notice it can be construed to be the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its successis not dependent upon the more or less capricious paths that will be followed.
Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissiblethat this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man's birth until his death, thought
offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, andtaking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to thesum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today
been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much
more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring indreams. It is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory, and in its
normal state memory takes pleasure in weakly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, in
stripping it of any real importance, and in dismissing the only determinant from the point where he thinks
he has left it a few hours before: this firm hope, this concern. He is under the impression of continuing
something that is worthwhile. Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night.
And, like the night, dreams generally contribute little to furthering our understanding. This curious stateof affairs seems to me to call for certain reflections:
1) Within the limits where they operate (or are thought to operate) dreams give every evidence ofbeing continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt
from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself.
By the same token, at any given moment we have only a distinct notion of realities, the coordination ofwhich is a question of will.* (Account must be taken of the depth of the dream. For the most part I retain
only what I can glean from its most superficial layers. What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream iseverything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state, everything I have forgotten about myactivities in the course of the preceding day, dark foliage, stupid branches. In "reality," likewise, I preferto fall.) What is worth noting is that nothing allows us to presuppose a greater dissipation of the elementsof which the dream is constituted. I am sorry to have to speak about it according to a formula which inprinciple excludes the dream. When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like

to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read mewith eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.
Perhaps my dream last night follows that of the night before, and will be continued the next night, with an
exemplary strictness. It's quite possible, as the saying goes. And since it has not been proved in theslightest that, in doing so, the "reality" with which I am kept busy continues to exist in the state of dream,that it does not sink back down into the immemorial, why should I not grant to dreams what I
occasionally refuse reality, that is, this value of certainty in itself which, in its own time, is not open to my
repudiation? Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of
consciousness which is daily more acute? Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental
questions of life? Are these questions the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do thesequestions already exist? Is the dream any less restrictive or punitive than the rest? I am growing old and,more than that reality to which I believe I subject myself, it is perhaps the dream, the difference withwhich I treat the dream, which makes me grow old.
2) Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenonof interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (asevidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what
is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but
the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it. Howeverconditioned it may be, its balance is relative. It scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it confines
itself to verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made an impression on it.
What impression it would be hard pressed to say, by which it reveals the degree of its subjectivity, andnothing more. This idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isolate
the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it
is. When all else fails, it then calls upon chance, a divinity even more obscure than the others to whom it
ascribes all its aberrations. Who can say to me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered,that what it likes in the eye of that woman is not precisely what links it to its dream, binds it to thosefundamental facts which, through its own fault, it has lost? And if things were different, what might it becapable of? I would like to provide it with the key to this corridor.
3) The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing
question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you
should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will
not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.
What reason, I ask, a reason so much vaster than the other, makes dreams seem so natural andallows me to welcome unreservedly a welter of episodes so strange that they could confound me now as I
write? And yet I can believe my eyes, my ears; this great day has arrived, this beast has spoken.
If man's awaking is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is because he has been led to make forhimself too impoverished a notion of atonement.
4) From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination, when, by means yet to be
determined, we succeed in recording the contents of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a
discipline of memory spanning generations; but let us nonetheless begin by noting the most salient facts),
when its graph will expand with unparalleled volume and regularity, we may hope that the mysteries
which really are not will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these twostates, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, asurreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too
unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.
A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice postedon the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE
POET IS WORKING.
A great deal more could be said, but in passing I merely wanted to touch upon a subject which initself would require a very long and much more detailed discussion; I shall come back to it. At thisjuncture, my intention was merely to mark a point by noting the hate of the marvelous which rages incertain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvelous isalways beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful. [. . .]One evening, therefore, before I fell asleep, I perceived, so clearly articulated that it was
impossible to change a word, but nonetheless removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange
phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my consciousness
agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which
was knocking at the window. I took cursory note of it and prepared to move on when its organic charactercaught my attention. Actually, this phrase astonished me: unfortunately I cannot remember it exactly, but
it was something like: "There is a man cut in two by the window," but there could be no question of
ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the faint visual image* (Were I a painter, this visual depiction would
doubtless have become more important for me than the other. It was most certainly my previous
predispositions which decided the matter. Since that day, I have had occasion to concentrate my attention
voluntarily on similar apparitions, and I know they are fully as clear as auditory phenomena. With apencil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines. Here again it is not a matter ofdrawing, but simply of tracing. I could thus depict a tree, a wave, a musical instrument, all manner ofthings of which I am presently incapable of providing even the roughest sketch. I would plunge into it,
convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to be
going nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something "neverseen." The proof of what I am saying has been provided many times by Robert Desnos: to be convinced,
one has only to leaf through the pages of issue number 36 of Feuilles libres which contains several of his
drawings (Romeo and Juliet, A Man Died This Morning, etc.) which were taken by this magazine as thedrawings of a madman and published as such.) of a man walking cut half way up by a window
perpendicular to the axis of his body. Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, what I saw was the simple
reconstruction in space of a man leaning out a window. But this window having shifted with the man, I
realized that I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it
into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it this capacity than it was in fact
succeeded by a whole series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me only
slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then
exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to theinterminable quarrel raging within me. [. . .]Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar as I was with his methodsof examination which I had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved toobtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as
possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently
unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. It
had seemed to me, and still does -- the way in which the phrase about the man cut in two had come to me
is an indication of it -- that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech, and that thought
does not necessarily defy language, nor even the fast-moving pen. It was in this frame of mind that
Philippe Soupault -- to whom I had confided these initial conclusions – and I decided to blacken some
paper, with a praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of view. The ease of
execution did the rest. By the end of the first day we were able to read to ourselves some fifty or so pages
obtained in this manner, and begin to compare our results. All in all, Soupault's pages and mine proved tobe remarkably similar: the same overconstruction, shortcomings of a similar nature, but also, on both ourparts, the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable choice of images of aquality such that we would not have been capable of preparing a single one in longhand, a very special
picturesque quality and, here and there, a strong comical effect. The only difference between our two
texts seemed to me to derive essentially from our respective tempers. Soupault's being less static thanmine, and, if he does not mind my offering this one slight criticism, from the fact that he had made theerror of putting a few words by way of titles at the top of certain pages, I suppose in a spirit ofmystification. On the other hand, I must give credit where credit is due and say that he constantly andvigorously opposed any effort to retouch or correct, however slightly, any passage of this kind which
seemed to me unfortunate. In this he was, to be sure, absolutely right.* (I believe more and more in theinfallibility of my thought with respect to myself, and this is too fair. Nonetheless, with this thoughtwriting, where one is at the mercy of the first outside distraction, "ebullutions" can occur. It would beinexcusable for us to pretend otherwise. By definition, thought is strong, and incapable of catching itself
in error. The blame for these obvious weaknesses must be placed on suggestions that come to it fromwithout.) It is, in fact, difficult to appreciate fairly the various elements present: one may even go so far as
to say that it is impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who write, these elements are, on
the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poeticallyspeaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, thequality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything
legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, inthe final analysis, than the others.
In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to
us to have followed a discipline of this kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literarymeans, Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which
we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM.[. . .]Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sensethat we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had nocurrency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concern.
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain
forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play ofthought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them insolving all the principal problems of life. [. . .]. . .The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its
childhood. For such a mind, it is similar to the certainty with which a person who is drowning reviews
once more, in the space of less than a second, all the insurmountable moments of his life. Some may say
to me that the parallel is not very encouraging. But I have no intention of encouraging those who tell me
that. From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated,
and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhoodthat comes closest to one's "real life"; childhood beyond which man has at his disposal, aside from hislaissez-passer, only a few complimentary tickets; childhood where everything nevertheless conspires tobring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself. Thanks to Surrealism, it seems that opportunity
knocks a second time. It is as though we were still running toward our salvation, or our perdition. In the
shadow we again see a precious terror. Thank God, it's still only Purgatory. With a shudder, we crosswhat the occultists call dangerous territory. In my wake I raise up monsters that are lying in wait; they are
not yet too ill-disposed toward me, and I am not lost, since I fear them. [. . .]Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there canbe no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense. It could, on thecontrary, only serve to justify the complete state of distraction which we hope to achieve here below.
Kant’s absentmindedness regarding women, Pasteur’s absentmindedness about "grapes," Curie’s
absentmindedness with respect to vehicles, are in this regard profoundly symptomatic. This world is onlyvery relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a
war in which I am proud to be participating. Surrealism is the "invisible ray" which will one day enable us
to win out over our opponents. "You are no longer trembling, carcass." This summer the roses are blue;
the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.
It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
André Breton. Excerpt from the First Manifesto of Surrealism in Art in Theory 1900­1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), pp. 87‐88.