Eluard's Rupture with Surrealism

Abstract

Eluard's rupture with Breton, in 1938, is attributed to a change in political ideology, from surrealism to Stalinism. Doubt is thrown on this simple explanation by the deliberate silence of Eluard, Breton, and their biographers, who have not recorded the event, though no such reluctance followed the earlier defections of Aragon, Desnos, or Prévert, who were accused, and who answered, in violent and well-known diatribes. It was not until 1951 that Eluard acknowledged the importance of the break, in publishing a testament of his surrealist days, and reproducing poems that he had tried until then to keep secret. A close examination of his poetry and of a few external events reveals several important facts. As we shall see, the vital elements in the rupture include Eluard's fatigue both with Breton's pacifism and with the thematic and technical artifices of dream interpretation. An analysis of his protest is obscured by his other psychic worries, from the war in Spain to his isolation from events during the first years of the German occupation. Eluard's personal crises came to an end with the death of his wife, Nusch, on 28 November 1946, and in a sense, until then, he found full peace of mind after 1937 only during the period of Poésie ininterrompue, published on 3 January 1946, and of his revised Choix de poèmes, of 15 July.