Le Merveilleux

The holidays frighten me with the potential for things going awry. This year, however, I have someone in my life who is just too marvelous for words. I finally begin to understand Breton's tenet of "le merveilleux" and how on earth it relates to beauty or love.

To introduce a surrealist ethos without discussing the marvelous is impossible, and yet because Breton develops the idea across his essays and reveals the experience of it in his fictions, a simple summary seems particularly shallow. This may be said of many surrealist conceits but the marvelous is particularly prone to being confused with the fantastic or to sounding like over-intellectualized sentimentality.

There is a history of literature of the fantastic that is different from Breton’s expression the marvelous. The fantastic is usually associated with science fiction and attempts to incorporate the alien into the rational world. The marvelous on the other hand is, as Hal Foster puts it in his work Compulsive Beauty, disruptive. Louis Aragon perhaps explains it best in Paris Peasant by stating "the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real."

“Le merveilleux est toujours beau, n’importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n’y a même que le merveilleux qui soit beau”. This memorable line from the first Manifesto is repeated often and everywhere. The statement is expressive only in the context in which it is presented, otherwise the statement seems like sophomoric over-glorification of either the marvelous or the beautiful. Breton explains in the manifesto how alive the marvelous is. It imbues works with energy and gives them life. Works are marvelous that sustain the moment of surprise and this experience is what is truly beautiful.

The marvelous lives and grows in some Hegelian unfurling. “Le merveilleux n’est pas le même à toutes les époques ; il participe obscurément d’une sorte de révèlation générale dont le détail seul nous parvient: ce sont les ruines romantiques, le mannequin moderne ou tout autre symbole propre à remuer la sensibilité humaine durant un temps” (The marvelous is not the same in all ages; it participates obscurely in a sort of general revelation, in which the details only remain: they are the romantic's ruins, the modern mannequin and all other symbols adequate to shaking human sensibility during a particular time). The marvelous performs in different manners at different times but continues to reveal even if only a few details are captured in the imagination of a culture. Artists present the marvelous through their works and this alters their viewers, rattling the nervous system of one person at a time with the goal of altering the society. The marvelous is progressive both in time and effect on society.

The marvelous in my case is changing the way I think about the holidays, changing the way I think about myself in love, all of which really is just too marvelous for words.