Excerpt from the Introduction to André Breton''s Cavalier Perspective by Garrett Caples Periodically, throughout his lifetime, André Breton (1896-1966)--poet, founder, and chief theoretician of the Surrealist Movement--would gather his shorter essays into a single volume, beginning with The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus) in 1924, and continuing with Break of Day (Point du jour) in 1934 and Free Rein (La Clé des champs) in 1953. These books largely exclude his writings on visual art, which were collected in successively expanding editions of Surrealism and Painting (1928, 1945, 1965), but include many major statements, like "The Automatic Message" and "The Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars." The present volume, Cavalier Perspective (Perspective Cavalière), was published posthumously in 1970 under the editorship of Marguerite Bonnet and collects Breton''s prose writings, along with assorted interviews, survey responses, radio broadcasts, and film transcriptions, from 1952 until his death in 1966. Necessarily imperfect, lacking the poet''s hand in its assembly, Cavalier Perspective nonetheless shares the basic principles of construction as its three predecessors and is rightly considered Breton''s final book. Though individual pieces have been translated, and the book is over 50 years old, Cavalier Perspective has never previously appeared in English. This would be surprising for a major world figure like Breton, were it not for the fact that, historically, he wasn''t well favored with English translation. Most of his work, including the earlier books of short essays, didn''t begin appearing in full in English until the 1990s. And Breton has further suffered from his treatment by art history, which tends to reduce Surrealism to an interwar avant-garde art movement, ignoring both its revolutionary aspiration to "change life" and the continued activities of Breton''s group through 1969, three years after his death.

Various groups have constituted and reconstituted themselves since through the present day, though without Breton, Surrealism has grown amorphous and decentralized, less a movement than a field of concerns that continues to gain new adherents. But even if we limit consideration to Breton''s lifespan, there''s over two decades of Surrealism that remain ignored or discounted in English language accounts of the movement. That Breton''s group after World War II is diminished in comparison with its modernist heyday--when it had the likes of Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, and Man Ray all sitting around the same table--is undeniable. Between the near-impossibility of meeting the standard set by the group itself in its prime and the sheer passage of time, Breton''s move from the center to the periphery of French intellectual life is perhaps inevitable. At the same time, the impact of Surrealism proved to be so central--if it didn''t succeed in changing life, it certainly changed aspects of our culture on a fundamental level--that Breton couldn''t help retaining an outsized presence. Very few people contribute a word/concept to multiple languages; Apollinaire may have coined it, but Breton invented the surreal as a distinct category of anti-rational experience, defining it through the activities and interests of himself and the group. If he was ill at ease with the degraded or glib usage of his hard-won concept, the very fact that the word became part of the popular lexicon in a way independent from him testifies to the extent to which Breton was truly an inaugurator of discourse, one of the key figures of 20th century thought. After the Second World War, Breton and Surrealism are as much up against their own legacy as they are against the succeeding waves of Existentialists, Situationists, and Poststructuralists, as well as the enduring Stalinism of the French Communist Party.

If the postwar group is diminished, however, Breton continues to attract the allegiance of high-caliber writers and artists, be it the exiled-from-Egypt poet Joyce Mansour or the transgender painter/photographer Pierre Molinier or the fakir-like performance artist and sculptor Jean Bênoit or the Prix Goncourt-refusing novelist Julien Gracq. And while age and increasing ill-heath take their toll and attenuate his output, Breton himself remains formidable, a lion in winter, stubbornly refusing to rest on his illustrious past in favor of plotting Surrealism''s still-potent present. "Its vitality stems not only from the deepening of its initial views and intentions but more from the degree of effervescence kept up in relation to the problems that pose themselves as time goes on," he writes in 1963, in the brisk, manifesto-like title piece of Cavalier Perspective. "Surrealism is a dynamic whose vector today is not to be found in [the group''s first magazine] La Révolution surréaliste but in [its then-current magazine] La Brèche." That the above statement was published one month before the Beatles release their second album and two months before John F. Kennedy is assassinated is part of what makes Cavalier Perspective so fascinating a volume. Breton is writing here in the age of atomic weapons and space exploration, of increased environmental awareness and decolonization, of television, computers, and the dawn of the information superhighway. Such topics are seldom the focus but they noticeably appear as the backdrop against which he writes; no less than five pieces--"Link," "Embers at Ceridwen''s Cauldron," "On Magic Art," "Speech at the ''Conscientious Objectors Relief Gala,''" and "First Hand"--allude, for example, to the prospect of annihilation by weapons of mass destruction.

Compared to 100 years ago, when he first published the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), the world Breton inhabits in Cavalier Perspective, while quite distant, is nonetheless much closer to our own.