Holy Barbarians; the impact of Surrealism and the Beat generation on human

values and the rise of the New Left

This work examines the theme of values at the heart of the Beat generation and the
Surrealist movement which would lead the way to the 1960s counterculture and civil
rights activism in both the USA and France. It aims to compare and contrast each
movement while placing them within their context as regards the events of the 1960s by
studying the literature, historical background and common themes within each. It will
centre on the search for values in society, and the rejection of the consumer culture of the
capitalist system, while exploring the humanitarian aspect of both the Surrealists and the
Beat generation. The work will use the literature of the two movements as a critique of
the emerging society against which the New Left would dissent.

The 1960s is characterised by the counterculture, by the rebellion against society through
political activism, through the use of drugs, and through sexual and musical liberation.
But the counterculture was not a spontaneous movement originating at the start of the
decade. The role of literature and literary figures throughout the twentieth century had an
enormous impact on the rising rebelliousness and disenchantment of the 1960s. For the
post WWI generation, the atrocities in the fields of Flanders made it seem that human life
had lost all value, at least in times of war it had become a mere utensil, part of a country’s
arsenal. The post WWII generation had witnessed the horrors of the holocaust and
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were now living under threat of nuclear war. When millions
of human lives can be destroyed at the touch of a button there emerges a sense of futility.
Both of these generations would produce literary movements whose works would express
clearly the disenchantment of the times and the search for what Jack Kerouac would call
the ‘tender values’ of mankind; a search which would culminate in the rising awareness
of the counterculture of the 1960s. “For youngsters who would not reach their teens until

Holy_Barbarians.doc 1
the 1960s, the Beat writings awaited them as a commentary on society’s oppression”1, for
the French youth, they were coming of age amidst a literature which had followed a
linear pattern from romanticism, through symbolism, Dadaism, surrealism and the lettrist
movement and which was now expressing itself in the Internationale Situationiste.
Though much has been written about the Beat generation, its effect on the
counterculture of the 1960s has often become a point of dissension. Recently, two works
on the Beat generation gave radically different views as to what extent the Beat
generation were countercultural. Jennie Skerl, in her Reconstructing the Beats, expounds
the more traditional view, placing the Beats as non-conformists and countercultural
rebels, whereas a work by Manuel Luis Martinez, Countering the Counterculture:
Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera, puts the Beat
culture as a “rehashing of an American 'rugged individualism' that was ultimately hostile
to a Rousseauean commitment to civic participation and radical egalitarian democracy”2
and even levels accusations of sexism and racism at the Beats, and that there was nothing
inherently countercultural about them. The problem with looking at the Beat movement
in a countercultural light is that it immediately draws comparisons with the 1960s. The
Beat generation was based on personal discovery, of subjective liberation, it was not a
call to revolution, it was not an organized social movement. From the point of view of the
60s counterculture the role of the Beats was to create an awareness of the sadness and of
the missing values within society. The counterculture then, was the mobilization of this
restless youth coming of age at the beginning of the new decade. Although one leads to
the other it is misleading to try to approach the two in the same terms.
In contrast to the Beat generation, the Surrealist movement was revolutionary. Its aim
was clearly defined, amalgamating Marx’s idea to ‘transformer le monde’ with that of
Arthur Rimbaud, to ‘changer la vie.’3 Its members were self admitted revolutionaries,
under the leadership of the enigmatic André Breton. Through their methods of automatic
writing, the analysis of dreams, and word games such as the ‘cadavre exquis’ they sought
the internal essence of mankind, the stripping of man down to his primitive levels of

1
Neil A. Hamilton, ABC-Clio Companion to the 1960s Counterculture in America, (Santa Barbara, ABC-
Clio Inc., 1997), p. xii
2
Manuel Luis Martinez, Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American dissent from Jack
Kerouac to Tomas Rivera, (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, 2003), p. 16
3
André Breton, Position Politique du Surréalisme, (Paris, Brodard et Taupin, 1991), p. 39

Holy_Barbarians.doc 2
thought, shedding the sullied garments of a society marred by the corrupted values of
capitalism. As Richard Gombin explores in his article on the emergence of French
Leftism, the Surrealists were following a chronological pattern of French literature
attacking the “monotonous world” and exerting an individualism which had been lost, or
swallowed, by society. Starting with the romantics, and especially ‘les fleurs maladives’
of Baudelaire, and following through the symbolist movement, where Rimbaud and the
macabre Comte de Lautréamont stood out amongst the Surrealist’s heroes and forebears,
before extending into the twentieth century and the nihilism of Dadaism.
The Surrealists however were not solely an artistic movement; they held a firm and
clearly defined philosophy and politics. They were heavily influenced by Marxist
thought, though their concept of revolution would distance them from the French
Communist Party, and would later align them with Leon Trotsky. The Surrealist ideal
was more in line with the continuous revolution propounded by Trotsky, centred on a
more humanistic approach to socialism than the Stalinism of the USSR. Gombin argues
that “this cultural and subjective view of the revolutionary act represents a complete
break with the system of Marx and Engels, which concentrates on economic and
objective factors. However, it renews a tradition which owes something to romanticism
and symbolism, but whose distant origins are to be found both in chivalry and in the
millenarian sects.”4
Gombin’s relation of the Surrealists to religion is interesting, as the Surrealist
movement, like the Beat’s, was profoundly spiritual. Though it denounced “masochistic
Christianity”5 it held man himself as a Divine figure (and like the Beat generation would
look to the East for its spiritual inspiration), as proclaimed in La Revolution d’Abord et
Toujours;

Car en définitive, nous avons besoin de la Liberté, mais d’une Liberté calquée sur
nos nécessités spirituelles les plus profondes, sur les exigences les plus strictes et les
plus humaines de nos chairs.6

4
Richard Gombin, ‘French Leftism’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 7, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Apr., 1972)
5
Robert S. Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-1936’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2
Left-wing Intellectuals between the wars (1966)
6
André Breton (ed.), ‘La Révolution d’Abord et Toujours’,
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_R%C3%A9volution_d'abord_et_toujours

Holy_Barbarians.doc 3
The same declaration goes on to proclaim “Nous sommes la Révolte de l’Esprit.”7
André Breton would go on to produce two Manifestes de Surréalisme within which he
propounded the cultural and political ideals of the group, towards their revolutionary end.
The second of which, appearing in 1930 would declare;

Si, par le surréalisme, nous rejetons sans hésitation l’idée de la seule possibilité des
choses qui « sont » et si nous déclarons, nous, que par un chemin qui « est », que
nous pouvons montrer et aider à suivre, on accède à ce qu’on prétendait qui « n’était
pas », si nous ne trouvons pas assez de mots pour flêtrir la bassesse de la pensée
occidentale, si nous ne craignons pas d’entrer en insurrection contre la logique, si
nous ne jurerions pas qu’un acte qu’on accomplit éveillé, si nous ne sommes même
pas sûrs qu’on n’en finira pas avec le temps, vielle farce sinistre, train
perpétuellement déraillant, pulsation folle, inextricable amas de bêtes crevantes et
crevées, comment veut-on que nous manifestions quelque tendresse, que même vous
usions de tolérance à l’égard d’un appareil de conservation sociale, quel qu’il soit?
Ce serait le seul délire vraiment inacceptable de notre part. Tout est à faire, tous les
moyens doivent être bons à employer pour ruiner les idées de famille, de patrie, de
religion.8

It may seem paradoxical that a group who would claim the greatest surrealist act as
being to “descendre dans la rue, et à tirer au hasard, tant qu’on peut, dans la foule,”9 (and
who hailed the young female assassin Germaine Berton as a heroine) as being a group
dedicated to moral values, in the same way as the sexual and narcotic liberalness of the
Beats didn’t fit in with traditional western values. But the acts of the Surrealists, and
before them the Dadaists, were acts of principle, they were declaring that the whole of
western society must be overturned, that one must return to ‘l’intérieure’ of mankind, to
find the essential needs and values there, that western thought had been so corrupted that
nihilist expression (be it destruction or creation) was the only possible way of
expounding their message.
In tracing the path from the Surrealists to the Internationale Situationniste Jean-Marie
Apostolides explores the use of shock within art, “Depuis le surréalisme, l’art n’est plus
reçu comme un pur spectacle devant être intériorisé, ses images visent à créer un choc

7
Ibid.
8
André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, (Saint-Amand, Gallimard, 2005), p. 77
9
Ibid., p. 74

Holy_Barbarians.doc 4
qui, en retour, produira une action.”10 He then continues to explain this link between art
and action;

C’est le point qu’ont en commun les trios principaux mouvements d’avant-garde qui
se sont partagé le champ culturel depuis la fin de la première guerre mondiale, Dada,
le Surréalisme et l’Internationale Situationniste : pour chacun d’eux, l’art doit
s’identifier au maximum à l’action. C’est un moyen privilégié pour changer les
conditions d’existence ; il doit provoquer chez les acteurs/spectateurs une prise de
conscience de leur aliénation dans le vécu quotidien.11

This was one of the key factors in the reappraisal of Marxist thought, the theory of
alienation put forward in 1845 did not fit the twentieth century, The ‘propertied class’ did
not feel comfortable and confirmed in this self-alienation, as Marx had propounded. The
distortion of human values could only be appreciated through a level of shock, through
surreality. The range of surrealist art was aimed at presenting the subconscious of man,
and of the singularity of the object, in no matter what relationship. They allowed the
spectator to appreciate objects and relationships in a manner previously beyond his
normal consciousness. The dream-like filmogrophy of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali,
particularly l’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou, would piece together fragmented images
as if stemming from the spectator’s own consciousness. The aim was to transform
western thought through a reappreciation of reality, to delve into its true essence.

Looking at the Beat generation in terms of its philosophy, it was, like the Surrealists,
undoubtedly a spiritual movement. Though often mistrusted, Jack Kerouac’s use of the
terms beatific and beatitude underlined the essential search for meaning and value which
these ‘new American saints’ undertook. They sought the essence of mankind at the base
of society, the sense that the only way to escape from society was to go right to its very
base, to go underneath society, as Dostoyevsky’s underground characters had done. As
with the Surrealist movement their heroes included poets Arthur Rimbaud and William
Blake, they sought a new confessional literature which would help “bring people back to
tender values.”12 The three major writers, Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S.

10
Jean-Marie Apostolides, Du Surréalisme à l’Internationale Situationniste; la question de l’image’, MLN,
Vol. 105, No. 4
11
Ibid.
12
Frederic Fleisher, ‘Jack Kerouac; Beat in Sweden’, Beat Scene, No. 51 (Summer 2006), p. 37

Holy_Barbarians.doc 5
Burroughs each took a different approach to their literature, though each celebrated the
criminals, the fellaheen, and the beatdown characters of, first, New York, then America,
and then the entire world. They viewed the criminal as “a political figure, a revolutionary
opposed to an unjust society.”13 A character like Herbert Huncke, a junky who wandered
Times Square “was attractive because he affirmed human needs and feelings in the face
of an inhuman establishment.”14
Jack Kerouac’s approach was based on his awareness of the sadness in society, his
biographer Gerald Nicosia claimed that “What was to make him a great writer was his
ability to break free from almost every traditional American value he had been bred to
accept - to break free enough, at least, to view himself as the crippled product of those
values, and as such typical of millions of very neurotic mid-century Americans.”15 One
theme that pervades all of Kerouac’s novels is sense of tender sadness, a constant pathos,
at times hard to see beyond the alcohol, sex and drugs but consistent nonetheless. Unlike
Ginsberg, Kerouac doesn’t howl his fury and discontent for the people and society of
America. He mourns for it. The celebrated heroes of his books maybe characters like
Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, but throughout every page there stands the sad figure of
the anti-hero, the American people, all in the pathetic image of Henry Miller’s Willy
Loman16. Characters like the man who picked him up while hitchhiking in California who
“had a nice home in Ohio with wife, daughter, Christmas tree, two cars, garage, lawn,
lawnmower,” but who “couldn’t enjoy any of it because he really wasn’t free. It was
sadly true.”17 This sense, or awareness, of the sadness of everyday existence in America
haunts Kerouac, from the recounts of his childhood in Doctor Sax and the pathetic
imagery of his own father, to his lonely struggle with alcoholism in Big Sur. It was this
awareness that would lead him along the route of Zen Buddhism in the mid 1950s,
linking him with several of the San Francisco Renaissance poets, including Kenneth
Rexroth and Gary Snyder. Both the Beat generation and the Surrealists called for a

13
Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe, (New York, Grove Press, 1983), p. 148
14
Ibid.. p. 148
15
Ibid., p. 130
16
Willy Loman was the anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman which depicted one man’s
tragic search for the American dream.
17
Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums, (London, Penguin, 2000), p. 110

Holy_Barbarians.doc 6
triumph of the Orient because of its spiritual values, a theme that would be echoed in the
later hippy movements of the 1960s.
The leading poet of the Beat generation Allen Ginsberg would take an approach slightly
differing from that of Kerouac. Brought up in a Left wing family amidst the insanity of
his mother and the modest literary success of his father, Ginsberg set out to champion the
underdog, indeed to become a lawyer fighting for the oppressed working classes of
America. His approach to his poetry was the “breaking down (of) the masks that set
tormented souls apart.”18 He would describe the movement’s goal as being “to save the
planet and alter human consciousness,”19 echoing the goals of the Surrealists twenty-five
years before. Ginsberg’s poems are replete with self-struggle and a need to find his own
place in society amidst the disenchantment of the apparent unfairness of the capitalist
world. The theme of his homosexuality features prominently in many of his poems, and
the sense of alienation that came with it. His poetry became increasingly explicit in its
description of homosexual acts as his criticism of society increased, employing the
methods of shock similar to that of Breton and Louis Aragon, especially in his most
famous poem Howl, and also in other more specific descriptions of his own experiences
such as Many Loves. It would be a censorship battle over Howl and Other Poems in 1956
that would first bring the public’s attention to Beat literature (Kerouac’s On the Road
would be published the following year).
A struggle with censorship would also accompany William S. Burroughs’ novel, Naked
Lunch, at the end of the 1950s. As is a major theme throughout this and other works
Burroughs’ outlook of society was largely based on his ‘Algebra of Need’ theory, which
Allan Johnston explores in detail in the article ‘Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy:
Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation’. In
Naked Lunch Burroughs presents a haunting analogy between drug addiction and
capitalist society, again employing the use of shock. Herbert Marcuse would later use
scarily similar terminology to describe his ‘One-Dimensional Man.’ The principles of
Burrough’s theory read as follows; 1) Never give anything away for nothing, 2)Never
give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and make him have to

18
Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation, (New York, Pantheon, 1998), p. 102
19
Ibid., p. 102

Holy_Barbarians.doc 7
wait), 3)Always take everything back if you possibly can.20 He goes on to parody the
junk pyramids of the narcotics underground with capitalist hierarchies, implying that
“opium is profane and quantitive like money.”21 Burroughs also expresses the addiction
of the seller as being worse than that of the user, hinting at the corruption of society on
every level, and comparing bureaucracy to cancer in how it spreads and envelops society;

The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is

cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state,
turns malignant, like the Narcotics Bureau, and grows and grows, always
reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or
excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms …
Bureaucracy is wrong as cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary
direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous
action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.22

The language of ‘infinite potential’ and spontaneity reads like Surrealist literature. Both
felt strongly the repressive and monotonous character of capitalism. But it was
Burroughs’ sense of paranoia and the similarities that he discovered between the
underground worlds of crime and narcotics and capitalist society that would feed his
literature.
When looking at both the Beat generation and the Surrealists, a number of similarities
appear, centered on the idea of the creation of a new consciousness, the search for the
natural, uncorrupted intuition of mankind. Both groups stood up against the suppression,
the oppression, and the paradoxes of everyday life. Michael McClure would describe the
impact of the Beat writers on American society as “a human voice and body … hurled
against the harsh wall of America and its armies, and navies, and academies, and
institutions, and ownership systems, and power support bases.”23 Louis Aragon declared
of the Surrealist movement, “Il s’agit d’aboutir à une nouvelle declaration des droits de
l’homme.”24 In his article ‘The Politics of Surrealism’ Robert Short described the
Surrealist artists’ attitude to society as denouncing “the wretchedness of everyday life,

20
Allan Johnston, ‘Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in
the Writings of the Beat Generation’, College Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring 2005, p. 112
21
Ibid.
22
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, (London, Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 134
23
Glenn Damiani, ‘Rebel Lion; Michael McClure’, Beat Scene, No. 51 (Summer 2006), p. 43
24
Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1964), p.56

Holy_Barbarians.doc 8
the cults of family and fatherland, the necessity to work, masochistic Christianity, and the
whole system of values which had permitted the war in which they themselves had
unwillingly sacrificed their youth.”25 Almost exactly the same sentence could be applied
to the Beats.
However, what separates the two movements is their outlooks on politics. The
Surrealists were active politically, especially from the late 1920s and their involvement
with the Communist Party, and their anti-Fascism of the 1930s, becoming part of the
Contre-Attaque movement which would hold class struggle as the source of all essential
moral values26. The Beat generation, on the other hand, did not align themselves with any
political group. Although some Beat writers did show a greater political awareness than
others. Ginsberg had a history of Communism and Socialist leanings, and many of the
San Francisco poets were strong supporters of Anarchism, for example Lawrence
Ferlenghetti. However, Kerouac was renowned for the naivety of his politics, at one time
claiming that Senator McCarthy had “all the dope on the Jews and the fairies.”27 Albeit a
strange comment considering Ginsberg, a Jewish homosexual, was amongst his closest
friends. But there was no deliberate effort for the Beat movement to influence politics. As
discussed earlier the Beat generation was a personal, subjective movement. It was the
consciousness, not the politics, of the people which preoccupied these authors. There was
a sense of futility with politics in the 1950s, with the horrors of WWII still fresh in
people’s memory, the threat of Cold War, Korea, McCarthyism. Politics didn’t appear an
attractive option. But, in a 1974 interview Gary Snyder described the evolution of the
Beat generation as well as the evolution of people’s attitude towards politics (which
would grow towards the activism of the 60s and the formation of movements like the
Students for a Democratic Society);

The next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat
thought changed after that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many
people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian
revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro’s victory it had to be rethought again.
Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was apparently a good thing.
Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give

25
Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism’
26
Breton, Position Politique du Surréalisme, p. 123
27
Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation, p. 256

Holy_Barbarians.doc 9
 more thought to it. In any case more people began to look to politics again as having
possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of Civil
Rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the
Movement.28

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that social theorists began a revisionism of
Marxism, led by the ‘false consciousness’ of the Frankfurt school, and in particular
Herbert Marcuse with his works Essay on Liberation and One-Dimensional Man, and
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, especially their work Dialectic of the
Enlightenment. The groundwork for revolution on an individual level, in terms of
lifestyle and values, had been set by the Beat poets and writers (and would be continued
through the writings of authors like Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe), but
now the politics of revolution were being looked at in a new way. The early writings of
Karl Marx came to outweigh his later works. There emerged the belief that something
could be done to fight the monotony and alienation of American capitalism, that Soviet
bureaucracy wasn’t the only alternative. The Beats had awakened the country’s youth to
the true values of mankind, now the fight for equality and humanity could be carried on
by a new generation.
Unlike the early Beats however, the Surrealists felt that the two aspects of
consciousness and politics could be reconciled, in fact needed to be brought together, as
Victor Crastre explained;

Au début André Breton et ses amis peuvent se contenter d’une liberté à leur usage.
De celle-ci ils font l’apprentissage. Plus tard ils découvriront que leur liberté est
conditionnée par la liberté des masses et la problème se posera immédiatement en
termes politiques : comment réaliser la liberté dans le monde?29

André Breton can be seen as the forefather of revolution in the twentieth century, his
legacy would live on and come to fruition in the days of May, 1968. The Surrealist
movement propounded revolution on artistic, cultural, and political levels, themes that
would reappear throughout all of Breton’s works, not least in the Manifestes du
Surréalisme, the first of which was published in 1924, the second in 1930, and in La

28
Arthur and Kit Knight (eds.), The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook, (St. Paul, Paragon House, 1987),
p. 23
29
André Breton (ed.), Essais et Témoignages, (Neuchatel, Baconniere, 1950), p. 216

Holy_Barbarians.doc 10
Position Politique du Surréalisme. Breton’s preoccupation, and disillusionment, with the
Russian revolution is evident with the naming of the main character and title of one of his
most well-known works, Nadja, “parce qu’en russe c’est le commencement du mot
esperance, et parce que ce n’en est que le commencement.”30 Breton felt that the Soviet
Union had betrayed the revolution but that communism “was the only force in existence
capable of bringing about the social revolution which in turn was the necessary condition
of ‘une revolution dans les esprits.’”31
The Surrealist’s relationship with the French Communist Party was rarely stable, and
although Breton, Aragon and other artists within the Surrealist movement were members
at one time, Breton’s dream of a complete cultural revolution linking the ideas of Marx,
Rimbaud and Sigmund Freud could never be reconciled with the Party in its puppet role
to the USSR. This would lead Breton to become a supporter of, and friend to, Leon
Trotsky. The Surrealists would produce a pamphlet in protest against Trotsky’s expulsion
from France in 1935. Though the revolutionary aims of the Surrealists had been declared
early in the 1920s with the publishing of La Révolution d’Abord et Toujours declaring;

Bien conscients de la nature des forces qui troublent actuellement le monde, nous
voulons, avant même de nous compter et de nous mettre à l’œuvre, proclamer notre
détachement absolu, et en quelque sorte notre purification, des idées qui sont à la
base de la civilisation européenne encore toute proche et même de toute civilisation
basée sur les insupportables principes de nécessité et de devoir.32

Here they would announce “Nous sommes la révolte de l’esprit”33 in response to the
condition that mankind found itself in, “Depuis plus d’un siècle la dignité humaine est
ravalée au rang du valeur d’échange.”34
Even in Breton’s works which largely featured love or human relationships his
awareness towards the revolutionary act and the Surrealists own position remained
prominent, as he reflects in Nadja;

30
André Breton, Nadja, (Saint-Amand, Gallimard, 1984), p. 75
31
Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism’, p. 6
32
Breton (ed.), La Revolution d’Abord et Toujours
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.

Holy_Barbarians.doc 11
 Les bureaux et les ateliers commençaient à se vider, du haut en bas des maisons des
portes se fermaient, des gens sur le trottoir se serraient la main, il commençait tout
de même à y voir plus du monde. J’observais sans le vouloir des visages, des
accoutrements, des allures. Allons, ce n’étaient pas encore ceux-là qu’on trouverait
prêts à faire la Révolution.35

In l’Amour Fou Breton establishes a rhetoric between Marxist and Freudian thought and
the concept of love held by himself and other Surrealists, presenting love, and sex in
particular, as the main intuitive instinct of man which remains, and so is thus without
boundaries;

Quelque entorse qu’on cherche aujourd’hui à faire subir à la pensée Marxiste sur ce
point comme sur tant d’autres, il est indéniable que les auteurs du Manifeste
Communiste n’ont cessé de s’élever contre les espoirs de retours aux rapports
sexuels ‘désordonnés’ qui marquèrent l’aube de l’histoire humaine. La propriété
privée, une fois abolie, ‘on peut affirmer avec raison, déclare Engels, que loin de
disparaître, la monogamie sera plutôt pour la première fois réalisée.’ Dans le même
ouvrage il insiste à plusieurs reprises sur le caractère exclusif de cet amour qui, au
prix de égarements – j’en sais de misérables et de grandioses – s’est enfin trouvé.
Cette vue sur ce que peut sans doute présenter de plus agitant la considération du
devenir humain ne peut être corroborée plus nettement que par celle de Freud pour
qui l’amour sexuel, tel même qu’il est déjà donné, ‘rompt les liens collectifs crées
par la race, s’élève au-dessus des différences nationales et des hiérarchies sociales,
et, ce faisant, contribue dans une grande mesure au progrès de la culture.’ Ces deux
témoignages, que donnent la conception de moins en moins frivole de l’amour pour
principe fondamental au progrès moral aussi bien que culturel, me sembleraient à
eux seuls de nature à faire la part la plus belle à l’activité poétique comme moyen
éprouvé de fixation du monde sensible et mouvant sur un seul être aussi bien que
comme force permanente d’anticipation.36

It wasn’t, however, until the 1930s that the Surrealist movement began to realise its
revolutionary ambitions in more active form. Against the backdrop of the rise in Fascism
in Italy, Germany and Spain, and despite their growing distance from the Communist
Party, 1934 saw a proclamation of intent from several Leftist groups;

Au milieu de ces remous, les surréalistes font entendre leur voix. Ils sont bien
entendu, du côté des révolutionnaires et lancent dès le 10 février un Appel a la Lutte.
Ils demandent la formation urgente d’une unité d’action étendue à toutes les

35
Breton, Nadja, p. 71
36
André Breton, L’Amour Fou, (Saint-Amand, Gallimard, 2004), p. 112-113

Holy_Barbarians.doc 12
 organisations ouvrières, la création d’un organisme ‘capable d’en faire une réalité et
une arme.’37

The call would rally a large number of intellectuals who would later become part of the
Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels. The means of forming this “unité d’action
proletariat”38 were discussed and the Surrealists affirmed that when the time came they
would take their place amongst the front line.39 Robert Short described the politics of the
Surrealists as “the politics of protest”40 He described its many facets as follows;

Satire and insult were its main weapons. It proceeded by contradiction and not by
argument. It was haphazard and undisciplined, shifting its ground from one phase to
the next. Its tone was invariably violent and tended to swing feverishly between the
outraged and the outrageous. It expressed unmistakably the political views of poets –
of idealists impatient beyond all endurance at the failure of the real to emulate the
imaginable.41

Short takes a very hostile view towards what he would suggest was the naivety of the
movement. This view is shared by a number of historians and critics who felt that the
Surrealists were unrealistic utopians whose aims were far beyond reality, but one must
not forget that the entire aim of the movement was to go beyond reality, to surreality. The
group couldn’t proceed along the lines of a normal political party, they had built
themselves upon a revolution of consciousness, at rejecting and destroying the
foundations of western thought, and this was reflected in their politics, especially with the
use of shock. The aim was to project people’s conscious beyond the normal reception of
politics and ideas into a revolution of thought and actions.
The individualism stemming from these anti-authoritarian actions is key to
understanding their critique of the consumer society. Echoes of this sense of individual
rebellion would be found in May 1968, in that case as a result of the alienation of the
consumer society and the concept of the spectacle put forward by Guy Debord. Just as
the Beat generation can be seen as the first movement to give a critique of the alienated
society to which they belonged in the USA, the Surrealist movement was already

37
Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, p. 157
38
Ibid., p. 157
39
Ibid., p. 157
40
Short, ‘The Politics of Surrealism’
41
Ibid.

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combating this alienation in the 1920s and 1930s. The concept would carry through to the
Internationale Situationniste when Debord would present his Societé du Spectacle. The
Situationists would follow the Surrealist critique in producing this concept of
manipulation within society, eradicating any sense of the individual.42 The effect of this
critique on student movements like UNEF would eventually lead to the 22nd March
movement and the revolutionary events of May 1968. The idealist values would
culminate in what Luisa Passerini termed the ‘conceptual triangle’ of subjectivity, desire
and utopia.43 As with the Surrealists romanticism lay at the heart of the movement, a
romanticism which has become synonymous with all forms of social critique, especially
literary, and which found its place as much in the United States as it did in France. In his
article dealing on the romantic nature of the events of May 1968 sociologist Michael
Lowy defined romanticism as;

a rebellion against modern capitalist society, in the name of past or premodern social
and cultural values, as a protest against the modern disenchantment of the world, the
individualist/competitive dissolution of human communities, and the triumph of
mechanization, reification, quantification.44

Lowy would go on to list four authors, Ernst Bloch, Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse,
and Guy Debord as continuing on the Surrealist’s efforts to combine Marxist and
Romantic critique of civilization, not just in France but on a world wide basis.45 The
concept of emancipation would emerge from the historiography of May 1968, Lowy
explores the search for emancipation in his article, a search which mirrors that of the
Surrealists, and historians Kristin Ross and Peter Wagner have also analyzed the nature
of emancipation in recent decades, and its link with the romanticism of individual acts of
protest, and the paradox which is created within an alienated society obsessed with
possessive individualism.46 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s work on ‘the new spirit of
capitalism’ also examines the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism, within its imprisoning

42
See Guy Debord, Société du Spectacle, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4
43
Michael Lowy, ‘The Revolutionary Romanticism of May ‘68’, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 68 (2002), p. 95
44
Ibid., p. 96
45
Ibid., p. 98
46
See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Peter
Wagner, ‘The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, or, What’s wrong with post-1968
Individualism?’, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 68 (2002), p. 31-45

Holy_Barbarians.doc 14
nature centered on rationalism, borrowing heavily from the Surrealists in terms of means
of expression, and tracing the evolution of the ideas through groups such as ‘Socialisme
ou Barbarie’ and, of course, the Situationists.47
Leaving aside for a moment the revolutionary aspiration of the Surrealists, it may be
useful to analyze the nature of Beat literature, following the themes of humanism and
values which would be adopted by the activists of the 1960s (amongst whom it must be
included a number of the major Beat figures, most notably Allen Ginsberg and Gary
Snyder). As has been discussed the ‘New Vision’ of the Beat generation was approached
in a number of different ways, but all incorporating the themes that would transform
people’s ways of thinking, that would create a personal awareness of the corrupt and
oppressive manner of life within society, “advanced word slingers prefiguring the
counterculture of the 1960s.”48 Their importance, in the opinion of New Left historian
Edward J. Bacciocco lay in their “embracing a life that flouted the customs, values, and
myths by which others lived”49 and by doing so gave an alternative to the lost and restless
youth of 1950s America. Norman Mailer would describe the ‘beatnik’ as “the torchbearer
of those all-but-lost values of freedom, self-expression and equality.”50 In the 1950s the
Beats would appear like a vibrant thorn amongst an endless field of identical plastic
roses, a way of life and a way of thought beyond the mundane rationality of the Silent
Generation. The Beat movement was undoubtedly a personal one, it was a search for
liberation, as with the Surrealists, though not solely a political or social sense of
liberation, but a complete disengagement from western thought, a liberation more in the
Oriental Buddhist sense, something beyond human conception, a search that would be
mirrored by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters through the use of LSD in quest of the
‘total breakthrough.’ But the 1950s was imbued with a sense of stasis, a bleakness which
Gary Snyder would term as the overwhelming sense that “all choices seemed entirely
personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any

47
Lowy, ‘The Revolutionary Romanticism of May’68’
48
Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters (eds.), Howl on Trial, (San Francisco, City Lights, 2006), p. xi
49
Edward J. Bacciocco Jr,, The New Left in America; Reform to Revolution 1956-1970, (Stanford, Hoover
Institution Press, 1974), p. 14
50
Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation, p. 258

Holy_Barbarians.doc 15
audience, or anybody would listen to us.”51 But he would label the actions of the Beat
generation as “a moral decision, a moral poetic decision.”52
When looking at the journals of Kerouac, from the end of WWII until the mid 1950s,
there is a constant sense of longing, of an almost religious hope which pervades many of
his entries, he asks “Is there a Jesus in the land?”53 There is also a constant presence of
the “shrouded stranger” which pursues him across an endless landscape towards the
“Protective City”54 and of his preoccupation with childhood friends whom he had lost in
the war. An overwhelming sense of pathos is evident throughout these writings, and
which also find themselves in his novels. The continual sense of longing, of the
degeneration and non-existence of the values he had been brought up to believe in, and
his continual need to move.
In complete contrast to static monotony of the 1950s the Beat writers constantly find
the need of movement. Tim Cresswell, exploring the geography of the Beat generation
sees “the frantic directionless mobility of the central figures in On the Road” as
representing “a form of resistance to the ‘establishment’”55 This movement echoes
another form of resistance which emerged after WWII, that of bop music. In his work,
The Birth of Bebop Scott Deveaux would label bebop as “a protest against capitalism,
through the uncompromising complexity of their art, bop musicians are said to have
asserted their creative independence from the marketplace.” The same description can be
given to that of Beat literature, especially the ‘bop prosody’ of Kerouac, who would wait
six years for On the Road to be published. Kerouac would see music as “a language
common enough so that you can forget all the alleged differences between the people
who produce it” and that such “an open approach to life could be moved into other areas,
that it was a key to the opening of society itself.” 56 This affinity between a predominantly
white literary movement and a predominantly black music genre would forecast the rising
awareness of American youth towards racism. The link with black music and the political

51
Knight, The Beat Vision, p. 23
52
Ibid., p. 23
53
Jack Kerouac, Windblown World, (London, Penguin, 2006), p. 187
54
Ibid., p. 319
55
Tim Cresswell, ‘Mobility as Resistance: a Geographical reading of Kerouac’s On the Road’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1999), p. 179
56
Nicosia, Memory Babe, p. 168

Holy_Barbarians.doc 16
activism of the 60s would bear witness to what Marcuse termed “the increasing
desublimation of culture.”57
But still beneath this mobility there constantly lies an acute sense of disenchantment,
especially with the misguided belief in the success which American society propounded;

In America, the idea of going to college is just like the idea of prosperity is just
around the corner, it was supposed to solve something or everything or something
because all you had to do was learn what they taught and then everything else was
going to be handled.58

In the same novel, Visions of Cody, Kerouac described the pathetic history of Neal
Cassady’s mother and father, and their typical journey in search of wealth and the
American Dream;

For some Godforsaken reason, some forgotten, pitiably American, restless reason his
father and mother driving in a jalopy from Iowa to LA in search of something,
maybe they figured to start an orange grove or find a rich uncle.59

There is an unmistakable sense of pathos, and even anger in Kerouac’s tone. His
description of lower middle class white Americans, a background from which he himself
came, was, throughout all his works, imbued with a real sense of sadness, of pity, and of
anger. A restlessness and anger that would be shared by James Dean’s character Jim
Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, a film that would capture the hopelessness and
aimlessness of youth in “the grey tragic land”60 of 1950s America.
Kerouac dreamt of an anarchic, Buddhist emancipation of the country’s young people;

A world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the

general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the
privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as
refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants
and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of
them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.61

57
Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, (London, Penguin, 1969), p. 47
58
Kerouac, Visions of Cody, p. 299
59
Ibid., p. 70
60
Ibid., p. 447
61
Kerouac, Dharma Bums, p. 77-78

Holy_Barbarians.doc 17
But the overwhelming disenchantment with society wasn’t something unique to the
writers of the Beat generation. Beat literature succeeded in spreading the awareness of the
misleading appearance of reality but before the explosion of Ginsberg, Burroughs’ and
Kerouac’s publications in the late 50s there was already a number of ‘beatnik’
communities springing up around the USA, such as North Beach and Venice West in
California, and the traditional bohemian centre of Greenwich Village in New York. In
1959 Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith conducted a sociological and psychological
study of the Beats around North Beach. Their findings found the same levels of
disillusion and the search for values that were central to wider Beat literature. One
interview with one of the community’s members expresses this general feeling;

In any civilization, at any time, I think most values are phony, and I think my
attitude towards the values, the symbols of the state, marriage, sex, have always been
subversive. I’ve been able to conceal these attitudes of mine with more or less
success, but only, like I say, just so long. I’ve felt that all these social values,
including religion and patriotism, are tawdry and phony things and have no moral
value and I guess my contempt for them showed sooner or later.62

As the new movement cemented itself upon the landscape calls for a summary of its
philosophy would emerge, something that had been avoided by the main Beat authors. As
aforementioned the Beat movement was a way of life, a way of thought, of personal
rebellion, it did not, like the Surrealist movement, propound cultural and political
revolution. However the task of producing the Philosophy of the Beat Generation would
fall to John Clellon Holmes, an author who had been part of the New York Beat circle in
the late 1940s/early 1950s and who, with Kerouac, had coined the term ‘Beat generation.’
Holmes explored the rising feeling amongst the countries youth of aimlessness, of the
sense of futility and alienation. In the article he discusses a murder committed for the soul
purpose of exploring the sensation of killing;

Such crimes, which are no longer rarities and which are all committed by people
under twenty-five, cannot be understood if we go on mouthing the same old
panaceas about broken homes and slum environments and bad company, for they are
spiritual crimes, crimes against the identity of another human being, crimes which
reveal with stark and terrifying clarity the lengths to which a desperate need for
62
Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith, The Real Bohemia, (New York, Basic Books, 1961), p. 45

Holy_Barbarians.doc 18
 values can drive the young. For in actuality it is the longing for values which is
expressed in such a crime, and not the hatred of them. It is the longing to do or feel
something meaningful, and it provides a sobering glimpse of how completely the
cataclysms of this century have obliterated the rational, humanistic view of Man on
which modern society has been erected.63

The unsatisfied youth of America were in search of the “mysterious secret of the origin
of faceless, wonderless, crapulous civilization.”64 It was against this background that
Allen Ginsberg would howl his frightening soliloquy against American and western
society. It will be useful here to give an excerpt from Ginsberg’s poem Howl to give a
brief idea of its tone;

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! Blind

capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! Granite
cocks! Monstrous bombs!65

It was Ginsberg’s poem which first brought nationwide attention to the literature of the
Beat generation. After the largely unsuccessful publishing of Kerouac’s first novel The
Town and the City in 1950 and Burroughs’ Junky in 1953 it wasn’t until the trial of Howl
and Other Poems that the novels and poetry of these authors would be accepted by
publishers and would be absorbed by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Between
1957 and 1960 Kerouac would have nine books published which he had written during
the 1950s. The recently published Howl on Trial edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy J.
Peters looks in depth at the trial itself and the mixture of public and literary criticism
which it received. The trial became one of the milestones of the battle for free expression
in the USA (alongside other similar struggles such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) and its outcome would result in bans being lifted on DH
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as well as
having an impact on the case against Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the early 1960s (it
being originally published in Paris in 1959). Many renowned literary experts defended
Howl against what was seen as a philistine establishment. Mark Schorer, of the
University of California, Berkeley, argued that Howl was not a dangerous poem but “an
63
John Clellon Holmes, ‘The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’, in Nothing More to Declare, ed. J. C.
Holmes, (New York, Andre Deutsch, 1968), p. 122
64
Kerouac, Dharma Bums, p. 35
65
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, in Selected Poems 1947-1995, (London, Penguin, 2001), p. 55

Holy_Barbarians.doc 19
indictment of those elements in modern society that, in the author’s view, are destructive
of the best qualities in human nature and of the best minds. Those elements are, I would
say, predominantly materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war.” 66
In his own defense, Ginsberg claimed of his poem that it was a protest in the original
sense of “pro-attestation, that is testimony in favour of Value.”67 Declaring that “Howl is
an ‘affirmation’ by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity…The poems are
religious and I meant them to be.”68
Again the combination of the spiritual with the obscene is used to create the same shock
which the Surrealists had employed. However, the main exponent of the shock technique,
at least regarding the Beat generation, was Burroughs. Though, in Burroughs one sees
less of a deliberate aim to shock than an extreme sense of paranoia that expressed itself in
his work. The structure of Naked Lunch (its apparent lack of order and relation between
chapters) and the ‘cut-up’ method that he would use later on reveal a sense of hyper-
reality, something more akin to Surrealist techniques. Indeed they employed a similar
method in rearranging headlines and quotes from newspapers to produce poems. Naked
Lunch provides a critique of society through using haunting imagery within a parallel
society, in a similar way to Orwell’s 1984. Though, unlike Orwell, Burroughs’ imagery is
replete with grotesque sexual acts and drug abuse and addiction. As previously discussed
Allan Johnston explores in detail in his article Burroughs’ analogy of drug addiction with
consumer society.69 At times Burroughs’ imagery is extremely surreal, even mocking of
society, though through the character of Doctor Benway he presents his view of the
corrupt and manipulative nature of the people who run the country. It is he who is
accused of reducing “whole provinces of our fair land to a state bordering on the far side
of idiocy…He it is who has fitted great warehouses with row on row, tier on tier of
helpless creatures who must have their every want attended…’The Drones’ he calls
them.”70 It is not difficult to see here an attack on capitalist culture. It is also no accident
that Burroughs names the most grotesque characters within the book Mugwumps, a name
usually attributed to a neutral or uncommitted person, normally on the subject of politics.

66
Morgan and Peters (eds.), Howl on Trial, p. xiii
67
Stephen Prothero, ‘On the Holy Road’, in LMfS, (Farmington Hills, Gale Group, 2003)
68
Ibid.
69
Johnston, ‘Consumption, Addiction, Energy, Vision, Energy’
70
Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 88

Holy_Barbarians.doc 20
Here he anticipated the ‘end of politics’ which would mark the last quarter of the
twentieth century.

However before the lines between Left and Right became blurred the rise of the New
Left in the 1960s marked a culmination in the culture, politics and revolution professed
by both Surrealism and the Beat generation, though, as discussed, through different
methods. Though what the two movements had in common was their spiritual nature and
the promotion of human intuition and values, the Surrealists on a political level, the Beats
on a personal. The torch had been passed on to the revisionists and activists of the 1960s.
C. Wright Mills, arguably the father of the New Left in America, puts forward in his
Letter to the New Left of 1960, “To be ‘Left’ means to connect up cultural with political
criticism, and both with demands and programmes.”71 Organisations began to spring up
around the world declaring the defense of human values, piecing together the ‘utopian’
ideologies of literary movements with political ambitions. In 1970 journalist and historian
Daniel Singer would describe the New Left movement as;

A total rebellion questioning not just one aspect of the existing society but both its
ends and means. It was a mental revolt against the existing industrial state, both
against its capitalist structure and the kind of consumer society it has created. It was
coupled with a striking revulsion against anything coming from above, against
centralism, authority, the hierarchical order.72

A key factor in the New Left movement, as opposed to the Old, was the participation of
students. Here was a new exploited class, active and disenchanted, and schooled in the
ideological traditions of literary movements such as the Beats, and the Surrealists. They
were also bourgeois, rebelling directly against their own station in life. It seemed to
confirm the moral weakness of capitalism. Oliver Castro, one of the leaders of the ‘22
Mars’ movement would ask “Pourquoi les enfants de la bourgeoisie sont-ils
révolutionnaires à l’heure actuelle?” and would go on to respond that it was because all
that they had known was “L’abondance matérielle, et la tristesse de cette abundance.”73
For the first time it was not the want of goods that led to Leftist thought amongst the
71
C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left, http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-
new-left.htm
72
Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution; France in May 1968, (Cambridge, South End Press, 2003), p. 21
73
Claude Prevost, Les Etudiants et le Gauchisme, (Paris, Editions Sociales, 1969), p. 63

Holy_Barbarians.doc 21
masses, but the realization of the hollowness of a consumer society, “Ils peuvent donc
aller au-dèla de leurs revendications strictement matérielles, vers une revendication
existentielle.”74
In America the SDS produced the Port Huron Statement declaring the movement’s
aims and its critique of society. France saw, in 1966, the publication by the student body
UNEF and the Internationale Situationniste of De la misère en milieu étudiant (or On the
poverty of student life), a deluge of abuse at the unjust nature and alienation of society.
These students were beginning to show an awareness of the sublimation of culture, in fact
of every aspect of society. The monotony and apparent lack of values of everyday life
meant that the only alternatives appeared ideological. Life had become one-dimensional.
The only way out in the 1950s seemed to be to embrace bohemia and escape from society
as much as possible, but the 1960s brought a new degree of hope, of unified action, a
hope routed in humanism against the overwhelming structuralism of the establishment.
The SDS offered the Port Huron Statement “as an effort in understanding and changing
the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort routed in the ancient,
still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances
in life.”75 In France the UNEF statement held the same ideals, that the value of truth had
been subordinated to that of exchange76, that society was now reduced to the two basic
principals of commodity and the spectacle77. They hailed a new creativity, “the free
invention of each moment and of each event”78 which they related back to Lautréamont
(as the Surrealists had done) as the “beginning of the revolutionary celebration.”79
It is interesting to explore the impact of these two literary movements on the awareness
of the 1960s generation, especially the youth. It is difficult to imagine that without some
previous sense of rebellion against the nature of society, and the spread of this rebellion
through literature, that the activism seen in the 1960s could have been possible. Both in
France and in the USA the groundwork for an expansion of consciousness, an
emancipation of the individual had been laid, the social theorists and rise of the Civil
74
Ibid., p. 63
75
Tom Hayden, Port Huron Statement, (New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), p. 48
76
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, (Abingdon, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2006), p. 60
77
UNEF Strasbourg (ed.), On the Poverty of Student Life,
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.

Holy_Barbarians.doc 22
Rights movements made it possible to combine the humanism and search for values with
political programmes and demands. The essence of all three movements, the Surrealists,
the Beats, and the New Left can be summated in the simple question of Allen Ginsberg,
“When can I go into a supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?”80

80
Ginsberg, ‘America’, in Selected Poems, p. 60

Holy_Barbarians.doc 23
Appendix I: Translations

6
Because in truth, we need Liberty, but a Liberty based on our profoundest spiritual
necessities, on the strictest and most human demands of our flesh.
7
We are the Revolt of the Mind.
8
If, by Surrealism, we reject without hesitation the idea of the sole possibility of things
which ‘are’ and if we declare, ourselves, that, by a route which ‘is’, we are able to show
the way and help others to follow, we comply with that which claims it ‘was not’, if we
fail to find enough words in order to wither away the baseness of western thought, if we
are not afraid to enter into insurrection against logic, if we shall not judge an act that one
accomplishes in dreaming as less than an act that one accomplishes awake, if we are not
even sure that we will finish with time itself, old sinister joke, perpetually derailed train,
insane beating, inextricable pile of exhausting and exhausted beasts, how is that we can
express any tenderness, even if we use tolerance in the face of an appliance of social
conservation, what must it be? It would be the sole true unacceptable delirium on our
part. All remains to be done, all of the means must be well employed in order to destroy
the ideas of family, fatherland, and religion.
9
To go into the street, and shoot at random, as much as one can, into the crowds
10
Since Surrealism, art has no longer been received as a pure spectacle to be internalised,
these images aim at creating a shock which, in return, will produce an action.
11
It is this point that the three principal avant-garde movements that have shared the
cultural field since the end of the First World War, namely Dada, Surrealism and the
Situationists, have in common; for each of them, art must identify itself as much as
possible with action. It is a unique way to change the conditions of existence: it must
provoke within the actors/spectators a grasp of conscious of their alienation in daily life.
26
Its aim is to result in a new declaration of the Rights of Man.
31
In the beginning André Breton and his friends could content themselves with a liberty
of their action. From this they took their apprenticeship. Later they would discover that
their liberty was conditioned by the liberty of the masses and the problem would
immediately pose itself in political terms; how to realise liberty in the world?
32
Because in Russian it is the beginning of the word hope, and because it is only the
beginning.
34
Well aware of the nature of the forces which trouble the modern world, we want, before
even counting ourselves and getting down to work, to proclaim our absolute detachment,
and in a way our purification, from the ideas which are at the base of the still too near

Holy_Barbarians.doc 24
European civilisation and even from all civilisations based on the unsupportable
principles of necessity and duty.
36
For over a century human dignity has been reduced to the value of the exchange rate.
37
The offices and workplaces begin to empty, from high on low buildings and doors were
shutting, the people on the pavement take themselves in hand, beginning all the same to
see more around them. I observed without wishing to their faces, their getups, their
appearances. Alas, it was still not there that one would find the readiness for Revolution.
38
Some aspect that one searches to make Marxist thought suffer from, on this point as on
so many others, it is undeniable that the authors of the Communist Manifesto never
ceased to rise up against the hopes to return to the disorganised sexual relations which
marked the dawn of human history. Private property, once abolished, ‘one can justly
affirm, declared Engels, that far from disappearing, monogamy will be realised for the
first time.’ In the same work he insists on several occasions on the exclusive character of
this love which, at the price of aberration – I am familiar with the miserable as with the
grand – finally finds itself. This view on which could, without doubt, present the
consideration of becoming human more agitating could not be more neatly corroborated
than by Freud for whom sexual love, such as it is already given, ‘breaks the collective
links created by race, rises above national hierarchies and social differences, and making
it contribute a great deal to the progress of culture.’ These two witnesses, which give a
less and less frivolous conception of love as a fundamental principal of moral as well as
cultural progress, would seem to me as alone having the nature to make the most
beautiful part of poetic activity a means of feeling the binding of a sensible and moving
world upon one individual being as well as a permanent force of anticipation.
39
Amidst these upheavals, the Surrealists made their voice heard. They were well heard
on the side of the revolutionaries and on the 10th February presented a Call to Arms. They
demanded the urgent formation of a unified action extended to all workers’ organisations,
the creation of a body ‘capable of making it one reality and one arm.’
76
Why is it that the children of the bourgeoisie are revolutionaries today? ... Material
abundance, and the sadness of this abundance…They can therefore go beyond these
strictly material demands, towards more existential demands.

Note; all translations are the author’s own

Holy_Barbarians.doc 25
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Breton, André, Manifestes du Surréalisme, (Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 2005)
Breton, André, Nadja, (Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 1984)
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http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_R%C3%A9volution_d'abord_et_toujours
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